Lacan in particular used literature (not uncommonly, following Freud and others) to help explain points of his psychoanalytic project. The tradition of criticism coming from Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida (and this is not to minimize the differences between them) considers not just how an author creates an effect or what themes he or she is trying to convey, but the relationship of a text or other creative work to the human psyche. What can philosophy get out of literary criticism? We've had some past episodes (like this and this) where we discussed some philosophical issues brought up by a piece of fiction, but that's different then the act of doing philosophy through literary criticism, which is supposed to reveal something about our relationship to language, to ideas, to culture.
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