Foucault, Dewey, and the Experience of Literature

What is the work of literature? Can we expect that poetry, or literature, or art, should engage in the world of action, the world of doing things? Do we reluctantly accept, with Auden, that poetry makes nothing happen, or do we adopt Seamus Heaney's optimism that poetry might be able to stop tanks? This paper addresses these questions by drawing on Foucault's idea of the transformability of experience, and Dewey's analysis of the way that art works in our experience. It argues that the force and value of literature comes from its capacity to get into and transform the experience of the reader, and it explains this capacity primarily in terms of Foucault's account of the way that "being is historically constituted as experience". This transformation of experience, it is argued, constitutes the distinctive action of literary works.