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Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation and Imagination
Only Imagine offers a theory of fictional content or, as it is sometimes known, 'fictional truth'.The theory of fictional content Kathleen Stock argues for is known as 'extreme intentionalism'; the idea that the fictional content of a particular work is equivalent to exactly what the author of the work intended the reader to imagine. Historically, this sort of view has been highly unpopular. Literary theorists and philosophers alike have poured scorn upon it. The first half of this book attempts to argue that it should in fact be taken very seriously as an adequate account offictional better, in fact, than many of its more popular rivals. The second half explores various explanatory benefits of extreme intentionalism for other issues in the philosophy of fiction and imagination. Namely, can fiction give us reliable knowledge? Why do we 'resist' imagining certain fictions? What,in fact, is a fiction? And, how should the imagination be characterised?
- GenresPhilosophy
232 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 1, 2017
2 people are currently reading
95 people want to read
About the author
Kathleen Stock
8 books187 followersKathleen Stock is a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex. She has published on aesthetics, fiction, imagination, and sexual objectification. She is currently the vice-president of the British Society of Aesthetics. In her monograph Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation and Imagination (2017) she examines the nature of fictional content. She has also written a book examining the UK Gender Recognition Act and trans self-identification.
Stock has written one monograph and articles in peer-reviewed academic journals and has contributed several chapters to edited volumes. She edited Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, and Work (first edition 2007) and together with Katherine Thomson-Jones she edited New Waves in Aesthetics (2008).
She has given lectures at the University of York, the Aristotelian Society, the London Aesthetics Forum, the University of Wolverhampton, the American Society for Aesthetics, and other places.
Stock has written one monograph and articles in peer-reviewed academic journals and has contributed several chapters to edited volumes. She edited Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, and Work (first edition 2007) and together with Katherine Thomson-Jones she edited New Waves in Aesthetics (2008).
She has given lectures at the University of York, the Aristotelian Society, the London Aesthetics Forum, the University of Wolverhampton, the American Society for Aesthetics, and other places.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 27, 2020
A challenging book and I'm not at all sure I got my head around it, but I did find it interesting and I could imagine it changing my approach to books. It treats the fictional text as a set of instructions to the reader, telling us what to imagine.
May 12, 2024
This book is about the content of utterances. Kathleen makes the extreme intentionalist argument that the content of an utterance is defined by the intention of the utterer, and any relevant wider context of that intention. I agree with her!
I love Kathleen Stock, and much of this was brilliant. She is a scarily precise and intelligent thinker, unashamed in interrogating pernickety details. Some dense bits went straight over my head (I’m not a philosopher, haha) - but I tried hard to get to grips with most of it! The only chapter I found unforgivable was one at the very end about “supposition”, which was not only incredibly wordy, but also, in my view, did not add much to the argument (as evidenced in the fact that it goes unmentioned in the Conclusion, despite taking up a sizeable number of pages).
She said in an interview about this book (look at me following her advice and seeking author interviews, haha!) that she wrote it because “you couldn’t understand what fiction was unless you understood what imagination was, and you couldn’t understand what imagination was unless you understood what fiction was - because the two of them seemed so central to each other.” Her thesis is that fictions are a set of instructions from an author that a reader imagine certain things, sometimes with a wider agenda for a set of beliefs, other times purely for non-belief-centric aims such as pleasure, titillation, tongue-in-cheek art for arts’ sake, etc. (And, of course, sometimes both!)
Her point about the nature of imagination is that there is no one purpose by which we imagine, unlike other philosophers who have tried to pigeonhole imagination into one purpose. “Imagining,” she writes, “is a flexible action which can be directed at a variety of useful and pleasurable ends, both cognitive and non-cognitive.” In fiction, which ‘end’ it is depends on what we are instructed to imagine.
(She also rather charmingly confides that she reads fiction far more often than philosophy because she finds actual philosophical texts “incredibly dull”. This makes sense! If fiction was her access route to philosophy, then it makes sense that she would treat fiction as a set of instructions to imagine stuff, often in service of a philosophical impulse.)
Other chapters of the book include her criticism of the notion that authorial intentions are “just impossible to know” (she makes it sound easy!), and a caveat that she, of course, doesn’t mean that certain kinds of literary meaning - e.g. connotation, poetic allusion, reader-response-generated meaning, what the text reveals about the period, etc. - can always be unduly imposed onto the author’s intentions. She restricts herself solely to intended fictional content, and any interpretations based on fictional content alone.
She also talks about imagining-committed-to-believing, and the resistance that occurs when we disagree with what we are being asked to believe. She points out that despite ‘respectable’ scholars disagreeing with intentionalism in theory, that often isn’t the case in practice - of course we try to establish what an author was trying to do when we read a text. And she defends her view against other more complicated and inelegant theories of fiction - the general theme here is that those theories sometimes apply, but whether they do or not is always motivated by authorial intention.
As said, the chapter I understood (and enjoyed) the least was the very last one, where she talked about aesthetics more generally and what this means for certain pernickety distinctions between imagination, belief, and “supposition”, blah blah.
I love Kathleen Stock, and much of this was brilliant. She is a scarily precise and intelligent thinker, unashamed in interrogating pernickety details. Some dense bits went straight over my head (I’m not a philosopher, haha) - but I tried hard to get to grips with most of it! The only chapter I found unforgivable was one at the very end about “supposition”, which was not only incredibly wordy, but also, in my view, did not add much to the argument (as evidenced in the fact that it goes unmentioned in the Conclusion, despite taking up a sizeable number of pages).
She said in an interview about this book (look at me following her advice and seeking author interviews, haha!) that she wrote it because “you couldn’t understand what fiction was unless you understood what imagination was, and you couldn’t understand what imagination was unless you understood what fiction was - because the two of them seemed so central to each other.” Her thesis is that fictions are a set of instructions from an author that a reader imagine certain things, sometimes with a wider agenda for a set of beliefs, other times purely for non-belief-centric aims such as pleasure, titillation, tongue-in-cheek art for arts’ sake, etc. (And, of course, sometimes both!)
Her point about the nature of imagination is that there is no one purpose by which we imagine, unlike other philosophers who have tried to pigeonhole imagination into one purpose. “Imagining,” she writes, “is a flexible action which can be directed at a variety of useful and pleasurable ends, both cognitive and non-cognitive.” In fiction, which ‘end’ it is depends on what we are instructed to imagine.
(She also rather charmingly confides that she reads fiction far more often than philosophy because she finds actual philosophical texts “incredibly dull”. This makes sense! If fiction was her access route to philosophy, then it makes sense that she would treat fiction as a set of instructions to imagine stuff, often in service of a philosophical impulse.)
Other chapters of the book include her criticism of the notion that authorial intentions are “just impossible to know” (she makes it sound easy!), and a caveat that she, of course, doesn’t mean that certain kinds of literary meaning - e.g. connotation, poetic allusion, reader-response-generated meaning, what the text reveals about the period, etc. - can always be unduly imposed onto the author’s intentions. She restricts herself solely to intended fictional content, and any interpretations based on fictional content alone.
She also talks about imagining-committed-to-believing, and the resistance that occurs when we disagree with what we are being asked to believe. She points out that despite ‘respectable’ scholars disagreeing with intentionalism in theory, that often isn’t the case in practice - of course we try to establish what an author was trying to do when we read a text. And she defends her view against other more complicated and inelegant theories of fiction - the general theme here is that those theories sometimes apply, but whether they do or not is always motivated by authorial intention.
As said, the chapter I understood (and enjoyed) the least was the very last one, where she talked about aesthetics more generally and what this means for certain pernickety distinctions between imagination, belief, and “supposition”, blah blah.
October 25, 2023
I have read Stock's other book Material Girls, although very through, like this first book it was in desperate need of an editor. Stock gets bogged down a lot in what may be a need to fully explain her position/ideas, but comes across more as ego masturbation. As for this book you get her thesis pretty much from the beginning, and then it turns into a fever dream that only she can interpret.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews