Pippin, Robert. Review of Richard Eldridge's LITERATURE, LIFE AND MODERNITITY. NDPR (January 2009).

Eldridge, Richard. Literature, Life, and Modernity. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. In Literature, Life, and Modernity Richard Eldridge focuses on the question of a reader's or a viewer's response to a literary or dramatic work in a specific historical epoch ("modernity"). That is, in contrast with many other philosophical approaches to literature, he avoids fixing attention on any putative doctrinal (moral or political or diagnostic) claims in a literary work. Thereby, and in many other admirable ways, he avoids the danger of treating literature as philosophy manqué, concedes the distinctness of literary experience, and only then asks about the significance of this experience. (In this way his approach is reminiscent to some extent of Schiller's; not bad company to be keeping.) This all amounts to a philosophy of literature of sorts but avoids a forced "philosophy in literature" or "literature as philosophy" treatment. There are themes and ideas at stake of course, but for distinct historical reasons, Eldridge also thinks of what he generally calls "modern" literature as characterized precisely by the absence of any thematic resolution, and so by a kind of play of possibilities, unsettledness, even homelessness. But, he argues, this is a play of ambiguity that nevertheless (and here the first controversial aesthetic claim) invites and sustains a compelling, valuable attentiveness, an attentiveness and involvement that (and here the second controversial philosophical claim) can be said also to inspire or provoke or in some way lead to this kind of attentiveness and involvement in, simply stated, life. (I should note too that this approach means that Eldridge has focused much more, though not exclusively, on issues of figuration and poetry, and not narrative. The latter is much more important for interpreters who take the fate suffered by characters in a narration as evidence of philosophical judgment. Eldridge's account of poetic figuration, even in dramas like Stoppard's and novels like Sebald's, allows him to stay much closer to a genuinely literary response, and that seems to me all to the good.) Let me first state more carefully the three cornerstones of Eldridge's position: (i) the unique and unprecedented historical condition that he thinks we face, "modernity"; (ii) the unique historical response summoned up by "modern literature"; and (iii) the value -- not the moral or political value, but something like the existential value -- of such a responsiveness for what is simply called "life." Modernity, Literature, and Life, then; as in his title, but re-arranging things a bit. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15027.