Author:
Harrison, Bernard, 1933-
ImprintBloomington : Indiana University Press, [2015]
Descriptionxxvi, 593 pages ; 23 cm
Note:Getting real. Humanism and its discontents ; The mirror of nature ; Truth, meaning, and human reality ; Leavis and Wittgenstein (1) : a living language ; Leavis and Wittgenstein (2) : the "third realm" -- Character, language, and human worlds. Nature and artifice ; Virginia Woolf and "the true reality" ; Aharon Appelfeld and the problem of Holocaust fiction ; The limits of authorial license in Our mutual friend -- Against "The meaning of the work". Reactive versus interpretive criticsm ; Houyhnhnm virtue ; Sterne and sentimentalism -- The skeptic side. Reanimating the author ; Persons and narratives ; Reading and reading-in ; Meaning it literally : Derrida and his critics revisitied -- Epilogue: Telling the great from the good.
Bibliography Note:Includes bibliographical references (pages 571-579) and index.
Note:"How can literature, which consists of nothing more than the description of imaginary events and situations, offer any insight into the workings of "human reality" or "the human condition"? Can mere words illuminate something that we call "reality"? Bernard Harrison answers these questions in this profoundly original work that seeks to re-enfranchise reality in the realms of art and discourse. In an ambitious account of the relationship between literature and cognition, he seeks to show how literary fiction, by deploying words against a background of imagined circumstances, allows us to focus on the roots, in social practice, of the meanings by which we represent our world and ourselves. Engaging with philosophers and theorists as diverse as Wittgenstein, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, F. R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, and Stanley Fish, and illustrating his ideas through readings of works by Swift, Woolf, Appelfeld, and Dickens, among others, this book presents a systematic defense of humanism in literary studies, and of the study of the Humanities more generally, by a distinguished scholar"-- Provided by publisher.
