History and Philosophy of Literature

I’m an English professor, but I find I approach the study of literature in a way doesn’t quite fit with the way most people in my field study literature. Here’s what I mean by that:

(a) What I call the study of literature is more commonly called “literary studies.” The reason I don’t call what I do “literary studies” is because I’m skeptical of the very concept of “the literary.” I’m fine with “literary” when it’s used simply to describe a relationship to something people have called “literature.” But I’m skeptical of “the literary” when it’s used to describe a special property or quality of literature that mystifies it or makes it resistant to analysis by the methods and procedures of history, philosophy, and science. In other words…

(b) I approach literature not necessarily as an art object or a special kind of “literary” text, but as a primarily discursive document. Perhaps the best way to describe this is by way of something widely understood as a primarily discursive document, a document that exists to convey ideas: a work of philosophy. Works of philosophy use fiction (thought experiments as well as examples from literature) and figurative language (metaphors, wordplay, analogies). They also require interpretation, or discerning the meaning of and intent behind the language, even when philosophers attempt to convey their ideas as clearly as possible. Much of what we call literature works the same way. Furthermore, much of what we call literature was pretty clearly written for the purpose of conveying ideas, principles, and views. Not all of it, but much of it. When I say…

(c) “literature” I mean it in the empirical sense of anything people have called “literature” in a given context. William Godwin defined “literature” in 1793 as “the diffusion of knowledge through the medium of discussion,” which makes sense for him, because he wrote both a renowned work of political philosophy (A Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1793) and an accompanying novel (Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, 1794) to elaborate upon and fortify his philosophical views. This sense of “literature” is not how we tend to think of literature today, because today we tend to associate literature with the aesthetic objectives of Modernism, “literature” as “creative” or “imaginative” writing, or as an expression of the literary, a particular art form that can only be studied through some form of close reading. This make sense, because the rise of Modernism (as a literary period, movement, or mode) largely coincided with the emergence of the literature department within the university and the discipline of literary studies, tasked with studying a special kind of writing called “literature.” But during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the period I study and teach—Godwin’s association of “literature” with knowledge and discussion was more the norm than the way we understand “literature” today. Likewise various genres in the history of writing—novels, poems, scientific atlases, political philosophy—could all be called “literature” (and indeed were until the end of the eighteenth century / beginning of the nineteenth century). So I use the phrase…

(d) “history and philosophy of literature” to describe what I do, for several reasons in addition to items (a) through (c) above. One, I’m mainly interested in the discursive elements of ideas, concepts, and objectives in fiction as well as natural philosophy or science writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly during the British Enlightenment. I’m interested in these things because the goal of my research is to bring these into conversation with ideas in philosophy and science. For example, some of my recent work is on the development of the concept of “data” from the time it entered the English language in the 1600s to the time it took on something like its modern meaning by the end of the 1700s, and how this helps us understand how to use, analyze, and interpret data-based claims today. Two, I think if we want to be serious about bringing ideas and concepts from genres such as fiction and poetry into conversation with philosophy and science—that is, with the web of knowledge—we need to think carefully about methodology, standards of evidence, and how we know what we claim to know about literature. That’s why I describe what I do as a form of “philosophy of literature.” This subfield of philosophy includes work on questions such as “What is the relationship between truth and fiction?,” “Can fiction contain propositional knowledge?,” and “Can fiction be a useful model of the real world?” I say my work in this regard is also historical work because, as I note above, I take literature as an empirical-historical concept, “What has been called ‘literature’ historically, when, why, by whom, and what did it do?” And because I think an empirical approach to the history of concepts in general is helpful for doing philosophy of literature. 

I’m not saying everyone should study literature the way I do, but because what I do is a bit strange for someone with “professor of English” in their title, I wrote this to help visitors to my website understand a bit about what I do and why. I understand that a lot of people—including probably most people in literary studies—think it’s wrong to study literature so discursively or extractively, because for them literature is an art form, possibly even a sacred one, that deserves to be treated in some higher fashion. And perhaps some of it really does deserve that kind of treatment. I’m not trying to stop you from studying or thinking of literature that way, nor am I suggesting that my research is meant to account for the experience or pleasure of reading literature. One really wonderful thing about all the genres in the history (and present) of writing variously called “literature” is they have multiple functions, affordances, advantages, disadvantages, uses, and readers.