Belief; or, The Sense of Reality

Nicholas Gaskill will argue that James presents belief as an ontological rather than epistemological issue, a matter of world-building rather than of knowledge and error. This reorientation both provides a useful way of... [ view full abstract ]

Nicholas Gaskill will argue that James presents belief as an ontological rather than epistemological issue, a matter of world-building rather than of knowledge and error. This reorientation both provides a useful way of responding to the vexing issue of how various political groups are now said to inhabit separate “realities,” and clarifies the stakes of the current debates around critique. In other words, once matters of belief are approached as practices of bringing something into existence, rather than states of being correct or wrong, then the job of the critic becomes not that of demystification (of countering pseudo-knowledge with real knowledge) but of addressing the webs of activities and affects that support a sense of reality. Literary scholars, as those attuned to how fictional worlds are created and perpetuated, are well equipped to take up this task, and Gaskill will conclude by arguing that James’s theory of belief is best understood in relation to the practice and experience of literary fiction. To illustrate this point, he’ll draw on the metafictional chapters of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man.