Literature and Understanding: The Value of a Close Reading of Literary Texts

This book investigates potential cognitive gain from the close analysis of literary texts. Providing a challenge to the anti-cognitivist position, it argues that cognitive gain is relevant to our aesthetic appreciation of literature. The author locates cognitive gain in the verstehen tradition and identifies five relevant senses of understanding to make the innovative case that reading literary fiction as literature stimulates the relevant senses of understanding. Using examples such as irony, metaphor, ambiguity and repetition, it shows that relevant senses of understanding may bridge the gap between understanding a literary text and understanding the world beyond the text.