ABSTRACT
This paper examines the problem of causal explanation, of literature’s “causes,” by looking to an unlikely literary-philosophical source: the fairytale. Following Heidegger’s “principle of reason” back into its formulation in Leibniz, I show how Heidegger’s account of the history of causality’s formulations amounts to an inadvertent fairytale, one that is remarkably suggestive, in turn, in illuminating Leibniz’s characterization of his own philosophical era as subject to faddish “contes de fée.” In following these fractured fairytales, I turn to Leibniz’s contemporary and sometime-interlocutor Charles Perrault and his grim fairytale “Bluebeard.” Perrault, I argue, has as much of a contribution to make to debates about cause and effect, justification and vindication, as his more philosophically inclined contemporaries. Bringing these literary and philosophical threads together, I suggest, permits a reassessment of literary criticism’s relationship to causation, determination, and justification.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Andrea Gadberry is Associate Professor at New York University where she holds a joint appointment in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She is the author of Cartesian Poetics: The Art of Thinking (Chicago 2020) and is currently at work on a second book on mereology, justification, and literary criticism.