Phlph f Ltrtr (rv

Jukka Mikkonen
Philosophy and Literature, Volume 33, Number 1, April 2009, pp. 224-227
(Article)
Pblhd b Th Jhn Hpn nvrt Pr
DOI: 10.1353/phl.0.0032
For additional information about this article
Access provided by University of Adelaide (12 Sep 2014 00:10 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/phl/summary/v033/33.1.mikkonen.html
224 Philosophy and Literature
indeed. Few of us willing or able to incur the costs of altruistic punishment,
which can be severe. So fction writers and storytellers are altruism brokers.
They get us into the game and take a little fee, but the costs are minimal and
widely dispersed.
Because it is the frst of its kind, Fleschs book will inevitably be both land-
mark and target. Let me therefore plant my downstream fag and say that I wish
that his style were less compact, a bit more open-handed. Each of his literary
examples is extremely condensed. I found myself yearning for explanations that
lingered. But perhaps this complaint is merely my own langur-like downstream
tinkering with a gift that is startling in its intellectual generosity.
Stanford University Blakey Vermeule
Philosophy of Literature, by Peter Lamarque; x & 329 pp.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. $34.95 paper, $84.95 hardback.
Even to this day, analytic philosophical approaches to literature have a bad
reputation among some literary critics and aestheticians from other philo-
sophical traditions. This is largely due to analytic philosophers of language
and metaphysics who often have done excursions into literary fction simply
to illustrate their theories of language and realityfor example, Bertrand
Russells interest in Hamlet as a group of false sentences. Fortunately, another
group of analytic philosophers is interested in literature as an art form, one of
them being Peter Lamarque. Over decades, Lamarque has immersed himself
in studying the central issues in the philosophy of literature, and it is hardly
an exaggeration to say that he is perhaps the most prominent contemporary
scholar in the feld.
Philosophy of Literature is divided into seven chapters covering ambitious subject
areas: Art, Literature, Authors, Practice, Fiction, Truth, and Value. The main
questions the book attempts to answer are: What is it to view literature as art
and what is it to approach literature philosophically? The frst chapter is an
introduction to the philosophy of literature. The discussion of the nature of
literature in the second chapter includes a conceptual analysis and extensive
historical survey of the theories of literature and literary aesthetics. In this
chapter, Lamarque presents trenchant insights into problems underlying recent
defnitions of art and all the major defnitions of literature from belles letters to
speech-act theories, paving the way for his institutional account.
Lamarque argues that literature is an intentional and, unlike fction, an evalu-
ative concept. He suggests that speech-act theories of literature remove works
from their contexts of origin, whereas the (Gricean) utterance theories, which
he considers plausible, focus on the origin of the works and the social practice
225 Reviews
of story-telling. Nevertheless, by stressing the authors literary intentionan aim
to produce a work of literatureas the defnitive factor of literature, Lamarque
perhaps goes too far in downplaying characteristics of literary language. As he
sees it, poetic devices such as dense and unusual syntax, rhythm, alliteration,
metaphors, and the like are not usual or necessary in literary fction. Accord-
ing to him, the language used in works of literature does not essentially differ
from that used in ordinary discourse, neither is it any more dense with meaning
than any other discourse. He argues that it is easy to fnd a vast multiplicity of
meaning everywhere in language use, if one just looks for it.
Admittedly, although poetic devices are neither universal nor essential, they
are characteristics of literary fction. Although I agree with Lamarque to a great
extent, I think that his intentionalist defnition underestimates, for instance,
the role of suggestion and implication in literature. Further, literary works
make use of symbols which seldom occur in ordinary conversationsan argu-
ment Lamarque has himself used when arguing against utterance models of
literary interpretation. Moreover, if literary usage were the same as in ordinary
discourse, the translation of literary texts would not be considered any more
diffcult than that of, say, cookbooks.
Another thought-provoking issue is Lamarques conception of literature.
Lamarque argues, for instance, that works of literature are of interest because
they offer content with depth, inviting refection. He calls this mimesis.
Here, a literary critic might argue that Lamarques broadly mimetic view of
literature, although it is argued to be distinct from connotations of realism or
mirroring nature, is too narrow and excludes, for instance, surrealist poetry.
Further, it is suspicious that Lamarques numerous literary examples are such
conventional and facile picks. For example, when arguing that appreciation
requires knowledge of literary forms, Lamarque uses as his example Edmund
Spensers Epithalamions unusual stanza form, derived from the Italian canzone
(p. 138). If, as Lamarque argues, all literary works, including the novels of
Robbe-Grillet he mentions, should be read as structures wholes, why treat
school examples instead of the complicated works which pose problems for
the theory?
The center of the book is perhaps chapter four, Practice. Lamarque seeks
here the essential features of literary practice. His analytical conception of
institution focuses not on actual social relations between groups of people but
rather principles and conventions governing social roles (p. 60). As Lamarque
sees it, literary works are institutional objects whose existence depends on
a set of conventions concerning how they are created, appreciated, and evalu-
ated, that is, on attitudes, expectations, and responses found in authors and
readers (p. 62).
When answering the historical argument which maintains that literature
means different sort of things in different periods, Lamarque contends that
although the word literature has evolved over time, the concept of literature
226 Philosophy and Literature
captured by the institutional account encompasses what was called poetry by
the ancient Greeks and up to the eighteenth century (p. 64). Nonetheless, in
addition to the aesthetic function, Lamarque does not discuss whether the vari-
ous social functions of literature (and their hierarchy) change from one period
and culture to another. Consider, for instance, the ethical and social dimension
of ancient Greek tragedy or the French realist novel. Surely, the socio-political
function of literature was different in those societies than it is today.
The second objection to the institutional account Lamarque treats maintains
that there are actually various approaches to literature. However, Lamarque
argues that he is not prescribing how to read but describing the core of literary
interpretation. According to him, without the universal features of literary
reading, there is neither literary criticism nor perhaps literature either (p. 133).
For Lamarque, the literary response is to reconstruct the theme of the work
and to appreciate it. This implies that reading a historical novel in order to
gain knowledge of past times is not in itself a literary interest. The main vice
of Lamarques otherwise broad-minded study is his essentialism which limits
literary fctions to aesthetic pleasure-givers whose other social functions are
merely some incidental purposes (p. 178). Moreover, by emphasizing the
distinctiveness of practices such as philosophy and literature, Lamarque ignores
major cultural traditions in which practices overlap, for instance, the melting
together of literature and philosophy in the Continental tradition.
Yet another central issue in the book is the relation between literature and
truth. For Lamarque, it is undeniable that people learn truths from fction, but
the question remains of what sort of value should be attached to this learning.
He suggests that deriving truths from, say, Shakespeares works misses their
literary and dramatic nuances. Statements in the plays are made by characters
and not directly asserted by the author (p. 234). Hence, he claims, one can-
not know whether or not the author intends them as truths the reader should
accept.
Lamarque also argues that as a thematic statement a statement in fction is not
banal, for it connects to the theme of the work. But as a truth-claim it should
stand on its own feet. For instance, Lamarque argues that the value of Dickenss
novel Our Mutual Friend is in the working of the theme (which, according to
Lamarque, is that money corrupts), not in the themes propositional content
which he considers banal (p. 239). Nonetheless, it seems odd to assume that
the proponents of literary truth, even those who argue for a propositional
theory of literary truth, want to reduce the cognitive content of a fction to its
generalizations or literal statements, as Lamarque suggests, or that they would
not take into account the context of the assertions nor the tone and style of
the narratives in which they occur. Neither does he argue for his claim that
truth-claims cannot connect to the thematic content of the work.
Moreover, Lamarque claims that critics rarely move from identifying themes
and locating them in the structure of a work to debating their truth as worldly
227 Reviews
generalizations (p. 237). As he sees it, engaging in, say, a philosophical debate
about themes in a work of literature is not part of the practice of reading.
However, Lamarques appeal to academic criticism in denying the place for
truth-assessment in literary interpretation has been criticized by Peter Kivy,
who suggests that although the assessment of truths is not part of academic
criticism, general readers commonly do assess literary truths as a part of the
appreciation of the work.
In its entirety, Lamarques book is a comprehensive study which is admirably
sensitive to literary art. His discussions concerning authors literary roles and the
nature of types of fctional characters show a delicate understanding lamentably
rare in the feld. Lamarque also leans greatly on literary critical commentaries
which give his treatment both support and substance. His philosophical analyses
and the clarifying interplay between the philosophy of literature and literary
criticism have signifcance not only to philosophers but literary critics, too.
Beyond this, Lamarque has the gift of treating complicated and subtle philo-
sophical theories in a lucid and intelligible way, and his writing is eloquent
yet placid. Not to mention that besides introducing the central issues in the
philosophy of literature the book also gives an extensive historical survey on
the topics, which will make it very useful for teaching. Philosophy of Literature is
a work which advances strong theses and simultaneously pays respect to oppos-
ing views. Whether or not the reader agrees with the main conclusions of the
work, Lamarques lucid arguments are nourishment for the brain.
University of Tampere, Finland Jukka Mikkonen
Strange Concepts and the Stories they Make Possible, by Lisa
Zunshine; 232 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2008, $25.00.
Unlike much recent evolution-themed scholarship in the humanities, Lisa
Zunshines Strange Concepts and the Stories they Make Possible is not a manifesto.
It does not announce the arrival of any new order, herald a radical paradigm
shift, or promise to deliver the study of literature from the jaws of evil or irrel-
evance. Whatever manifesto-writing impulses Zunshine may have had seem
to have been worked out suffciently in her 2006 book, Why We Read Fiction:
Theory of Mind and the Novel. In her new book, she gives herself a refreshingly
modest assignment: to demonstrate that a certain cognitive predisposition has
contributed to the development of, and continued interest in, specifc literary
motifs that occur across a wide variety of cultures. This is all that she tries to
do, and she does it very well.
The cognitive disposition in question has to do with the way that human