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Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction

17. April 2021 Philosophy News News
2021.04.02 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Gregory Currie, Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction, Oxford University Press, 2020, 240pp., $70.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199656615. Reviewed by Peter Lamarque, University of York, UK Few would dispute that, all things considered, some exposure to works of imaginative literature (novels, plays, poems) as part of a rounded education is better than no such exposure. Beyond that, disagreements are rife. Culture wars loom, with anxieties over curriculum choice, gender and racial bias, elitism, contested pedagogic methods, and a disconcerting vagueness about aims sought. In this important and polemical book, Gregory Currie sidesteps direct engagement with these heated controversies at the frontline of educational policy but nevertheless shines a penetrating, for some disturbing, light on one of the most prominent lines of defence for a humanistic, literary education, the thought that we can learn from works of fiction in substantial ways: that reading fiction can make us better... Read [More]
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