A Panenmentalist Philosophy of Literature, or How Does Actual Reality Imitate Pure Possibilities?

The relationship between the literary imagination, literary possibilities, and actual reality poses a major philosophical problem in the field of the metaphysics of literature. This detailed analysis of some literary masterpieces, by Proust, Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, demonstrates that actual reality actualizes or “imitates” literary pure possibilities. As such, these masterpieces should be treated not as romans a clef, but, instead, as paradigm-cases on whose basis we grasp and understand actual reality. Dedication 6 Contents 8 Acknowledgements 10 Introduction 12 1. How does Actual Reality linitate Literary Pure Possibilities? 14 2. How is Gregor Samsa Possible? 40 3. Literary Necessity 59 4. Creativity, Free Choice, and Necessity 70 5. What is the Difference between Mathematical and Literary Necessity? 78 6. Literary Arguments 84 7. The Reality of Fiction 89 8. How Far can Literary linagination Go? 94 9. Interior Portraits in The Magic Mountain and Brain Imaging 111 10. Actualities, Pure Possibilities, and The Magic Mountain 128 11. A Panenmentalist Connnent on the Purely Possible in Virginia Woolf’s Writings 136 12. How Does Literature Make the Contingent Necessary? 138 13. Freudian Pure Possibilities 145 14. How does Love Make the Ugly Beautiful? 156 15. The Singularity of Benjy Compson 164 16. Concluding Remarks 181