On Literary Understanding

Abstract

Several recent approaches to literature—what the chapter describes as moral, aesthetic, and cognitive models of literary experience—allow us to consider its relevance in epistemic terms. Through an examination of the insights and limits of these approaches, the chapter presents the case for the experiential, generative, and expressive dimensions of understanding the literary work, and for their implications beyond literary reading. That literary understanding is experiential will mean that, beyond knowledge of what the text is about, one must have acquaintance with what it is like to undergo the imaginings prompted by the text. That literary understanding is generative means that what we understand in literary experience is not merely the objects or events in the world from which the work may draw, but how these are transformed in the specific literary presentation created by the work. That literary understanding is expressive will mean that the object of understanding issues from, and brings us into contact with, a point of view, even if one known only through and as the work itself. These dimensions of literary understanding, I suggest, enable understanding beyond the experience of literature as such.