An Externalist Approach to Literature: from Novel to Cave Writing

My purpose is to investigate to which extent the externalist stance might prove useful in exploring both the way a writer enacts a fictional world, and how the reader makes that fictional world real for her/himself. Instead of talking in the abstract, I intend to proceed through a reading of several well-known English novels and digital narrations from the 18th century through cave literature. Such a huge overview might seem a challenging endeavour, yet irrespective of contrasting aesthetic perspectives, literature has always been aware of the unavoidable and vital relation between subject and object or between living beings and environment. I will champion the view that the dichotomy between objective and subjective reality is nothing more than a disguised and misleading version of the underlying union of subject and object expressed by the interplay between language and narration. How has literature developed these relationships? What is the reader’s role?