The trouble with literature, according to Kahn, is that it is fictive and subjective yet aims to produce belief, an apprehension of objective reality. This trouble, she argues in her Clarendon Lectures of 2017, goes back to the Reformation: its emphasis on individual interpretation of scripture conflicted with its demand for inward belief and not just outward conformity with ritual. Kahn focuses on Thomas Hobbes and John Milton as two writers in the immediate aftermath of the Reformation who grappled with this dilemma. In her final lecture, she argues that Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, and J. M. Coetzee did too.
On Kahn's account, Hobbes and Milton both attempt to generate belief out of fiction. Hobbes creates the fictions of the state of nature and of a sovereign Leviathan, who can rescue the rest of us from that state, and then he urges that sovereign to create the fiction of belief...
