Author: John Christopher Gibson

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Published: 2001

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This thesis is a sustained discussion of the relationship between literary texts and extra-textual reality. My overarching goal is to present an alternative to what I think is a misguided and unacceptable thread in many of the dominant contemporary theories of literature: the conception of literary language as a self-referential use of language, one which does not and cannot reach beyond the 'world of the text' to touch the nature and reality of the world of the reader of literary texts. It is misguided because it assumes that there is an unbridgeable gap between literary language and reality; and it is unacceptable because it renders what we regard as one of our primary mouthpieces of human culture speechless about anything external to the borders of a fictional world. In contrast to this position, I develop a theory of what I call ' linguistic humanism'. The defining feature of this position is that it denies that there is an insurmountable gap between a literary text and the world external to it. Linguistic humanism, as I develop it in my thesis, offers an account of how we can see reality as present immediately and directly in the literary use of language, as a part of a literary text's internal structure. I will argue that the idea that we can segregate a literary text from reality is theoretically confused, since literature's use of a common social language, properly understood, reveals a way of understanding how it can weave our world into the very words it uses to construct its fictional worlds. I structure the main argument of my dissertation around this picture of literary language, drawing in particular on a tradition in the philosophy of language that runs from the later Wittgenstein to contemporary philosophers such as Stanley Cavell and Hilary Putnam. I argue that since language provides our point of contact with reality, it is by examining the structure of language, of linguistic convention and practice, that we illuminate and investigate the ways in which we confront social reality. Literature, I argue, is uniquely capable of providing this sort of investigation.