How to Do Things with Fictions

Joshua Landy teaches French at Stanford University, where he co-founded and co-directs the Initiative in Philosophy and Literature. He is author of Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust and editor, with Michael Saler, of The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age.

Joshua Landy's captivating book, How to Do Things with Fictions, dispenses with the usual pieties about what we stand to gain from literary works. In their place, he advances a compelling theory that reveals as much about what fiction can do for us as it does about what we can do with fiction.

• Table of Contents ; Acknowledgments ; INTRODUCTION ; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fiction ; Formative Fictions ; The Temporality of the Reading Experience ; In Spite of Everything, a Role for Meaning ; A Polite Aside to Historians ; The Value of Formative Fictions ; PART ONE-CLEARING THE GROUND ; Chapter One-Chaucer: Ambiguity and Ethics ; Prudence or Oneiromancy? ; A Parody of Didacticism ; Preaching to the Converted ; The Asymmetry of 'Imaginative Resistance' ; Virtue Ethics and Gossip ; Qualifications ; Positive Views ; PART TWO- ENCHANTMENT AND RE-ENCHANTMENT ; Chapter Two-Mark: Metaphor and Faith ; Rhetorical Theories ; Five Variables, Six Readings ; Deliberate Opacity ; The Vision of Mark ; From Him Who Has Not ; To Him Who Has ; The Syrophenician Woman ; The Formative Circle ; Metaphor and Faith ; Theological Ramifications ; A Parable about Parables ; Getting It Wrong By Getting It Right ; Coda: The Secular Kingdom ; Appendix: <"Le Cygne>" ; Chapter Three-Mallarme: Irony and Enchantment ; Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin ; Exorcisms and Experiments ; Science and Wonder ; Lucid Illusions ; Stephane Mallarme ; The Spell of Poetry ; Setting the Scene ; A Replacement Faith ; How to Do Things with Verses ; A Corner of Order ; The Magic of Rhyme ; A Training in Enchantment ; A Sequence of States ; The Birth of Modernism from the Spirit of Re-Enchantment ; PART THREE-LOGIC AND ANTI-LOGIC ; Chapter Four-Plato: Fallacy and Logic ; A Platonic Coccyx ; Ascent and Dissent ; The Developmental Hypothesis ; Dubious Dialectic ; Pericles, Socrates and Plato ; The Gorgias Unravels ; The Uses of Oratory ; Was Gorgias Refuted? ; Spiritual Exercises: Seven Points in Conclusion ; Appendix: Just How Bad is the Pericles Argument? ; Chapter Five-Beckett: Antithesis and Tranquillity ; Bringing Philosophy to an End ; Ataraxia ; Antilogoi ; One Step Forward ; Finding the Self to Lose the Self ; An Irreducible Singleness ; Res Cogitans ; Solutions and Dissolutions ; Two Failures ; <"I confess, I give in, there is I>" ; Negative Anthropology ; The Beckettian Spiral ; An End to Everything? ; Fail Better ; Glimpses of the Ideal ; Two Caveats ; Coda ; Works Cited