ABSTRACT
I favor two very spare, very plain, completely unadorned arguments here. Read
separately, each isolates an overly familiar philosophical puzzle about the nature
of literature – questions made tiresome by clever repetition. One concerns lit-
erary representation and the ‘‘world’’ a story makes accessible through a com-
petent reader’s imagination informed by his reading of the enabling verbal text.
The other addresses certain sweeping distinctions we are tempted to conflate –
the paired differences between fiction and literature and between fiction and
imagination – neither of which can be said to involve different species of a
common genus. Put more pointedly, the second inquiry goes on to contrast the
uses of the term ‘‘fiction’’ in literary contexts and contexts of real-world asser-
tion. The two lessons are clearly linked and clearly mastered by taking stock of
the general capability we call imagination. The trouble is, imagination is symp-
tomatically slighted in recent analytic philosophies of literature: falsely thought
to yield no more than a fictive ‘‘world’’ in the logician’s sense.
