The Experience of Fiction

Argues that our experience of becoming engrossed in the fictional world of a novel is connected to the fundamental condition of human bein our capacity for language in all its broadest shapes. Unlocking the subtle riches of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and working across phenomenology, analytic philosophy, and literary criticism, The Experience of Fiction argues that our capacity for language is the bedrock of fiction and of our experience of its worlds. By harnessing the general structure of fictional worlds that our minds navigate when we read, masterworks of fiction expose our capacity for language for what it is: a capacity to be otherwise and to exceed ourselves. Charting the worlds of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Thomas Jurkiewicz explores the pressures and opportunities that the impulse for coherence places on interpretive experience, arguing that it is finally left to each individual to commit themselves to the actual world. The Experience of Fiction injects new verve into the burgeoning conversation between literary scholars and philosophers of art and language, bringing hermeneutic philosophy decisively to bear on literary studies. It clears a way between critics invested in critique and those looking for new modes of thinking, appreciating, and taking works of literary fiction seriously, by showcasing how an attitude of openness to experience lays bare both our capacity to reach out towards alterity and to dominate it.