This book has been fortunate in the many circumstances that occasioned it and in the comments and conversations that contributed to its development. I am grateful to many friends, readers, and interlocutors for their good will, insights, and friendship.
In conversations beginning around their editing of The Literary Wittgenstein, Wolfgang Huemer and John Gibson prompted me to begin thinking and writing more directly about the nature of distinctively literary achievement than I had done in the past. On one or another occasion, either in Philadelphia or in Erfurt, Germany, I talked with John, Wolfgang, or both about almost everything written in the analytic philosophy of literature in the last ten or so years. These conversations were invaluable for the direction of my work. Wolfgang then invited me to spend a semester at the University of Erfurt, where I taught a seminar on the philosophy of literature with Wolfgang present. Wolfgang visited Swarthmore nine months later, where we taught the philosophy of literature together for six weeks and I had the pleasure of hearing his lectures. In both settings, we talked several times a week about recent professional philosophical work on cognition, morality, and the uses of literature, and reflections of these conversations run continuously through this book. I also found in Erfurt extraordinarily congenial colleagues in Alex Burri, Carsten Held, Christian Beyer, Winfried Franzen, and Jan-Hendrik Heinrichs, in addition to Wolfgang Huemer. I cannot imagine a happier and more supportive environment in which to do philosophical work. In addition, Wolfgang Huemer and Alex Burri organized a conference on literature and cognition in Erfurt during my visit. I was able there to present an early version of part of chapter 4 and to enjoy the presentations of and discussions with Bernard Harrison, John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer, Luca Pocci, Catherine Elgin, Christiane Schildknecht, Alex Burri, Gottfried Gabriel, Peter Lamarque, and Joachim Schulte.
Thanks to Bettina Menke, I was able to present an early version of chapter 6 to the Faculty for General and Comparative Literature. Comments from Bettina Menke and Holt Meyer about the singularity of the exemplary work of literature and the nature of the literary experience have been much on my mind in subsequent writing and rewriting, and Bettina Menke helpfully corrected some points about Sebald. Reading Christoph Menke’s account in Die Souveränität der Kunst of Kafka’s literary achievement together with a subsequent conversation with him in Erfurt about this account also substantially shaped my thinking.
A yet earlier version of chapter 6 was presented at a seminar on Philosophy and Literature, sponsored by the Philosophical Society of Finland and organized by Martha Nussbaum. There I was also fortunate to be able to talk about subject development with Jonathan Lear and about romanticism and modernity with Josef Früchtl. This earlier version subsequently appeared in Visions of Value and Truth: Understanding Philosophy and Literature, ed. Floora Ruokonen and Laura Werner (Helsinki: The Philosophical Society of Finland, 2006), 13–29.
A somewhat later version was then presented as a lecture to the philosophy department of Purchase College of the State University of New York, where during both a wonderful general discussion and dinner I learned from and was encouraged by Casey Haskins, Morris Kaplan, Jennie Uleman, and Frank Ferrell.
Nikolas Kompridis invited chapter 3 for his volume Philosophical Romanticism (London: Routledge, 2006), 97–112, and I was able to present an early draft of this chapter at a meeting of the International Conference on Romanticism, where I profited from conversations with Larry Peer, Diane Hoeveler, William Davis, Eugene Stelzig, and Joshua Wilner.
Fred Rush invited me to deliver a lecture on “Romanticism and Tom Stoppard” in a symposium for the inauguration of the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center at Notre Dame. This lecture subsequently became chapter 2, improved by the comments at Notre Dame of Fred Rush, Charles Larmore, and Neil Delaney. A slightly later version of this chapter was delivered as a lecture to the German Society for Aesthetics, to which I was invited by Josef Früchtl and where I received useful comments from Georg Bertram, David Lauer, and Ian Kaplow, in addition to Josef Früchtl. A portion of this chapter will be forthcoming in Zeitschrift für Aesthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, vol. 1, 2008.
Ross Wilson invited what became chapter 4 for a forthcoming volume on romantic conceptions of life. He provided acute comments on an early draft.
A version of chapter 5 was presented as a Faculty Lecture at Swarthmore College, where I am grateful to Alfred Bloom, Peter Schmidt, and Robin Wagner-Pacifici for encouraging and useful remarks. Philip M. Weinstein subsequently read this chapter and provided written comments that not only improved it but also substantially prompted and contributed to some points in the introduction. A version of it has been published in A Sense of the World, ed. John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer, and Luca Pocci (London: Routledge, 2007), and in German in Kunst denken, ed. Wolfgang Huemer and Alex Burri (Paderborn: Mentis, 2007).
During the last year or so of the writing and revising of this manuscript, I was fortunate to have been editing The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature. Essays from contributors would arrive every three weeks or so for my comments. As a result, I was continually thinking about the arguments put forward by these contributors and comparing them with my own lines of thinking. Without exception, I was stimulated and encouraged by essay after essay. I am aware of specific turns of thought on my part being prompted by essays by Charles Altieri, J. M. Bernstein, Simona Bertacco, Anthony J. Cascardi, Ted Cohen, John Gibson, Bernard Harrison, Toril Moi, Kirk Pillow, Fred Rush, Susan Stewart, and Philip Weinstein.
Hannah Eldridge and Sarah Eldridge both attended the Erfurt conference on literature and cognition, and they have each talked regularly with me about Sebald, Rilke, Benjamin, Hegel, and romanticism, among many other topics. Each of them read drafts of sections of various chapters, and their responses were important to increasing my confidence in the coherence and direction of my argument.
Adam Haslett read a demipenultimate and then a penultimate version of the introduction. His acute comments prompted a significant structural revision and helped me to tighten the development of the argument and to make it more accessible to more readers than it might otherwise have been.
Lydia Goehr and Gregg Horowitz each read a complete, penultimate draft of the book. They offered detailed and insightful comments, criticisms, and suggestions, all of which prompted significant revisions and additions, particularly to the introduction and to chapter 6, but also throughout the manuscript as a whole. Acute comments from readers for Columbia University Press led to further productive final revisions.
Joan Vandegrift likewise read a complete, penultimate draft, and her comments led to some significant rearrangement of materials from chapter 5 to the introduction. In this, as in everything else, her ear and sense of development proved vital to the whole.