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The afterword briefly summarizes the major conclusions of the book and gestures at how they shift wider discussions about philosophy and literature in general and American philosophy and American literature more particularly. It hypothesizes that the focus on literary terror opens up a new thread of intellectual history that parallels and contrasts with several recent studies linking American literature and pragmatism. In this possible new history, the dark strain in American literature leads, not to pragmatism, but rather to its darker cousin, poststructuralism.

Most philosophers believe that art, perhaps literature especially, has something to offer moral philosophy, imaginative examples most importantly. Fewer philosophers believe that it has much to contribute to the philosophy of law. That is in part because writers are rooted in a natural language (not necessarily their own) with historical resonances, depth, allusions, aliveness to tone, that has shaped and is shaped by the lives of particular peoples. But the judge who rebukes a witness given to literary flourishes wants plain speech, suited to establishing facts, and the philosopher of international law, one is inclined to think, must strive for the high abstraction necessary to formulate principles and their justifications to all of human kind in a language that appeals to what we have in common rather than what divides us as natural languages and anything that is necessarily rooted in them appears to do. This chapter explores whether these are irreconcilable perspectives one necessarily local, the other necessarily universal. It argues that they are not. Taking the concept of genocide and the writings of novelist and legal philosopher, Bernhard Schlink as examples, the chapter argues that literature can provide even the philosophy of law with a richer understanding of the forms of universality and the form of philosophical thought suited to understanding some of the big categories on international law, than philosophers commonly assume.

A remarkable demonstration of the contempt literary theory has had for content appears in the various reference dictionaries of literary terms. Almost invariably, they offer lengthy definitions of form, while usually failing to include an entry at all for content. Yet all the while, the term “content” recurs throughout other definitions, a hidden but necessary component of explaining the various methods of making sense of literary texts. A more nuanced account of the form-content distinction, one that draws on both the analytic philosophy of literature and the sophisticated scholarship on allegory in literary theory, explains how form can be a tool for the expression of literary content.

Identifying cognition in general with propositional knowledge exposes the cognitive value of literature to abiding skepticism. This chapter argues that German romanticism has generated two competing views of the relation between literature and the overtly truth-seeking disciplines. One is a legacy of skepticism and antirealism that is powerless to give a positive account of literary value. The other is a complementarist legacy emphasizing literature’s cognitive priority to and its role as the cognitive fulfillment of discursive knowledge. This tradition offers important resources to aesthetic cognitivism for articulating and defending the value of literature and the institutions that support it.

This chapter examines literary studies, starting with the ways in which the constitution of literature made study an important outgrowth of literary reading. It offers a map of Shakespeare studies in U.S. literary culture and examines some of the ideological investments that the United States brought to Shakespeare. The legacies of rhetoric and philology, two other important predecessors of literature, are especially important to literary studies. Taking up the vexed question of why rhetoric, so prominent in academic culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was barely visible in the research university model at the end, the chapter argues that the cultural dependence on print and fears of cultural manipulation that had gathered around oratory had moved rhetoric out of prominence before the research university model took hold. The fears of oratorical manipulation were not really justified but point to the tremendous anxieties about autonomy at stake in both oratory and literature, which open the self to outside influences; theories of the sublime also navigated these anxieties. The chapter ends by profiling Coleridge’s and Emerson’s competing models of literary authority and literary reading, which in broad strokes count as modern and antimodern.

This chapter approaches the relation between ethics and aesthetics from the perspective of Emmanuel Levinas. It examines the form of Levinas’s discourse in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, works that privilege the interlocutory relation that frames witnessing but whose orientation toward the other is largely articulated in a philosophical idiom indebted to sameness. The challenge to philosophy is pursued by turning to a literary “other,” Jorge Semprun’s testimonial memoir, Literature or Life, where questions of form are inseparable from ethical considerations in a witnessing focused on the addressee. This emphasis on the addressee, analogous to Levinas’s insistence on a self constituted by an appeal from the other, leads to a concluding consideration of his work as a response to victims of the Holocaust and a philosophical allegory of posttraumatic memory.

This chapter is focused on three claims about literature and the moral life made by Cora Diamond, Martha Nussbaum, and Alice Crary. The first, ‘expansionism’, is that there’s more to moral thinking than certain conventional conceptions allow. This the chapter simply accepts as a starting point, going on to argue with the aid of an extended literary example for the second claim, that literary texts—especially literary fiction—are instances of moral thinking. The third claim is that these same texts are (in part) instances of moral philosophy. Though this too may be true, the chapter argues that it’s a mistake to think it follows—as Nussbaum in particular has suggested—from the truth of the first two.

The introduction sets out the book’s main themes: a philosophical reading of Paradise Lost, in which the relationships between philosophy and literature, literature and religion, and religion and philosophy are examined. The book's guiding metaphor—an ascent—is explained. The introduction explains why previous routes by which philosophy and literature have been successfully connected before are less suitable for religious poetry. The book does not follow the “compensatory” model, in which literature overcomes limitations that hamper philosophy. Instead, the reading hopes to expose episodes of misalliance between philosophy and literature. Implications for interdisciplinarity are briefly discussed. The tensions between religion and literature in relation to beauty, knowledge, and the imagination are presented. Finally, some methodological clarifications are made.

This chapter takes up a gauntlet thrown down by Lucy Lurie in J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace: it considers the plight of animals other than human even in the teeth of recognizing that South Africa’s political priorities lie elsewhere. The chapter contributes to a larger exploration of the boundary between literature and philosophy and a questioning of the certainty with which the line between these disciplines is often drawn. The poets and the philosophers, in their different ways, have the capacity to call out to fellow humans in ways that may have positive ethical consequences for non-human creatures. Art is one way of expressing our humanity, but in its troubling of a presumed dividing line between the “human” and the “animal”, so the argument of this chapter goes, it serves as a reminder that the poets and the philosophers, too, are animals.

Although the writings of Henry David Thoreau are regarded around the world as classics of American literature, Thoreau is seldom taken seriously as a philosopher. Examining why Thoreau might qualify as a philosophically significant author nonetheless requires that we reconsider our assumptions about the nature of philosophy, and recognize the challenges that he poses to the discipline. This chapter introduces and defends the project of situating Thoreau more centrally within the Western philosophical canon.

This introductory chapter provides context for the volume’s subsequent contributions on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship on a variety of levels. It begins by explaining its aims with regard to the relationship between philosophy and literature. It then locates Goethe’s novel within this set of aims in three ways: first, by providing a brief outline of Goethe’s career; second, by locating his novel in the literary-historical context of late eighteenth-century Europe; and third, by outlining the connections between the Goethe of Wilhelm Meister and specific philosophers and thinkers who influenced his thought and for whom his work was in turn influential.

This chapter examines how the theme of Bildung so central to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship is bound up with a set of issues involving the relation between life and literature—the concerns philosophers and literary theorists have explored in light of famous problems of fictionality and theatricality, as well as more widely in terms of how artistic irony is engaged with the world itself and what sorts of strategies of narrative revision might be required for that engagement (as Goethe himself, attached to the themes and central character of his novel for more than five decades, clearly thought).