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  • What Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored by Bernard Harrison
  • Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge (bio)
What Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored
by Bernard Harrison
Indiana University Press, 2015.
xxviii+594pp. US$35. ISBN 978-0-253-01408-5.

It is striking that one of the most vehement and thorough defences of literature in recent decades should come from a philosopher—but given the picture Bernard Harrison paints of the state of literature departments in Anglo-American universities, in which literary works are too often reduced to serve as the “handmaidens” of wider political or socio-cultural arguments, perhaps it is not entirely surprising. Harrison offers this defence by combining a detailed account of meaning based on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language with readings of major literary works and explicit argumentative engagement with a broad range of literary theorists of the mid- to late twentieth century. Although this book, across its considerable length, is occasionally idiosyncratic and frequently repetitive, Harrison’s defence is ultimately compelling, in large part owing to his ability to work across disciplines to provide novel perspectives on long-standing debates about meaning, referentiality, interpretation, and criticism.

In Harrison’s reading, the value of the humanities depends on its being able to fulfil “the Criterion of Independent Contribution,” that is, literary studies must be able to “contribute kinds of understanding of the human condition that are different from, and independent of, those contributed by the social sciences” (11). After giving an extended account of the arguments against this idea and its attendant claims of literary humanism (in which he admirably avoids reducing these arguments to strawmen), Harrison develops an account of meaning in language that debunks the notion that language must either refer always and only to a world outside language or that it is entirely self-referential. He thus eschews a notion of literature as mimetic and looks for its connection to truth and to reality elsewhere, namely in the language (as a socially developed and maintained practice) that authors of literature share with their readers. He uses Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language to suggest a “Practice-Based Model of meaning” (61) that gives us “an account of the relationship between meaning and reality that is complex and many-layered enough to begin to throw light on the equally complex [End Page 327] relationships that exist between literature and life” (68). According to this model, literature neither gives us new factual information about the real world, nor does it paper over the miseries of human existence with a series of decorative and diverting illusions—rather, it gives us access to the ways in which practices of meaning-making come about, causing us to reflect on what we generally take for granted, namely, “the living strictures of practice and social interaction in which [words] take on roles that determine their truth-conditions and hence their meanings” (71). The word “chancery” in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House serves as an initial example here. Crucially, these practices are shared, and language “is not the private property of any of its speakers” (78), which means that what literary authors can do is “show us ... the interplay of language, practice, and human possibility” (81). He thus arrives at the argument that literary works “offer us the possibility of grasping the human world as something ‘real’ in the sense of transcending individual subjectivity, but nevertheless capable of change in accordance with wider alterations in consciousness” (100). Harrison’s command of thinkers from Wittgenstein to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty to F.R. Leavis, and many others, gives him the tools to make a detailed, authoritative, and genuinely original case that literature does offer an independent contribution to human knowledge.

Part 2 (of four) consists of four essays all previously published elsewhere (in different versions), which, roughly speaking, address traditional problems in the philosophy of literature together with literary case studies. After establishing that literature works by way of empathy and persuasion rather than by way of argument, Harrison examines Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as a way of rebutting the common narratological argument that novels tell us the contents of minds. He objects to this notion on the grounds that it...

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