Literature and Philosophy: A Guide to Contemporary Debates

Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 8
Acknowledgements......Page 10
Notes on Contributors......Page 11
Introduction – Literature and Philosophy: The Contemporary Interface......Page 16
Part I: Encounters with Literature in French Philosophy......Page 24
1 First Lessons: Gilles Deleuze and the Concept of Literature......Page 28
2 ‘The Absence of Origin’: Beckett and Contemporary French Philosophy......Page 39
Part II: Encounters with Literature in Anglo-American Philosophy......Page 52
3 The Pattern that Literature Makes: Davidson, Pragmatism, and the Reconstruction of the Literary......Page 56
4 Autobiographical Memory: Wittgenstein, Davidson, and the ‘Descent into Ourselves’......Page 68
5 What Can My Nonsense Tell Me About You?......Page 81
Part III: Encounters with Literature in German Philosophy......Page 92
6 A Risky Business: Internal Time and Objective Time in Husserland Woolf......Page 96
7 The Poetics of Thinking......Page 107
8 Construction without Theory: Oblique Reflections on Walter Benjamin’s Goethe......Page 129
Part IV: Literature and Philosophy: The Question of Ethics......Page 140
9 Liminal Agencies: Literature as Moral Philosophy......Page 144
10 Is Forgiveness Ever Possible At All?......Page 157
Part V: Reading Philosophy as Literature......Page 174
11 Who is Speaking? Brodsky, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and the Question of Genre......Page 178
12 Literary Potential: The Release of Criticism......Page 185
13 Gibberophobia: Philosophy, Fear, and the Plain Style......Page 194
14 Philosophy’s Metaphors: Dennett, Midgley, and Derrida......Page 209
15 Hearing Voices: A Dialogical Reading of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations......Page 219
Part VI: Conclusion: Approaching the End......Page 234
16 No Matter: Aesthetic Theory and the Self-annihilating Artwork......Page 236
17 Form, Reflection, Disclosure: Literary Aesthetics and Contemporary Criticism......Page 246
Index......Page 258