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Ignorance: Literature and agnoiology
Andrew Bennett argues in this fascinating book that ignorance is part of the narrative and poetic force of literature and is an important aspect of its thematic ignorance is what literary texts are about. He sees that the dominant conception of literature since the Romantic period involves an often unacknowledged engagement with the experience of not knowing.
From Wordsworth and Keats to George Eliot and Charles Dickens, from Henry James to Joseph Conrad, from Elizabeth Bowen to Philip Roth and Seamus Heaney, writers have been fascinated and compelled by the question of ignorance, including their own. Bennett argues that there is a politics and ethics as well as a poetics of literature’s agnoiology, its acknowledgement of the limits of what we know both of ourselves and of others, engages with the possibility of democracy and the ethical, and allows us to begin to conceive of what it might mean to be human.
This exciting approach to literary theory will be of interest to lecturers and students of literary theory and criticism.
From Wordsworth and Keats to George Eliot and Charles Dickens, from Henry James to Joseph Conrad, from Elizabeth Bowen to Philip Roth and Seamus Heaney, writers have been fascinated and compelled by the question of ignorance, including their own. Bennett argues that there is a politics and ethics as well as a poetics of literature’s agnoiology, its acknowledgement of the limits of what we know both of ourselves and of others, engages with the possibility of democracy and the ethical, and allows us to begin to conceive of what it might mean to be human.
This exciting approach to literary theory will be of interest to lecturers and students of literary theory and criticism.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
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September 18, 2026
Chapter Summaries: Ignorance: Literature and Agnoiology
Chapter 1: Ignorance and philosophy
Examines the foundational divide between philosophy and literature regarding nescience. While Socrates inaugurates Western philosophy through aporetic professions of not knowing, later Platonic thought treats ignorance as a defect to be cured and eliminated through reason. Academic philosophy historically rejects scepticism, whereas literature embraces permanent perplexity and cognitive contradiction.
Chapter 2: Literary ignorance
Explores the mechanics of reading and authorial intention. Following theorists like Maurice Blanchot, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida, reading is shown to demand an encounter with unreadability, undecidability, and an author who "does not know what he is doing". Bennett challenges E.D. Hirsch’s rigid intentionalism by demonstrating how poetic survival depends on resisting transparent communication.
Chapter 3: To see as poets do: Romanticism, the sublime and poetic ignorance
Investigates how eighteenth-century and Romantic aesthetics frame the sublime through obscurity, loss, and cognitive failure. Tracing Edmund Burke's claim that ignorance excites the passions, Immanuel Kant’s mathematical sublime, and works by William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and P.B. Shelley, the chapter reveals how canonical Romantic narratives repeatedly stage traumatic recoils from absolute knowledge.
Chapter 4: The opposite of epistemology: Keatsian nescience
Analyzes John Keats’s obsession with the sensory and cognitive pleasure of not knowing. Through concepts such as "Negative Capability" and readings of the 1819 odes and the Hyperion fragments, Bennett positions Keats as the anti-epistemologist who seeks to inhabit mystery, indolence, and hypnological doubt.
Chapter 5: Our ignorance of others: Middlemarch and Great Expectations
Considers the nineteenth-century realist novel’s promise to make other minds transparent. Bennett argues that George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations actually expose the insurmountable opacity of others and the self, tracking this failure through the recurrent, alienated motif of characters' hands.
Chapter 6: Joseph Conrad’s blindness
Addresses the paradox between Joseph Conrad’s stated aim "to make you see" and his writing's pervasive thematic and compositional blindness. Tracking Conrad's persistent underestimation of word counts alongside optical failures in stories like "The End of the Tether" and "Heart of Darkness," Bennett shows how narrative accretion emerges from authorial visual impairment and doubt.
Chapter 7: Children, death and the enigmatic signifier: Wordsworth and Bowen
Examines adult fascination with childhood ignorance regarding mortality. Using Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytic concept of the "enigmatic signifier," the chapter demonstrates how texts by William Wordsworth (such as "We Are Seven") and Elizabeth Bowen dramatize the adult's inability to translate trauma to children, exposing adult incomprehension instead.
Chapter 8: Monsters and trees: epistemelancholia in David Hume and Henry James
Traces the concept of "epistemelancholia"—the depressive state born from radical philosophical scepticism and cognitive isolation. Bennett pairs David Hume’s existential despair in his Treatise of Human Nature with the shadowy dread, psychic paralysis, and cognitive obstruction found in the late fiction of Henry James.
Chapter 9: American ignorance: Philip Roth’s America trilogy
Analyzes Philip Roth’s late novels (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain), where the narrator Nathan Zuckerman confronts the absolute impossibility of knowing another human being. Bennett highlights how public ideologies and historical dogmas crumble against irreducible personal secrets and epistemological failure.
Chapter 10: The politics of authorial ignorance: contemporary poetry
Focuses on post-war and contemporary British and Irish poetry (including works by Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Medbh McGuckian). The chapter argues that modern poetic practice politicizes authorial nescience as an ethical stance—resisting authoritarian certitude and ideological totalization by keeping language open, vulnerable, and incomplete.
Why Authors Say They Are Ignorant of Their Authorship
Authors frequently disclaim knowledge of their own creations because of how literary production operates across inspiration, the unconscious, language, and historical reception. From classical notions of poetic madness to Romantic theories of genius, poets often experience language as an external gift arriving without conscious calculation. Influenced by psychoanalysis, literature also recognizes that the self cannot fully map its own desires or subterranean motives. At the same time, language carries uncontrollable rhetorical, etymological, and figural currents that exceed what any single author sets out to convey. Finally, writing intended for posterity must surrender control over its interpretations, leaving an unprogrammed reserve that invites future reading.
10 Illustrative Quotes from Andrew Bennett's Ignorance
Jacques Derrida on the necessary condition of readerly interest:
"‘[Y]ou can take interest in what I am doing here only insofar as you would be right to believe that – somewhere – I do not know what I am doing.’" (Quoted in Chapter 2, from Glas)
Percy Bysshe Shelley on the involuntary nature of the poetic faculty:
"Poetry differs from logic since it is 'not subject to the controul of the active powers of the mind': it has 'no necessary connexion with consciousness or will'." (Cited in Chapter 3, analyzing "A Defence of Poetry")
Percy Bysshe Shelley on poets as unknowing instruments:
"Poets are 'the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not ...'" (Quoted in Chapter 3, from "A Defence of Poetry")
Immanuel Kant on genius acting through nature rather than conscious knowledge:
"[G]enius is defined as 'the innate mental predisposition through which nature gives the rule to art', meaning that the author or artist cannot know 'how he came by the ideas' for his work: it is nature’s work, not his." (Paraphrased and quoted in Chapter 2, discussing the Critique of Judgement)
Richard Woodhouse recording John Keats’s compositional astonishment:
"‘He has said, that he has often not been aware of the beauty of some thought or expression until after he has composed & written it down – It has then struck him with astonishment – & seemed rather the production of another person than his own ...’" (Quoted in Chapter 4)
John Keats on unintentional creation:
"... a Keatsian sense that Shakespeare’s sonnets are 'full of fine things said unintentionally' ..." (Quoted in Chapter 2, from Keats's letters)
Jacques Derrida on the linguistic gap between meaning and text:
"Derrida’s work ... is pervasively engaged with the apparent paradox that an author can always say 'more, less, or something other than what he would mean [voudrait dire]'." (Cited in Chapter 2, drawing on Of Grammatology)
Jacques Derrida on the writer's lack of linguistic mastery:
"... reading 'must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses'." (Quoted in Chapter 2, from Of Grammatology)
Joseph Conrad on composing his fiction in the dark:
"... Garnett, Conrad declares, is the 'Seer of the Figures in the Carpet' who has 'grapple[d] with the foggishness of H of D, to explain what I myself have tried to shape blindfold, as it were'." (Quoted in Chapter 6, from Conrad's correspondence with Edward Garnett)
Joseph Conrad on being unable to extract meaning from his own text:
"‘And I must trust to that’, he goes on, 'for the effect of the whole story from which I cannot evolve any meaning – and have given up trying’." (Quoted in Chapter 6, writing about The Rescue)
Chapter 1: Ignorance and philosophy
Examines the foundational divide between philosophy and literature regarding nescience. While Socrates inaugurates Western philosophy through aporetic professions of not knowing, later Platonic thought treats ignorance as a defect to be cured and eliminated through reason. Academic philosophy historically rejects scepticism, whereas literature embraces permanent perplexity and cognitive contradiction.
Chapter 2: Literary ignorance
Explores the mechanics of reading and authorial intention. Following theorists like Maurice Blanchot, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida, reading is shown to demand an encounter with unreadability, undecidability, and an author who "does not know what he is doing". Bennett challenges E.D. Hirsch’s rigid intentionalism by demonstrating how poetic survival depends on resisting transparent communication.
Chapter 3: To see as poets do: Romanticism, the sublime and poetic ignorance
Investigates how eighteenth-century and Romantic aesthetics frame the sublime through obscurity, loss, and cognitive failure. Tracing Edmund Burke's claim that ignorance excites the passions, Immanuel Kant’s mathematical sublime, and works by William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and P.B. Shelley, the chapter reveals how canonical Romantic narratives repeatedly stage traumatic recoils from absolute knowledge.
Chapter 4: The opposite of epistemology: Keatsian nescience
Analyzes John Keats’s obsession with the sensory and cognitive pleasure of not knowing. Through concepts such as "Negative Capability" and readings of the 1819 odes and the Hyperion fragments, Bennett positions Keats as the anti-epistemologist who seeks to inhabit mystery, indolence, and hypnological doubt.
Chapter 5: Our ignorance of others: Middlemarch and Great Expectations
Considers the nineteenth-century realist novel’s promise to make other minds transparent. Bennett argues that George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations actually expose the insurmountable opacity of others and the self, tracking this failure through the recurrent, alienated motif of characters' hands.
Chapter 6: Joseph Conrad’s blindness
Addresses the paradox between Joseph Conrad’s stated aim "to make you see" and his writing's pervasive thematic and compositional blindness. Tracking Conrad's persistent underestimation of word counts alongside optical failures in stories like "The End of the Tether" and "Heart of Darkness," Bennett shows how narrative accretion emerges from authorial visual impairment and doubt.
Chapter 7: Children, death and the enigmatic signifier: Wordsworth and Bowen
Examines adult fascination with childhood ignorance regarding mortality. Using Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytic concept of the "enigmatic signifier," the chapter demonstrates how texts by William Wordsworth (such as "We Are Seven") and Elizabeth Bowen dramatize the adult's inability to translate trauma to children, exposing adult incomprehension instead.
Chapter 8: Monsters and trees: epistemelancholia in David Hume and Henry James
Traces the concept of "epistemelancholia"—the depressive state born from radical philosophical scepticism and cognitive isolation. Bennett pairs David Hume’s existential despair in his Treatise of Human Nature with the shadowy dread, psychic paralysis, and cognitive obstruction found in the late fiction of Henry James.
Chapter 9: American ignorance: Philip Roth’s America trilogy
Analyzes Philip Roth’s late novels (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain), where the narrator Nathan Zuckerman confronts the absolute impossibility of knowing another human being. Bennett highlights how public ideologies and historical dogmas crumble against irreducible personal secrets and epistemological failure.
Chapter 10: The politics of authorial ignorance: contemporary poetry
Focuses on post-war and contemporary British and Irish poetry (including works by Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Medbh McGuckian). The chapter argues that modern poetic practice politicizes authorial nescience as an ethical stance—resisting authoritarian certitude and ideological totalization by keeping language open, vulnerable, and incomplete.
Why Authors Say They Are Ignorant of Their Authorship
Authors frequently disclaim knowledge of their own creations because of how literary production operates across inspiration, the unconscious, language, and historical reception. From classical notions of poetic madness to Romantic theories of genius, poets often experience language as an external gift arriving without conscious calculation. Influenced by psychoanalysis, literature also recognizes that the self cannot fully map its own desires or subterranean motives. At the same time, language carries uncontrollable rhetorical, etymological, and figural currents that exceed what any single author sets out to convey. Finally, writing intended for posterity must surrender control over its interpretations, leaving an unprogrammed reserve that invites future reading.
10 Illustrative Quotes from Andrew Bennett's Ignorance
Jacques Derrida on the necessary condition of readerly interest:
"‘[Y]ou can take interest in what I am doing here only insofar as you would be right to believe that – somewhere – I do not know what I am doing.’" (Quoted in Chapter 2, from Glas)
Percy Bysshe Shelley on the involuntary nature of the poetic faculty:
"Poetry differs from logic since it is 'not subject to the controul of the active powers of the mind': it has 'no necessary connexion with consciousness or will'." (Cited in Chapter 3, analyzing "A Defence of Poetry")
Percy Bysshe Shelley on poets as unknowing instruments:
"Poets are 'the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not ...'" (Quoted in Chapter 3, from "A Defence of Poetry")
Immanuel Kant on genius acting through nature rather than conscious knowledge:
"[G]enius is defined as 'the innate mental predisposition through which nature gives the rule to art', meaning that the author or artist cannot know 'how he came by the ideas' for his work: it is nature’s work, not his." (Paraphrased and quoted in Chapter 2, discussing the Critique of Judgement)
Richard Woodhouse recording John Keats’s compositional astonishment:
"‘He has said, that he has often not been aware of the beauty of some thought or expression until after he has composed & written it down – It has then struck him with astonishment – & seemed rather the production of another person than his own ...’" (Quoted in Chapter 4)
John Keats on unintentional creation:
"... a Keatsian sense that Shakespeare’s sonnets are 'full of fine things said unintentionally' ..." (Quoted in Chapter 2, from Keats's letters)
Jacques Derrida on the linguistic gap between meaning and text:
"Derrida’s work ... is pervasively engaged with the apparent paradox that an author can always say 'more, less, or something other than what he would mean [voudrait dire]'." (Cited in Chapter 2, drawing on Of Grammatology)
Jacques Derrida on the writer's lack of linguistic mastery:
"... reading 'must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses'." (Quoted in Chapter 2, from Of Grammatology)
Joseph Conrad on composing his fiction in the dark:
"... Garnett, Conrad declares, is the 'Seer of the Figures in the Carpet' who has 'grapple[d] with the foggishness of H of D, to explain what I myself have tried to shape blindfold, as it were'." (Quoted in Chapter 6, from Conrad's correspondence with Edward Garnett)
Joseph Conrad on being unable to extract meaning from his own text:
"‘And I must trust to that’, he goes on, 'for the effect of the whole story from which I cannot evolve any meaning – and have given up trying’." (Quoted in Chapter 6, writing about The Rescue)
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