Literature and Understanding: The Value of a Close Reading of Literary Texts

Abstract

Detailed, precise and ridden with excellent examples, Jon Phelan’s Literature and Understanding: The Value of a Close Reading of Literary Texts is an inviting and inspiring book that seeks to establish a novel account of the cognitive value of literature. It does this by providing a variety of arguments supporting the educative, cognitive and moral value of literature. Phelan positions himself within the literary cognitivist camp and joins the minority within it who argue that it is through literary devices, and not through its fictional dimension, that literature gives us knowledge. As he claims in the first chapter, philosophers are all too quick to run literature and fiction together, making it unclear how precisely the learning takes place, attributing the cognitive impact of fiction to the literary dimension of a work and vice versa. To overcome this problem, Phelan establishes a category of literary fiction, taking inspiration from Ken Walton’s (1970) notion of categories of art (each with its own set of standard features) and Stacie Friend’s (2012) account of fiction as a genre. As he sees it, literary fiction includes those works that exhibit the standard features of literature and of fiction.