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What does literature know, and how does it know it? A prominent philosopher of science has recently argued that literature aims to produce not knowledge but certain aesthetic or emotional effects.1 Literary critics, therefore, should abandon their efforts to create knowledge and return to cultivating literary appreciation. but even if we restrict our attention to literature's aesthetic qualities, can we abandon philosophical and scientific problems of knowledge? In the following, I will suggest that literature generates philosophically inter-esting knowledge in the process of creating novel aesthetic effects. To illustrate the operation of literary knowledge, I will examine the effort of poems by Emily Dickinson and John Keats to create compelling descriptions of what it is like to die.
The poets' strategy is to present an experience of listening as an analogue for the experience of dying. We are familiar with the sensation of "losing ourselves" in sound. In describing this familiar experience, the writers locate surprising aspects of it. These aspects align absorbed listening with some of our intuitions about what death is like. The authors of "I heard a Fly buzz" and "Ode to a Nightingale" find a depiction of listening to be analogous to the experience of death because they have discovered something extraordinary about this ordinary experience. I think we can learn something about how literature generates new knowledge by attending to this discovery.
I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air -
Between the Heaves of Storm -
The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -
And breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset - when the King
Be witnessed - in the Room -
I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable - and then it was
There interposed a Fly -
With blue - uncertain - stumbling buzz -
Between the light - and me -
And then the Windows failed - and then
I could not see to see -2
The first line of Dickinson's poem indicates that its subject is the experience of crossing from life to death. She describes the experience of dying by way of a certain experience of listening. The speaker experiences the...