A Panenmentalist Philosophy of Literature, or How Does Actual Reality Imitate Pure Possibilities?

Download or read book A Panenmentalist Philosophy of Literature, or How Does Actual Reality Imitate Pure Possibilities? written by Amihud Gilead and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between the literary imagination, literary possibilities, and actual reality poses a major philosophical problem in the field of the metaphysics of literature. This detailed analysis of some literary masterpieces, by Proust, Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, demonstrates that actual reality actualizes or “imitates” literary pure possibilities. As such, these masterpieces should be treated not as romans a clef, but, instead, as paradigm-cases on whose basis we grasp and understand actual reality.