The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Philosophy

Anthony J. Cascardi is Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also holds the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Chair in Comparative Literature, Rhetoric, and Spanish. His many publications across the fields of literature and philosophy include The Subject of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 1992), Consequences of Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics (2012), which was awarded the Phyllis Goodhart Gordon Prize by the Renaissance Society of America.

Literature and philosophy have long shared an interest in questions of truth, value, and form. And yet, from ancient times to the present, they have often sharply diverged, both in their approach to these questions and in their relationship to one another. Moreover, the vast differences among individual writers, historical periods, and languages pose challenges for anyone wishing to understand the relationship between them. This Introduction provides a synthetic and original guide to this vast terrain. It uncovers the deep interests that literature and philosophy share while offering a lucid account of their differences. It sheds new light on many standing debates and offers students and scholars of literary criticism, literary theory, and philosophy a chance to think freshly about questions that have preoccupied the Western tradition from its very beginnings up until the present.

This Introduction provides an original, synthetic overview of the relations between literature and philosophy from ancient times to the present. It covers a wide range of genres, historical periods, and topics, making it a valuable guide for students, teachers, and researchers in literary criticism, literary theory, and philosophy.

Introduction; Part I. Questions of Truth and Knowledge: 1. The 'ancient quarrel'; 2. Action, imitations, conventions of make-believe; 3. The single observer standpoint and its limits; 4. Contingency, irony, edification: changing the conversation about truth; Part II. Questions of Value: 5. Values, contingencies, conflicts; 6. Reason and autonomy, imagination and feeling; 7. Forces and the will; 8. Opacity; Part III. Questions of Form: 9. Ubiquitous form; 10. Linguistic turns; 11. Form, narrative, novel; 12. Forms and fragments; Afterword: limits.