Truth and literature: The relevance of truth to literary value
Item
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Title
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Truth and literature: The relevance of truth to literary value
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:4dc057314e2d:10580
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identifier
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10956
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Creator
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Farley, John,
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Contributor
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Sibyl Schwarzenbach
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Date
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2010
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Philosophy | Aesthetics | Literature | philosophy of art | philosophy of criticism | philosophy of langauge | philosophy of literature | speech act theory | truth
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Abstract
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In this dissertation, I examine the question of whether it is ever appropriate to judge a work of literature on the truth or falsity of the statements it contains. I argue that literary works often do assert truths, and that therefore a normal and appropriate element of our critical response to these works involves an assessment of their truth claims. I am therefore arguing against what has come to be called the "No Truth Theory," whose various defenders claim that truth is never relevant to the literary value of a piece of language.;I trace the No Truth Theory in its modern form, through the work of Arnold Isenberg, Sydney Zink, Monroe Beardsley, Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen. I identify several common threads in their arguments, and isolate the source of my disagreement with them, namely, their (in my view) mistaken theory of what a work of literature is. While they all consider a work of literature to be a locutionary act, I argue that a work of literature is an illocutionary act, or more precisely, that a work of literature often has an illocutionary force, and that assessing how well this illocutionary act is performed is a legitimate part of literary criticism. The assertion of truths is, of course, one such illocutionary project, and so the assessment of truths is part of legitimate critical practice. I show that the purely locutionary view of literature, espoused by the NTT, is inadequate, while the illocutionary view has much to recommend it.;I show how the illocutionary view of literature affects our understanding of several key literary concepts, such as metaphor, theme and thesis. I apply my theory to particular cases, and show how an assessment of truth claims is crucial to certain kinds of literary works.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Philosophy
