ABSTRACT
An achievement of imaginative literature, writes the phenomenologist Maurice Natanson, is the revelation of ‘the experiential foundation of our world’. 2 In this sense, novels, short stories and poems are starting points for phenomenological investigation: they provide descriptive accounts of ordinary and extraordinary human experience which the phenomenologist can explore and order. The aim is an explicit picture of implicit experiential and behavioural patterns delineating the essence of what it means to be and live as a human being. Imaginative literature can be trusted to provide at least the beginnings of such a picture because the microcosm of novel or poem reflects in some measure ‘the big world of real life’. 3
