Kant and Literary Studies

Examines the premises and principles of Kant's philosophy in its specific relation to the defining features, means and aims of literature.

Claudia Brodsky (Edited by)

9781316513026, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 June 2025

346 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.6 cm, 0.67 kg

With original contributions from a wide range of scholars of literature and philosophy alike, Kant and Literary Studies is the first volume devoted to examining the premises and principles of Kant's explicitly interdisciplinary philosophy in its specific relation to the defining features, means and aims of literature. Its central explorations of the relations between experience and representation, feeling and judgment, thought and poetics, and language and freedom make the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant one of the most relevant to the understanding of literature. Organizing its analyses of Kant's relationship to literature along intersecting lines, the three sections of the book focus, first, on the relation of central literary problems and genres to the theoretical underpinnings of Kant's thought; second, on the epistemological, narrative and historiographic dimensions of Kant's critical conceptions; and third, on the formative relation of his Critique to specific literary works and of critical discourse to ethics.

Part I. Kant on Literature: 1. 'Differing Only in Degree': Judging and Making in Kant and Wordsworth Paresh Chandra
2. On Power in an Extra-Secular Sense: Kant's Analytic of the Sublime David Martyn
3. Kant and the Problem of Tragedy Robert Pippin
Part II. Kant, Literary Theory, and the Critical Formation of the 'Human' Disciplines: 4. 'A New Light Broke Upon the First Person ....': Transcendental Argument, History of Science, and Narrative Intervention in Kant's Critique and the Kleistian Novella Rüdiger Campe
5. Modern Being in the World: Kant's Philosophical Anthropology and Wordsworth's Poetry Richard Eldridge
6. Language Enjoined: Ethics as Form of Address in Kant and Levinas Gabriela Basterra
7. Narrative Discontinuity: Kant's History of Religion(s) Karen Feldman
Part III. Kant and Literature: 8. Kleist Reading Schiller After Kant: The Fate of 'Beautiful Souls' Tim Mehigan
9. 'Critique:' Literary Form, Concept, Philosophical Project Willi Goetschel
10. 'The Shapes My Brain Holds': Kantian Spontaneity and Woolf's The Waves Maya Kronfeld
11. The Poetics of a Transcendental Deduction: The Self-Erasing 'I' in Kant Tawada, and Benveniste John Kim
12. Ethically Speaking, or 'Freedom' in Context: Poetics, Critical Economy, and Kant's Invention of the 'Category' of the 'Possible' Claudia Brodsky.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]