Tracy Daugherty: A Pigeon Coop, A Crystal Palace: On Philosophy and Fiction (July 2004)

Invoking William Carlos Williams’ famous aphorism “No ideas but in things,” Tracy Daugherty asks how fiction writers turn ideas into things and whether philosophy has any place in fiction.  Daugherty looks at writing by William Gass, Soren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ernest Hemingway and others to undermine our conventional understandings of fiction as rooted in the body and philosophy as trying to transcend it, suggesting that the dichotomy between the two forms is a false one.