THE ADVENTURE OF READ ING: L ITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY, CAVELL AND BEAUVOIR

Is there a way of reading philosophically without imposing a pre-existing philosophy on the literary text? Turning first to the work of Stanley Cavell, then to Simone de Beauvoir’s often neglected accounts of reading, this essay shows that such a philosophical reading can be understood as a form of aesthetic experience in which the reader lets the work teach her how to read it. The reader must be willing to let her own experience (of philosophy, of life) be educated by the work. A similar view can be found in Cora Diamond’s (and Beauvoir’s) suggestion that the reader must be open to the adventure proposed by the text. I was honoured to receive an invitation to be a keynote speaker at the 2010 Biennial Conference of the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture. I chose to speak about philosophy and literature, in the hope that the questions I raise about the relationship between literature and philosophy, and about how to read a literary text, will be relevant also for people working in the fields of religion and theology. This text is a much-revised version of the lecture I gave at the conference in Oxford in September 2010. I. THE QUESTION OF LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY ‘The clash between literature and philosophy does not need to be resolved. On the contrary, only if we think of it as permanent but ever new does it guarantee us that the sclerosis of words will not close over us like a sheet of ice, ’ Italo Calvino writes.1 He was right: the relationship betwee