Anders Pettersson presents a comprehensive account of the foundations of literature, grounded in an original analysis of the interactions between author and reader. Drawing on post-Gricean pragmatics and Nicholas Wolterstorff's notion of presentationality, Pettersson develops the idea of the verbal text and conveys an integrated and nuanced understanding of literary experience, its conditions, and the values it affords. In the second part of Verbal Art he systematically examines the cognitive, affective, and formal aspects of the literary work and explores their (...) interrelations.Pettersson demonstrates the implications and applications of the theory through a series of detailed studies of literary works, taking care to show that his theory is compatible with a broad variety of perspectives. Combining an intimate knowledge of modern literary theory and the aesthetics of literature with innovative applications of linguistics and cognitive psychology to the literary work, he provides a thorough treatment of fundamental problems in the area, including the concept of a text or work, the concept of form, and the distinctiveness of the literary use of language. (shrink)

1. The application of literature to life -- 2. Examples of application -- 3. Application and the act of reading -- 4. Literature and cognitive enrichment -- 5. Transportation and empathy -- 6. Simulation and identification -- 7. The aesthetic approach to literature -- 8. Conceptions of the text -- 9. Literary practice -- 10. The concepts of literature -- 11. Questions of norms and values -- 12. A final look at application.

An anthology that reveals that interpretation of literature and the arts is done from different perspectives and often with different objectives so that attempts to provide unified analyses of the logic of such interpretation will always be unsuccessful.

The articles in this collection focus attention on the concept of literature and on the relationship between this concept and the concepts of a literary work and a literary text. Adopting an analytic approach, the articles attempt to clarify how these concepts govern our thinking about the phenomenon of literature in various ways, exploring the issues which arise when these concepts are employed as theoretical instruments for describing and analyzing the phenomenon of literature.

In the course of the nineteenth century the study of literature was professionalized. There was a concerted attempt to make the study of literature an academic pursuit, ‘a particular branch of learning or science’, to turn it into ‘literary studies’ or, as it was called in German, Literaturwissenschaft. 1 This attempt was ultimately successful in the sense that literary studies became a recognized and established discipline within the new Humboldtian kind of university. However, this success brought troubles of its own. (...) Among other things, the arrival of the academic discipline of literary studies not only required a method of study but also a determinate field of study. In order to delimit such a field, a clear and well-defined concept of literature was needed. This meant that academic literary studies would have to transform, for its own specific purposes, such concepts as ‘literary work’ and ‘literary text’ as well as the concept of ‘literature’, from broad, vague, non-theoretical, everyday notions into something like well-designed theoretical tools. Though it has not always been recognized, this transformation has presented a major theoretical problem for literary studies, and it is arguable that to this day no satisfactory solution has been found. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson’s Individuals contains a condensed version of an ontology of art. According to this ontology, musical and literary compositions are similar to types. They are abstract entities, instantiated in the performances of the piece of music or the copies of the literary work. Musical and literary compositions are “well-entrenched”, Strawson says – we cannot eliminate these abstractions, or perhaps we have no need to do so. Strawson’s ontology of art forms an integral part of what he calls his “descriptive (...) metaphysics”, and his resistance to the elimination of types and type-like entities is one example of his reservations against “revisionary metaphysics”.Nowadays, Strawson’s name is seldom mentioned in connection with the philosophy of art. Yet the general view of the ontology of art advocated in Individuals is still probably the one most widely held in analytical aesthetics today. Thus, for example, Stephen Davies adopts the same general position as Strawson in his article “Ontology of Art” , the best informed contemporary overview of the complex of problems surrounding the mode of existence of works of art. Unlike Strawson, Davies also adduces explicit reasons why concepts of musical and literary compositions cannot be successfully eliminated.Critically reviewing Strawson’s and Davies’ standpoints and arguments, I maintain that concepts of artworks can in fact be successfully eliminated, and that the bracketing of such notions leads to a better theoretical perspective on musical and literary communication. Throughout the paper, I speak for an open-minded approach to conceptual revision. (shrink)