The application of literature to life

pp. 1-24

in: Anders Pettersson, The concept of literary application, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

Readers of literature often focus on attitudes or states of affairs in a text and ask themselves, implicitly, whether they share those attitudes, whether similar states of affairs can be found in real life, and suchlike. In this way readers establish and evaluate comparisons between literature and extra-textual reality, and the focusing, comparing, and evaluating, taken together, make up what I refer to as application. Application is far from an unknown phenomenon, but it has never been discussed in depth, and its aesthetic relevance has often been disputed.