Educating the Heart: Realism, Reason, and the Novel

Abstract

fourteen-chapter book. Mulhall borrows idea of a difficulty of from his fellow philosopher Cora Diamond, who uses it to designate experiences in which something in reality seems hard or impossible or agonizing to get one's mind around (70), or in Mulhall's formulation, the possibility of experiencing something that is perfectly everyday as constitutively enigmatic (92). Both philosophers adopt a Wittgensteinian view that in Western philosophy, an imperialism of reason with respect to real (116) systematically deflects such difficulties, and they link this tendency to Plato's founding repudiation of literature as register of emotion, immanence, and concreteness as against philosophy's defining commitment to intellect, transcendence, and universality. The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy instead tries to delineate vital areas of common concern between literature and philosophy. Specifically, book suggests how post-Wittgensteinian philosophy and contemporary novelistic realism can in effect perform limitations of