What is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored

In What is Fiction For?, Bernard Harrison describes, defends, and demonstrates a form of ‘literary humanism’, the view that fiction can disclose profound truths, and that the point of reading is to learn them. The book is rich, expansive, and rewarding, but also disjointed, limited, and frustrating. Since J. Hillis Miller is among those Harrison names as enemies of humanism, his Communities in Fiction provides an interesting foil for Harrison's arguments, besides being an illuminating work of literary criticism in its own right. Any philosopher interested in literature, professionally or personally, will find something worth reading in some part of Harrison's book. ‘Literature’, not fiction; despite his title, he's really only concerned with books that withstand repeated reading and sustained critical examination (pp. ix–x), and with that critical examination itself, ‘the study of literature’ (p. 11). His principal aim is to rescue the ‘humanist’ approach to such study. The humanist believes a number of things about literature: that it's somehow serious, that it can tell us profound truths about the world, that some works are better at this than others (helpfully summarized at pp. 13–14). Humanism needs defence owing to the depredations of Derrideans, deconstructionists, and other malcontents, mostly in departments of English literature, who argue that fictions are unable to tell us truths, because they concern a realm detached from reality; if they can be convinced to yield truths, they are not the truths their authors intended, but rather the operations of ideology and power revealed by ‘suspicious’ readings of texts (ch. 1, and throughout).

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