Respected Professor,

After my recent class presentation and the discussion that we had thereafter, I took to mind the
ideas and concepts that you put forward.

As you recommended, I started to read the works of Terry Eagleton, and he is a fantastic writer
and the way he articulates everything is just brilliant. Some of the things he says in “Literary
Theory” are truly thought-provoking and has informed me about a lot of things I previously did
not know about.

I am a free-thinking individual who is curious about a lot of things, however, sometimes I do not
give my ideas a second look. During my presentation on the topic “Literature and Philosophy”, I
have made several remarks that were overambitious and ignorant to an extent. I have treated it
like a learning experience, and in the future I shall be careful about the topics I speak on and be
armed with more knowledge before venturing out to explore topics that I do not understand fully.

I am writing this ‘letter’ because I wanted to share some of the new things that I learned after
reassessing my ideas and also reading about Terry Eagleton’s views on literature and literary
theory.

There was a very interesting line in Eagleton’s book where he says, “If it will not do to see
literature as an 'objective', descriptive category, neither will it do to say that literature is just
what people whimsically choose to call literature.”

I remember saying in my presentation, “Philosophy is literature”. This comes across as an

extremely naïve opinion and something that can be refuted in numerous ways. Philosophy is
concerned with the truth of the world, understanding of being and the existence and non-
existence of some things and the analysis done through philosophical investigation. There are
three very important things that I have learned which I shall discuss in the consequent
paragraphs.

Firstly, concerning literary methods and the philosophical. There may be certain literary methods
that one may go about in their pursuit of philosophy. Sometimes (‘some’ being an essential fact),
individuals might make progress into the philosophical, than directly approaching the subject
through a lens of philosophical enquiry. However, when it comes to answering the important
questions, it should be understood that these literary methods are not superior to standard
philosophical procedures established through years of study. Thus, the methodology of
answering certain questions may overlap in certain situations, but this in no way establishes a
clear relationship between philosophy and literature as a whole itself.

Secondly, I took into consideration the opinions of philosophers on literature. I did this after you
told me about Plato and how he viewed literature. I learned that many philosophers have
wondered about literature in their philosophical spirit of inquiry. Can we learn truths about the
world by reading and analysing works of literature? I think that while literature can certainly
‘show’ us the truths of the world in some situations, it does not help in completely understanding
and analysing those truths. Sartre for example, might give some insights into modern
existentialism through some short story or another, and while that certainly informs us to an
extent of his philosophy through a literary analogy, we cannot claim to be reading ‘works of
philosophy’ nor draw the conclusion that this is the be-all and end-all of that philosophy. It is
also important to remember that the rules of the world can be easily broken in literature, and this
brings into effect an essence of unreliability for dependence on literature for complete
philosophical insight. I also wondered about the question as to why certain works of literature
make us feel emotions, something which has been a subject of philosophical study. However, I
would say that these emotions would fall more into the sphere of psychology and psychoanalysis
than they would in the philosophical, if we were to ask why literature makes us feel things.

Thirdly, and I am again quoting Eagleton here, “Value is a transitive term: it means whatever is
valued by certain people in specific situations, according to particular criteria and in the light of
given purposes.” There is this idea that some literature can be valued as philosophy, but there is
something very interesting regarding this idea. Eagleton says, “people may treat a work as
philosophy in one century and as literature in the next, or vice versa, so they may change their
minds about what writing they consider valuable.” And this was truly thought-provoking for me,
especially the concept regarding ‘fine writing’ and how prose is presented and the ‘value-
judgement’ of that prose. Philosophers generally in the discourse of academics use punctilious
language to lay down their prose. Some have a dogmatic style and others use some kind of
captious form or methodology in laying down philosophical theory or criticism. Philosophers
write in a manner that tries to build detailed theories, and this is something polar opposite from
literary pursuit and this establishes the difference in presentation of prose as to how it is valued
in different academic spheres.

These are some of things that I have been thinking about and trying to understand. I thank you
for introducing me to the works of Terry Eagleton, right now I am reading his book on the
concept of ideology and then I plan to explore the works he has written on Marx.

Yours sincerely

Aditya Chatterjee