PERSPECTIVES IN IMAGINATIVE ENGAGEMENT WITH FICTION

Abstract

Recent philosophical attention to fiction has focused largely on the phenomenon of imaginative resistance: the fact that readers are sometimes unable or unwilling to play along with an author's instructions to imagine certain, especially moral, contents or responses. The fact that readers resist in these cases appears puzzling, given that they are typically willing to imagine all sorts of highly implausible, even impossible things, including alterations to the laws of physics. Theorists have explained imaginative resistance in various ways. Richard Moran (1994) argues that resistance arises because evaluative and emotional engagement with fiction requires more than merely imaging certain contents: it requires having actual, robust responses of the relevant kind, and this is not the sort of thing readers can simply choose to do in response to an author's demands. Kendall Walton (1994), Steve Yablo (2002) and Brian Weatherson (2004) argue that resistance arises because what readers are able to imagine true in the fiction is fixed by invariant conceptual or metaphysical principles. And Tamar Szabó Gendler (2000) argues that resistance is driven by readers' unwillingness to 'export' certain moral principles or perspectives from fictions to reality. Because they focus on imaginative resistance, all of these theorists emphasize the limits of imagination, and specifically the ways in which engagement with fiction is constrained by one's sense of reality. Against this, I will argue that it is at least as notable how often readers' evaluative and emotional responses toward fictions differ from those they would have toward the same situation in reality. Thus, I find it funny rather than cruel that the Three Stooges bop each other over the head with heavy implements. I find the events in a Stephen King novel thrilling rather than disgusting. And I root for Conversations with Richard Wollheim were instrumental in developing the notion of perspectives. My debt to the work of Richard Moran and Tamar Gendler will also be apparent throughout.