A Panenmentalist Philosophy of Literature, or How Does Actual Reality Imitate Pure Possibilities?

Book excerpt: The relationship between the literary imagination, literary possibilities, and actual reality poses a major philosophical problem in the field of the metaphysics of literature. This detailed analysis of some literary masterpieces, by Proust, Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, demonstrates that actual reality actualizes or “imitates” literary pure possibilities. As such, these masterpieces should be treated not as romans a clef, but, instead, as paradigm-cases on whose basis we grasp and understand actual reality.