The epistemology of literary inquiry: Towards a 'foundherentist' pedagogy of literature

'The Epistemology of Literary Inquiry: Towards a "Foundherentist" Pedagogy of Literature' addresses several problems in teaching literary interpretation to undergraduates. The primary problem I identify is the problem of how to teach students not simply to apply literary theory to texts, but to know what counts as evidence in developing justified beliefs about what literary texts can mean. There are many important spokes that extend from this central problem. One related problem is the problem of anti-foundationalism, which has become widely accepted in English as an alternative to foundationalist ways of knowing. I argue that anti-foundationalism disallows us to teach literary interpretation as a form of inquiry because it views any guiding principles of inquiry, any epistemological grounds for practice, and any theoretical approach to interpreting as misguided attempts at an absolutism that controls what we do. While I am not positing a theory of literary inquiry that makes a return to absolutes, I criticize the anti-foundationalist stance because having no grounds to practice, no guiding principles, and no way of determining when one interpretation is better than another undermines teaching and undermines students abilities to form justified beliefs about texts. What I offer, then, is one possible way of solving the foundationalism vs. anti-foundationalism problem as it relates to teaching students to be better interpreters. My argument depends greatly upon Susan Haack's epistemological theory called 'foundherentism'; that she developed as an alternative to either foundationalism or its most popular competitor, coherentism, which is a kind of anti-foundationalism. I believe foundherentism is an excellent model of inquiry and is highly adaptable to teaching inquiry in literature courses.