Philosophy, Literature, and the Avoidance of Reading

Abstract: “Philosophy of literature” is a thriving subfield of Anglo-American philosophy but virtually unknown within literary studies. This essay aims to address a significant methodological inadequacy that is characteristic of much work in “philosophy of literature”: the remarkable absence of sustained and close textual interpretation as a technique for argument and substantiation. Underlying this approach are assumptions about the separability of meaning from linguistic form that lie at the foundation of modern philosophical approaches to logic and language, instantiated here by Gottlob Frege’s 1918 essay “The Thought.” The implications of Fregean ideas are legible in the interpretive failings of “philosophy of literature.”