ABSTRACT
The history of analytic philosophy of literature could be written as a narrative of the efforts to formulate and solve a series of interrelated paradoxes. Indeed, such efforts have been so central to the development of the discipline that the editors of a recent anthology of philosophy of literature single out attention to puzzles and paradoxes as definitive of the discipline. Philosophers of literature may differ widely in their assumptions and ambitions, but they all seek to “help us better understand the nature of [the relevant] paradoxes—their goals, the entities with which they deal, the standards that govern our participation in them, and the broadly ethical questions to which they give rise” (Davies and Matheson 2008, xiv). This kind of approach will strike many as uncontroversially part and parcel of an analytic philosophy of literature. After all, as Mary Mothersill has argued, one can trace back to the giants of the early analytic tradition such as Russell (if not also to Wittgenstein) the conviction that philosophy itself takes the form of resolving puzzles and paradoxes. I will argue, though, that this is neither the only nor the best form that a distinctively “analytic” philosophy of literature can take.
