Off-campus access
Using PhilPapers from home?
Click here to configure this browser for off-campus access.
- Peter Alward (2006). Leave Me Out of It: De Re, but Not de Se, Imaginative Engagement with Fiction. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (4):451–459.I have been dissatisfied with Walton’s make-believe model of appreciator engagement with fiction ever since my first encounter with it as a graduate student.1 What I have always objected to is not the suggestion that such engagement is broadly speaking imaginative; rather, it is the suggestion that it specifically involves de se imaginative activity on the part of appreciators. That is, while I concede that appreciators imagine (de re) of the fictional works they experience that they are thus and so, I deny that they imagine (de se) experiencing an object that is thus and so.2 The main source of my dissatisfaction with the make-believe model is that it is phenomenologically unfamiliar; I have never been aware of de se imaginings of the requisite sort while appreciatively engaged with fiction.3 Of course, one could argue that it nevertheless occurs, albeit sub-consciously. But in order for this manoeuvre to be plausible, it would have to be established that there are appreciative phenomena that can only (or best) be explained by the supposition that appreciators engage in de se imagining, and which cannot be adequately explained by the supposition that they merely engage in de re imagining. Currie, for example, has argued that we need to make the former supposition in order to find a solution to the “problem of personality,” the problem of explaining why our emotional reactions to the plights of fictional characters often differ from our reactions to the similar plights of actual people.4 What I want to argue in this paper is that Currie’s defense of de se imaginative engagement is..Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
| Export citation | Other links: interscience.wiley.com people.uleth.ca jstor.org dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library 
Similar books and articles
This paper has two aims. First, I seek to show that Kendall Walton's analysis of the participatory character of our imaginative engagement in games of make-believe provides a powerful explanatory framework that can be used to address some of the central problems that still remain unresolved in contemporary accounts of living-presence response, including those put forward by David Freedberg and Alfred Gell. Second, I argue that Walton's focus on the activities of ‘appreciators’ prevents him from considering the possible application of his theory to other kinds of activity, even where this would permit a genuine enrichment or extension of his position. Once we open up the field of enquiry to include the various ceremonial, civic, religious, and other functions that works of art fulfil, the analogy to the participatory character of games of make-believe becomes stronger rather than weaker.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Statements about fictional characters, such as “Gregor Samsa has been changed into a beetle,” pose the problem of how we can say something true (or false) using empty names. I propose an original solution to this problem that construes such utterances as reports of the “prescriptions to imagine” generated by works of fiction. In particular, I argue that we should construe these utterances as specifying, not what we are supposed to imagine—the propositional object of the imagining—but how we are supposed to imagine. Most other theories of thought and discourse about fictional characters either fail to capture the intentionality of our imaginings, or else obscure the differences between imaginings directed toward fictional characters and those directed toward real individuals. I argue that once we have an account of prescriptions to imagine about real individuals, we can adapt the same framework to specify the contents of prescriptions to imagine about fictional characters, and thereby to account for the truth (or falsity) of statements about fictional characters.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: springerlink.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: springerlink.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... For the assessment of the prospects of the two main candidates for a unified account of imagining, it is necessary to say first a bit more about what is required of such a theory. An important part of this task will be to clarify which phenomena should definitely be captured by a unified account of imagining, and which definitely not. Accordingly, the four sections of this chapter will be concerned with the particular demands on and the mandatory scope of theories of imagining. In the first section, I will specify two desiderata for a unified account of imagining: (a) extensional adequacy with respect to all central cases of both imaginative and nonimaginative phenomena; and (b) explanatory power with respect to the distinctive nature of imaginings. The next section will then outline the class of paradigm instances of imaginative and nonimaginative phenomena. In particular, I will describe the five main forms of imagining which any unified account has to capture: (i) sensory imaginings; (ii).
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Scholar | More options ...
| | Scholar | More options ... This essay develops a new account of the phenomenon of imaginative resistance. Imaginative resistance is best conceived of as a limited phenomenon. It occurs when we try to engage imaginatively with different moral worlds that are insufficiently articulated so that they do not allow us either to quarantine our imaginative engagement from our normal moral attitudes or to agree with the expressed moral judgment from the perspective of moral deliberation. Imaginative resistance thus reveals the central epistemic importance that empathy plays for our understanding of rational agents in a context where we try to make sense of the moral appropriateness of their reasons for acting. Reflecting on the phenomenon of imaginative resistance allows us to recognize important features of the relationship between imaginative perspective taking and ordinary moral deliberation.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... George Wilson has defended the thesis that even impersonal third-person fictional narratives should be taken to contain fictional narrations and have fictional narrators. This, he argues, is necessary if we are to explain how readers can take themselves, in their imaginative engagement with fictions, to have knowledge of the things they are imagining. I argue that there is at least one class of impersonal third-person fictional narratives—thought experiments—to which Wilson’s model fails to apply, and that this reveals more general problems with his argument. I further argue that there is no good reason to think that Wilson’s account applies more restrictedly to those impersonal third-person fictional narratives that feature in standard works of literary fiction.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... I take up three puzzles about our emotional and evaluative responses to fiction. First, how can we even have emotional responses to characters and events that we know not to exist, if emotions are as intimately connected to belief and action as they seem to be? One solution to this puzzle claims that we merely imagine having such emotional responses. But this raises the puzzle of why we would ever refuse to follow an author’s instructions to imagine such responses, since we happily imagine many other implausible things. A natural response to this second puzzle is that our responses to fiction are real, and so can’t just be conjured up in response to an author’s demands. However, this simple response is inadequate, because we often respond differently to people and events in fiction than we would if we encountered them in real life. Solving these three puzzles in a consistent way requires the notion of a “perspective” on a fictional world. I sketch an account of this intuitive but frustratingly amorphous notion: perspectives are tools for organizing our thinking, which can in turn alter our emotional and evaluative responses. Cultivating a perspective can be illuminating, entertaining, or corrupting — or all three at once.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: sas.upenn.edu | Scholar | More options ...
| | Other links: sas.upenn.edu | Scholar | More options ... A fiction may prescribe imagining that a pig can talk or tell the future. A fiction may prescribe imagining that torturing innocent persons is a good thing. We generally comply with imaginative prescriptions like the former, but not always with prescriptions like the latter: we imagine non-evaluative fictions without difficulty but sometimes resist imagining value-rich fictions. Thus arises the puzzle of imaginative resistance. Most analyses of the phenomenon focus on the content of the relevant imaginings. The present analysis focuses instead on the character of certain kinds of imaginings, arguing that we resist in such cases given the rich evaluative character of the imaginings prescribed, and the agent-dependent constraints on imagining in such ways.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: stokes.mentalpaint.net bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: stokes.mentalpaint.net bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... The puzzle of imaginative desire arises from the difficulty of accounting for the surprising behaviour of desire in imaginative activities such as our engagement with fiction and our games of pretend. Several philosophers have recently attempted to solve this puzzle by introducing a class of novel mental states?what they call desire-like imaginings or i-desires. In this paper, I argue that we should reject the i-desire solution to the puzzle of imaginative desire. The introduction of i-desires is both ontologically profligate and unnecessary, and, most importantly, fails to make sense of what we are doing in the imaginative contexts in question.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: informaworld.com tandfonline.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: informaworld.com tandfonline.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... We argue for an imaginative analog of desire from premises about imaginative engagement with fiction. There's a bit about the paradox of fiction, too.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: dx.doi.org web.me.com | Scholar | At my library | More options ...
| | Other links: dx.doi.org web.me.com | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In this chapter, a positive account of reader engagement with fiction will developed. According to this picture, the basic reader attitude towards fictional works is imaginative. But, in my view, engagement with fiction does not require any de se imagining on the part of readers; it requires only de dicto and de re imagining. The account of reader engagement is modelled on the attitudes of story-listeners to the stories to which they listen and the performers who tell them. In engaged reading, however, the activity of story-listening is, in an important sense, truncated: reader engagement with the text occurs without the mediation of a storyteller. As a result, readers have to imaginatively supply a substitute – a fictionalized version of the author.
Reading list
| Discuss | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Scholar | More options ...
| | Scholar | More options ... Discussion of Peter Alward, Leave me out of it: De re, but not de se, imaginative engagement with fiction
 Back
All discussions
Start a new thread
|
There are no threads in this forum |
Nothing in this forum yet.
