What We Are in Literature and Art begins from a simple observation: literature and art hand us complex material evidence of the experience of people. This is not a mystical, naive, or hopelessly old-fashioned claim about aesthetic works. The experience that literature and art let us touch, to be sure, is wildly and irreducibly complex. But it is an important idea that creative works like poems, novels, plays, paintings, and photographs give us evidence of the lives of persons. They ask: What are we?

This book considers how aesthetic works pose this longest-standing question and become entangled in our philosophical conversations about personhood. It is written for a broad audience interested in the relationship between literature and philosophy. Through sequences of reflective fragments, the book weaves through a diverse constellation of works in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The reflections zigzag through poetry (William Wordsworth to Gwendolyn Brooks), novels (Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf), drama (Henrik Ibsen to Samuel Beckett), visual art (J. M. W. Turner to Jeff Wall), and philosophy (Immanuel Kant to Ludwig Wittgenstein). What We are in Literature and Art is an experiment in philosophical reading.