Literature, Analytically Speaking: Explorations in the Theory of Interpretation, Analytic Aesthetics, and Evolution by Peter Swirski, and: Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution, and Game Theory by Peter Swirski (review)

I recently attended a conference where among world-renowned analytic philosophers, a lone literary scholar gave a presentation. The subject of the conference was realism, which referred not to the familiar literary genre, but rather to the philosophical and epistemological problem of truth. The literary scholar, Peter Swirski, concentrated on the problem of fictional truth—i.e. what things can be said to be true about a story. He found no difficulty in relating the problem and generating an enthusiastic discussion among his logically and analytically minded audience.

While a cross-disciplinary presentation at an international conference is hardly unusual, those of us involved in literary studies are well aware that the relationship between logic-obsessed analytic philosophers and literary critics—who after all, are writing about art, which by its very nature does not have to be logical—can be described, at the very least, as uneasy. However, I was not surprised at Swirski's adroit use of concepts and theories appropriated from analytic philosophy. For several years he has been consistently working on bringing the insights and methods of analytic inquiry to the study of literature. This is especially true of his recent book Literature, Analytically Speaking, as well as of his preceding theoretical work Of Literature and Knowledge.

Well yes—Swirski is one of those critics who think that the relativistic postmodernism and social constructivism in much of literary studies has come to a dead end. While I did not completely agree with Swirski on this point, I can't help but find his work not only engaging, but also quite useful for pursuing the study of literature. There have been numerous works of analytic inquiry on the nature of art and especially of literature, but they are often left unread by literary scholars. It appears that philosophers are often so concentrated on the logical methods and philosophical themes they are pursuing that the actual richness of artistic expression is obscured and constricted by the philosophical strictness of their conceptual paradigms.

Happily, Swirski's works manage to avoid this problem. He doesn't approach the phenomenon of literature in order to clarify and illustrate philosophical problems. Rather, he comes to analytic philosophy from the perspective of a literary scholar, asking questions concerning how the theories and methods of analytic philosophers might help us understand literature better.

Especially in Literature, Analytically Speaking, this goal is realized in an exceptionally cogent manner. The study is explicitly intended as an exploration of what analytic philosophy, and analytic aesthetics in particular, have to offer to literary scholars. It makes several salient and sometimes polemic points and deals with many fundamental problems of understanding the phenomenon of literature: What is the literary work of art? What is the relationship between the text and the work? How do fiction and nonfiction differ from each other? What is the nature of fiction? What is truth in fiction? What is the role of intentions in literature? Can evolution furnish a fruitful perspective for understanding literature? The book is divided into eight chapters that each concentrate on one of these fundamental problems.

Swirski begins Literature, Analytically Speaking by addressing the very fundaments of literary research, asking what art is. Or more specifically, what is the literary work of art? These questions have, of course, posed the most fundamental problem of aesthetics since antiquity, but Swirski is not trying to sketch out an overview of the different approaches taken to define art in the analytic tradition. He focuses rather on two admittedly influential responses to the problem submitted by philosophers Gregory Currie and Jerrold Levinson. In a book purportedly attempting to familiarize literary scholars with analytic aesthetics, I would have expected a...