The Normative Relations between Fiction, Imagination and Appreciation

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Tilmann Köppe
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy ; German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: from 2016 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 313805504

It is a commonplace that fictional texts invite and move us to imagine certain things concerning the characters and events described by the text. Reading The Sound and the Fury prompts us to imagine various incidents in the history of the Compson family. It is equally undeniable that considerations about what fictional texts ask us to imagine are central to our aesthetic appreciation of them. We value Faulkner's novel in part because it allows us to imagine these incidents from the very complex, diverse and subjective points of view of the three Compson brothers. What these two truisms about the relationship between fiction, imagination and appreciation have in common is that they describe two normative relations. Imagining is the appropriate basic response to fictional texts. If we fail to imagine in accordance with the text's prescriptions to imagine, we fail to properly engage with it. Similarly, appreciation is the appropriate response to the power of fictional texts to captivate our imagination in rich and rewarding ways. Much of the aesthetic worth of fictional texts resides in the fact that they make specific fictional worlds in certain ways accessible to our imagination. Hence, the aesthetic evaluation of fictional texts requires us to take into account what they ask us to imagine, and how they want us to imagine it. The aim of the research project is to investigate the nature of these two normative relations between fiction, imagination and appreciation, which may be characterized in the following way: (NR1) Fictional texts direct us to imagine certain things. (NR2) That fictional texts direct us to imagine certain things bears on whether we should aesthetically (dis)value them. With respect to each fictional text, there are specific instances of (NR1) and (NR2) which tell us what to imagine when reading the text, and also how to aesthetically assess it in light of what it asks us to imagine. Although important aspects of (NR1) and (NR2) have already been discussed in the literature, many others have not. A bit surprisingly, there has so far been no comprehensive, systematic investigation of the normative role of imagining and its normative connections to fiction and appreciation: something that this research projects aims to remedy. The neglected issues that we intend to address can be divided into factual, normative and foundational questions. The first subproject inquires into which specific instances of (NR1) and (NR2) are actually present in the practice of interpretation in literary studies, while the second subproject elucidates particular instances of (NR1) and (NR2) that should (or should not) guide our interpretation. The third subproject aims to investigate why the instances of (NR1) and (NR2) hold and what makes them possible. Together the three subprojects aim at providing a comprehensive account of the general normative relations between fiction, imagination and appreciation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Fabian Dorsch; Professor Dr. Tom Kindt