In this chapter, I shall comment briefly on four psychological topics: (i) human motivation, (ii) the mental processing of perceptions, (iii) experiences and mental representations, and (iv) emotions.

I have endeavoured, in speaking of these four subjects, to achieve a measure of integration through emphasizing the inner relationships between them. They do not, however, in themselves form a field with natural boundaries. My reason for thus delimiting the scope of my psychological discussion is that it is precisely these four themes that prove important again and again in later chapters.

My words about motivation and mental processing are, as I...

In the last chapter, I emphasized that we constantly attempt to keep ourselves au fait with the world around in order to secure an adequate basis for the actions by which we strive to satisfy our needs. How can literature be integrated into such a perspective? In what way does it satisfy, or help to satisfy, our wants?

There is of course no single answer to that question. In this chapter, however, I shall introduce one partial answer which I find important.

A concise and somewhat simplified formulation of this partial explanation may start from the observation that we humans...

In the preceding chapters, I have outlined an explanation of how the fantasies created and communicated by the author may come to play a cognitive and emotional role for a reader. I have, however, still not made clear just how linguistic communication is possible, exactly how the reader connects with the author’s mental creations. Describing those mechanisms is the main task of both this chapter and the next one.

What literary meaning is, how it is conveyed, and how it is understood is a big question with many ramifications. Yet a sound basic answer to this complex question is the...

The concepts “text,” “interpretation,” and “meaning” played no important part in the previous discussion. In fact, I refrain from assigning a structural role to these concepts in my theory. I regard them as wide, all-embracing terms of only indirect interest in an analysis striving for clarity and precision. Concepts like “text,” “meaning,” and “interpretation” are bound to appear to be of central importance to those who think in terms of a folk theory of communication, that is in terms of the transportation and container metaphors. According to folk theory, the author creates a text that literally possesses a meaning, and...

The outline of a theory of literature in the first part of the book has laid the foundations for the second part’s inquiry into the interrelationship of the cognitive, emotional, and formal aspects of literature. An inquiry of the latter kind makes it necessary to raise a number of basic questions about thoughts, feeling, and form. Essentially, four types of problems will be dealt with. Whatisa thought (what is a feeling, what is form)? How is it possible for thoughts (feeling, form) toget intothe literary object? How are thoughts, feeling, and forminterrelatedin literary wholes?...

The core phenomenon in linguistic communication is that thoughts are, in a certain determinate sense, “transmitted” from the originator to the addressee, who in her turn is expected to process the thought content conveyed.

Literary communication, too, follows this general pattern. It differs from other linguistic communication in its intended communicative function, in the fact that the processing foreseen is partly of another kind. In terms of literature, the picture of reality presented, the thoughts introduced, are not meant to be taken as a correct picture of actual reality or as a depiction of a situation that it is incumbent...

My reasoning concerning the cognitive dimension of literature in chapters 5 and 6 has laid the necessary foundation for my analysis of the place of feelings in literature. As I suggested earlier, there are four basic questions that I wish to ask regarding literature and feelings. What is a feeling? How is it possible for feelings to get into the literary object? How are the feelings in the literary object related to the thoughts and the form also present there? And what function or functions do feelings have in literary contexts?

In chapter 1, I touched on the question what...

Like other language, literary discourse is a vehicle for the communication of thoughts, of representations. And in literature, too, feelings are associated with the communicated content in various ways. Yet, literary communication has a character of its own. I have contended that it is, basically, literature’s presentationality that makes it special.

Neither literature nor other types of language are exclusively communicative, however. On the one hand, the listener or reader does not confine herself to reconstructing a communicative content – in her post-communicative processing she also adopts an attitude to the communicative content or spins it out. On the other, the...

It is a widely held opinion that the concept of form employed in artistic and literary contexts is unclear or vague.¹ Nevertheless one can point to several substantive ideas about artistic and literary form that are shared by practically all theorists. There is extensive agreement that form is the manner in which the aesthetic statement is made: “thewaysomething is said in contrast towhatis said.”² Likewise, it is a common observation that form is concerned both with the artistic expression and with the content it conveys.³ And it is hardly disputed that “form” may be used both...

In the last chapter I said that what we call literary form is, in reality, the (artistically significant?) obligatory non-representational properties of the physical sign-object, of the linguistic sign-sequence, and of the communicative content. I also explained how form enters into the literary process and how form is related to thought and feeling. In addition, I gave an analysis, in general terms, of the literary function of form.

The features I discussed are in fact normally spoken of as formal. In several other respects, however, my view of literary form diverges from current opinion. In this chapter, I shall present...