Reading and Experience: A Philosophical Investigation

Research output: Book/ReportBookpeer-review

Abstract

This text is the first comprehensive attempt in decades to integrate reading into the philosophical discussion of the synthesis of experience more generally. It offers a comprehensive critique of three disciplinary approaches to reading: philosophical, literary and empirical/neuroscientific, while developing an innovative and unifying phenomenological account. It discusses texts from a variety of contemporary and historical contexts. It is inclusive, treating non-fiction alongside fiction, literary art alongside everyday texts, and narrative alongside thematic discourse. It addresses all reading practices found today: casual and unreflective reading, close and scholarly reading with re-reading, the analysis of literary art, and sacred text study and memorization. In the current intellectual landscape, the book is unique in bringing all these aspects together in a philosophically coherent discussion.

The book provides a critique of philosophical accounts of text meaning and linguistic experience by philosophers from Husserl and Ingarden to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, Gadamer and Derrida, and examines the positions of contemporary ‘naturalizing’ phenomenologists, such as Varela and Thompson. Also treated are neuroscientists such as Dehaene, and theorists of consciousness such as Kintsch, Flanagan and Dennett. Finally, this volume engages with psychological, linguistic, structuralist, ‘theory of mind’ and ‘experiential’ approaches in literary studies, from Bühler and Hamburger to Fludernik, Herman and Kuzmičová. It appeals to students and researchers working in these fields.
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationCham
PublisherSpringer Cham
Number of pages442
ISBN (Electronic)9783031557637
ISBN (Print)9783031557620, 9783031557651
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 11 Jun 2024

Publication series

NameContributions to Hermeneutics
PublisherSpringer
Volume13
ISSN (Print)2509-6087
ISSN (Electronic)2509-6095

Keywords

  • phenomenology and hermeneutics
  • husserl and hermeneutics
  • reading and phenomenology
  • synthesis of experience
  • love and reading
  • reading and hermeneutics
  • Ricoeur and reading

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