Yanal, Robert J. Review of Peter Lamarque's THE PHILOSOPHY OF LITERATURE. NDPR (March 2009).

Lamarque, Peter. The Philosophy of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. The Philosophy of Literature is another installment in the Foundations of the Philosophy of the Arts series, which "is designed to provide a comprehensive but flexible series of concise texts addressing both fundamental general questions about art as well as questions about the several arts". Peter Lamarque, formerly editor of the British Journal of Aesthetics, has made a specialty of the philosophy of literature, having authored two books in this area (with Stein Haugom Olsen Truth, Fiction and Literature (1994), and Fictional Points of View (1996), along with a goodly number of articles. I shall not here describe points of similarity with or departure from Lamarque's previous work. Appropriately for a book that presents itself as an introduction to the field, Lamarque gives a historical overview of various sub-topics in the philosophy of literature as well as supplementary readings for each chapter. The topics canvassed are: literature-as-art; the role of the author (including attention to the intentional "fallacy"), reading a work of art-literature (including issues regarding interpretation), issues raised by works of fiction (including the ontology of fictional characters and emotions towards fiction), literary truth (what it might be); and the evaluation of literature (including the formation of a "canon" and "ethical criticism"). There are many topics I haven't listed (hence "including"), and certainly many topics I cannot touch on in this review. Indeed, I shall focus on one topic here: the definition of literature (which does seem to be Lamarque's principal concern). His Preface begins, "What exactly is it to view literature as art?" (vii), implying that the book is an exploration of various issues that arise from this very question. There is one general objection I have to this, though it isn't terribly serious. Some issues touched on in the book do directly relate to the problem of defining art-literature. If a text is art-literature, we might adopt approaches to it that are like those we would take towards other art forms (e.g., attention to form and structure, special ways of evaluation). But other issues can be raised quite independently of whether a text is art-literature: interpretation, the ontology of fiction, and emotion towards fiction, to name three. The same issues that arise with the interpretation of art-literature come up with the interpretation of non-art texts, such as legal contracts. That is, the fact that a certain text is a work of art is not always what forces issues of interpretation. Too, "Not all novels . . . are 'literary' " (31), but even fictional stories that are not art-literature raise issues of ontology and emotional reaction. (What, if anything, does "Sherlock Holmes" refer to? What is the nature of our emotional response to reading "The Adventure of the Speckled Band"?) Literary theorists -- New Critics, Structuralists, etc. -- are not interested in the problem of when a text is a work of literary art (though something like it arises as the problem of canon formation). Philosophers, though, are interested in definition, and the standard form of the analytical problematic is to seek necessary and sufficient conditions for "X is a work of literary art". . . . Notwithstanding Yanal's limited understanding of literary theory in the paragraph above (where does he get the idea that literary theorists are uninterested in the "problem of when a text is a work of literary art" and what has this to do with "canon formation" exactly?), read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15645.