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Description
Argues that our experience of becoming engrossed in the fictional world of a novel is connected to the fundamental condition of human being: our capacity for language in all its broadest shapes.
Unlocking the subtle riches of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and working across phenomenology, analytic philosophy, and literary criticism, The Experience of Fiction argues that our capacity for language is the bedrock of fiction and of our experience of its worlds.
By harnessing the general structure of fictional worlds that our minds navigate when we read, masterworks of fiction expose our capacity for language for what it is: a capacity to be otherwise and to exceed ourselves. Charting the worlds of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Thomas Jurkiewicz explores the pressures and opportunities that the impulse for coherence places on interpretive experience, arguing that it is finally left to each individual to commit themselves to the actual world.
The Experience of Fiction injects new verve into the burgeoning conversation between literary scholars and philosophers of art and language, bringing hermeneutic philosophy decisively to bear on literary studies. It clears a way between critics invested in critique and those looking for new modes of thinking, appreciating, and taking works of literary fiction seriously, by showcasing how an attitude of openness to experience lays bare both our capacity to reach out towards alterity and to dominate it.
Accessibility Information
Additional accessibility information
- Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
- WCAG level AA
- WCAG v2.2 compliant
- Accessibility request contact
Support for non-visual reading
- No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
- Has alternative text descriptions for images
Visual adjustments
Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified (font, spacing, colors)
Navigation
- Page list to go to pages from the print source version
- Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
- All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
- Content is enhanced with ARIA roles to optimize organization and facilitate navigation
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Rich content
Language tagging provided
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The Language of Worlds
2. Fiction and Experience
3. Worlds Apart, Worlds Within
4. The Threat of Coherence
5. Negative Possibility
6. Possibility Promised
7. Hermeneutic Experience
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Product details
| Published | 06 Aug 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 224 |
| ISBN | 9798216367345 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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