Poetry holds an important place as part of our cultural heritage.1 However, despite poetry’s apparent cultural value, there have been surprisingly few attempts to articulate clearly how this should be reflected in the teaching curriculum in our schools and universities. As a consequence of this lack of clarity, the cultural value of poetry gives way to the increasing emphasis on providing instrumental justification for the teaching curriculum; including poetry in the curriculum is often justified in terms of promoting transferable skills (...) and knowledge such as problem solving, understanding and interpreting language, general creativity, widening vocabulary, identifying or “spotting” techniques, and learning... (shrink)

This article will introduce readers to current debates in the philosophy of poetry. This includes discussion of the need for a philosophy of poetry as distinct from a philosophy of literature, the (in)compatibility of poetry and philosophy, poetic meaning and interpretation, and poetry in relation to affect, emotion and expressiveness, which opens up discussion of wider forms of poetry from spoken word to signlanguage poetry. The article ends with suggestions for future directions of research in the philosophy of poetry. I (...) argue that as the philosophy of poetry is gaining interest, the previous debates that presuppose an understanding of poetry as taking form on the page and as having fixed aboutness ought to be abandoned in favour of an understanding of a poem in the affective space, with issues of reception, interpretation, distribution, and performance in play. (shrink)

This article considers an apparent tension between, on the one hand, a widespread belief among literature teachers that the appreciation of a poem involves an experience of form-content inseparability and, on the other hand, these same teachers’ use of paraphrase to encourage appreciation. Using Terrence Deacon’s model of art experience, I argue that the tensions of this ‘paraphrase paradox’ mirror tensions inherent in poetic experience. Section II draws upon work by Rafe McGregor, Peter Lamarque, and Peter Kivy to frame an (...) approach to the form-content distinction, and to offer a brief overview of the paraphrase paradox. Sections III-IV summarize Deacon’s model of aesthetic experience, and argue that this model implies that poetic experience both triggers an impulse towards paraphrase, and frustrates this impulse. Section V looks at implications for the poetry teacher’s attempts to navigate the paraphrase paradox. Section VI tests these implications through an analysis of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Faith Healing’. (shrink)

Why is there a long-standing debate about paraphrase in poetry? Everyone agrees that paraphrase can be useful; everyone agrees that paraphrase is no substitute for the poem itself. What is there to disagree about? Perhaps this: whether paraphrase can specify everything that counts as a contribution to the meaning of a poem. There are, we say, two ways to take the question; on one way of taking it, the answer is that paraphrase cannot. Does this entail that there is meaning (...) mysteriously locked in a poem, meaning that cannot be represented in any way other than via the poem itself? If that were so it would have profound implications for poetry’s capacity to convey insight. We suggest reasons for thinking that the entailment does not hold. Throughout, we connect the traditional debate over paraphrase, which has largely been conducted within the fields of philosophy and literary theory, with recent empirically oriented thinking about the communicability of meaning, represented by work in pragmatics. We end with a suggestion about what is to count as belonging to meaning, and what as merely among the things that determine meaning. (shrink)

This dissertation explores and analyzes interpretive skepticism in literary theory. It argues that traditional interpretive theories and debates often harbor unacknowledged forms of skeptical thinking and arguments. As these forms of skepticism are seldom recognized as skepticism, the problem tends to remain hidden and unresolved. The dissertation further argues that interpretive skepticism is (i) the result of a philosophical confusion, and (ii) practically harmful when used in order to regulate interpretive practice. Accordingly, a central purpose of the dissertation is to (...) offer an analysis and taxonomy of what interpretive skepticism is. Only once we are in a position to understand and recognize it in its many guises will we be able to criticize and challenge it. The first part of the dissertation thus aims at identifying a specific structure of skeptical reasoning within the theory of literary interpretation. In articulating this taxonomy and analysis, the study builds on the American philosopher Stanley Cavell’s reinterpretation of epistemological skepticism in terms of tragedy, avoidance and repudiation of grammatical criteria. The second part of the study explores, in greater detail, interpretive skepticism within New Criticism. It centers on analyses of two classics within interpretive theory: “The Intentional Fallacy” by Monroe C. Beardsley (and W.K. Wimsatt) and “The Heresy of Paraphrase” by Cleanth Brooks. The study argues that Beardsley becomes both a so-called “skeptical twin” about literary interpretation and a straightforward literary other-minds skeptic with regard to authorial intentions. Brooks, for his part, becomes a straightforward skeptic about poetic interpretation and a “skeptical twin” about poetic meaning. Both theorists are investigated in comparison with Cavell’s explorations of the themes of intention, overinterpretation, fraudulence, modernism, and aesthetic judgment in art, literature and criticism. Despite these skeptical findings, the study also argues that there are important similarities between Cavell’s non-skeptical approach to literature and criticism, and New Critical “close reading.” The dissertation concludes with a chapter that leaves the confines of the New Critical idiom to explore interpretive skepticism within the tradition of so-called “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Through readings of Susan Sontag, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Cora Diamond, it argues that suspicious or paranoid hermeneutics is not skeptical in itself but can become so through the skeptical temptations of dogmatism, authoritarianism, and fraudulence. (shrink)

An interview with poet and literary critic, Professor Angela Leighton (Senior Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge). She is primarily interested in poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also in nineteenth-century aestheticism and its continuing legacy in the twentieth, in particular the work of Woolf, Yeats, Stevens, Bishop, Plath and W.S. Graham. In this interview, Leighton talks about her poetry, the philosophical potential of poetry and the way in which poetry means.