Kirjanduse lepitav otstarve

Doctoral theses defended at the University of Tartu

The reconciliatory purpose of literature

The present survey about the reconciliatory purpose of literature deals with fiction and literary writing on the overall level of its philosophical function. The general question posed at the outset is “How does literature work?” From a more particular point of view, the research focuses on the function of fiction and literary writing in the field of tension between necessity and possibility – between that which is and can never be otherwise and that which could have been.  The study posits reality as something which comes to existence on the behalf of countless of “failed possibilities” and sees fiction or literary writing as something that reconciles bare necessity with the endless amount of “failed possibilities”, regulates the balance between possibility and reality in reality, and therefore reconciles reality with its own failing nature, allowing it to coherently come forth as such. Using (and expanding) this thesis, the survey explores the works of Ene Mihkelson and Erkki Luuk in greater depth and takes an insight to the inner potentiality of the figure of a silent writer.