ABSTRACT
Literature offers us four basic approaches to reality, if it is concerned with the nature of reality at all: illusion, vision, revision, and disillusion. Perspectivism or dogmatic relativism, as it is also known, affects interpretations of reality as well as those of literature. Literature embodying this relativism defines itself by its general effect on its audience rather than by formal or internal similarities. Perspectivist literature, depending on your personal philosophy, smashes humanly desirable myths of meaning or liberates you from illusions. Didactic literature pleases us with certitude and with assurance of our own importance in the universe. Medieval poets often use dreams to challenge our sense of reality. Some kinds of visionary worlds stemming from psychic aberration are so compelling that their creator loses the power to distinguish reality from illusion, and in literature these worlds can be made to play such tricks on the reader.
