What Literature Knows
Kley A, Merten K (2018)
Publication Language: English
Publication Type: Edited Volume
Subtype: Book
Publication year: 2018
Publisher: Peter Lang GmbH
Series: Contributions to English and American Literary Studies
City/Town: Berlin
Book Volume: 2
DOI: 10.3726/b14220
Abstract
Forays into Literary Knowledge Production
Literature and Knowledge seeks to shed light on two interrelated dimensions of the underdetermined and capacious nexus between knowledge and literature. The volume’s contributions address forms of literary writing from the early modern period to the present as media staging and reflecting concepts of knowledge and negotiating the historically and culturally specific interrelation of epistemology (both individual and collective), materiality, and representation (Horatschek). At the same time, the essays converge in a conception of literature as a culturally embedded form of knowledge production in its own right. In contrast to quantifiable empirical forms of knowledge production in such fields as the natural sciences, engineering, medicine, and parts of the social sciences and economics, literature deploys narrative, poetic and discursive methods of exploration, experimentation, interrogation, claiming and confirmation. Its guiding value is not scientific truth but a notion of truth that is built around historically shifting semantics from beauty to coherence and attraction. While empirical forms of knowledge production seek to produce a “view from nowhere” (Nagel, Daston) in order to achieve the ideal of objective verifiability, literary writing provides a decidedly interested, socially situated “view from somewhere” (Kley) in order to produce meaning and accrete credibility (Mohanty). As many of the volume’s essays confirm, literature also knows that the notion of reliable knowledge is a contested one.
The essays explore literary writing as formally, rhetorically and generically rich archive of re-descriptions of the world attempting to surprise, seduce, enchant or shock readers into reading other people’s minds, into accessing institutional environments and social interactions in a different key, and into seeing individual self-understandings as socially mediated (Felski). Interconnecting formalist and political protocols of reading, the volume articulates a more plastic sense of how philological expertise in imaginary and historiographical processes of meaning making, in conceptual clarification, in the negotiation of uncertainty, complexity, heterogeneity, and particularity (Turner, Kelleter) may generate productively irritating forms of connectivity to other knowledge discourses. Contributions explore literary writing, both in its popular and its culturally distinguished forms, as a way of thinking and endeavor to follow its imaginary roads to encounter vast and diversified knowledge landscapes.
Editors with CRIS profile
Additional Organisation(s)
Related research project(s)
Involved external institutions
Germany (DE)How to cite
APA:
Kley, A., & Merten, K. (Eds.) (2018). What Literature Knows. Berlin: Peter Lang GmbH.
MLA:
Kley, Antje, and Kai Merten, eds. What Literature Knows. Berlin: Peter Lang GmbH, 2018.
BibTeX: Download