1 This essay is based on Nünning, A. (2021) ‘Literatur als Laboratorium für Formen guten Lebens: Potential einer wissenschaftlichen Metapher und Leistungsvermögen der Literatur’, Comparatio: Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft 13 (2), pp.-313-334. I would like to thank Louise Louw for translating the article. Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life The Potential of a Scientific Metaphor and the Value of Literature 1 Ansgar Nünning 1 Introducing ‘The Lab’ and the Goals of the Article While research students in the sciences can choose from a wide range of laboratory notebooks, academic publications on laboratories are few and far between. In one of the rare books that not only deals with the topic but is even entitled The Lab, David Edwards (2010: 3) observes that “Labs obviously come in various kinds - film labs, design labs, molecular biology labs.” Although the concept of the laboratory is usually associated with the natural sciences, Edwards focuses on a special kind of lab, viz. the “artscience lab” (ibid.: 8). This already shows that during the last two decades or so, the concept of the lab has travelled to other disciplines and domains, including e.g. architecture, design, and the arts. Edwards describes the artscience lab as a “kind of lab where creators and society meet through cultural exhibition, a new platform for innovation” (ibid.: 3-4). As this description and the subtitle of his book - Creativity and Culture - already indicate, laboratories are associated with the creative processes of discovery, experimentation, and innovation. This link between laboratories and creativity is also one of the reasons why the concept of the lab has become popular outside the realm of the sciences, as such recent usages of e.g. ‘ideas lab’ and ‘writing labs’ serve to testify. Labs are places where new ideas can be tried out and where a spirit of experimentation prevails, as the subtitle of a forthcoming book - The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre (Davidson and Laplante 2025) - demonstrates. In the context of writing, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 2 I would, furthermore, like to thank my colleague and co-editor Anna Tabouratzidis for sharing her research on the topic of ‘literature as a laboratory’ and her careful reading of this contribution. however, experimentation pertains to experimenting with forms, genres, and style. Although literature has occasionally been called a ‘laboratory’, no sustained attempt has yet been made to explore the implications of this metaphorical usage of the term in the context of literary and cultural studies. The main goals of this article are to gauge the potential of the scientific metaphor of literature as a laboratory for forms of the good life and to explicate the hypotheses about the functions that literary works can fulfil that are implied in this metaphor. Taking its cue from the notion of the laboratory as a “travelling concept” (Bal 2002), this chapter conceptualises literary works as “thought experiments” (Elgin 2007: 48) and as “experiments in life” (Eliot 1955: 216-217) which generate aesthetic experiences and new perspectives on the good life. Drawing on Paul Ricœur’s notion of a “circle of mimesis” (1984: 71), I argue that aesthetic forms of literary configurations do not merely represent existing cultural models of the good life but rather serve to reflect upon and critique prevailing notions, while also generating alternative ideas and models of what a good life could look like. The value of literature, it is argued, resides in its capacity to broaden the range of possibilities of cultural models and to function as “valorization laboratories” (Citton 2017: 150) that can entail revalorizations of prevailing views of the good life. 2 Literary Works as Worldview Machines, Thought Experiments, and Experiments in Life At first glance, the hypothesis implied in the title of this article, that literature is to be understood as a laboratory for forms of life, may appear counterintuitive insofar as literature and laboratory belong to diametrically opposed domains. While literature, as part of the arts, makes use of aesthetic and linguistic techniques to create fictional worlds, laboratories are used to conduct scien‐ tific or technical experiments intended to generate empirically proven factual knowledge. Despite the obvious contrasts between the two concepts, it is no coincidence that the formulation of literature as a laboratory can be found in recent publications (see Struwe 2008; Rank 2014). 2 The term has, however, mostly been used as a mere metaphor in which the implications and heuristic potential of the laboratory are hardly the subject of reflection. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 82 Ansgar Nünning 3 If not indicated otherwise, all translations are by the author of this chapter. As will be shown in the following, the understanding of literature as a laboratory draws attention to one of the essential characteristics of literary works, which has likely always contributed significantly to their great and lasting fascination: their ability, with the help of language, to carry out literary thought experiments and experiments in life, as well as to conceptualise alternative views of the world and humanity alongside the various forms of life, values, and norms represented in them. Konstanze Fliedl has succinctly summed up this potential of literary works in her concept of “literature as a worldview machine” (2005: 134, my translation). 3 This metaphorical concept emphasises that literature by no means merely mimetically depicts or represents reality but rather creates models of life and the world. Furthermore, this concept emphasises that literary works do not only create a single worldview, but that literariness can be defined precisely by the fact “that it only knows worldviews in the plural” (ibid.). Moreover, the metaphor of the laboratory emphasises both the experimental character and the poietic power of literature as well as its potential to test new forms of life. The laboratory, furthermore, matches the strength of those metaphors that classify literature as thought and life experiments that take place in the imagination, i.e. in the “laboratory of the mind” as “a venue in which reconfigurations can be contrasted, elaborated, and tested” (Elgin 2007: 47). The value of fictional works is based on their capacity to enable imaginative thought experiments. Such “[a] thought experiment is an imaginative exercise designed to determine what would happen if certain conditions were met” (ibid.). Thus, literary works resemble scientific experiments in that they use aesthetic means to conduct thought experiments and play out ‘what-if ’ scenarios. In contrast to philosophical thought experiments, literary works are usually experiments that probe various forms of human life and coexistence. Therefore, it seems obvious to conceptualise literature as aesthetic “experiments in life”, an understanding of literature that can be found in the works of George Eliot, arguably the most significant Victorian novelist. In a letter to Dr Joseph Frank Payne, dated 25 January 1876, Eliot characterises her writing in a way that gives clear insight into her understanding of literature as experiments in life: But my writing is simply a set of experiments in life - an endeavour to see what our thought and emotion may be capable of - what stores of motive, actual or hinted as possible, give promise of a better after which we may strive - what gains from past revelations and discipline we must strive to keep hold of as something more sure than shifting theory. I become more and more timid - with less daring to adopt any 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life 83 4 The contributions in their volume impressively document and analyse the literary expressions of the knowledge-making technology used in scientific experiments since the end of the nineteenth century and how literature itself was conceptualised as a medium for conducting experiments. formula which does not get itself clothed for me in some human figure and individual experience, and perhaps that is a sign that if I help others to see at all it must be through that medium of art. (1955: 216-217) For Eliot, these literary experiments consist primarily of depicting individual experiences - thoughts, emotions, motifs, and memories - in the medium of language to explore possible forms of life. In addition to Eliot’s novels, many realistic, naturalistic, and experimental literary works since the end of the nineteenth century are characterised by experimental arrangements in that their characters are placed in situations and constellations in which their behaviour and the consequences of their actions can be examined under laboratory conditions, as it were. Literature thus not only thematises and reflects scientific experiments, but literature itself becomes the arena for experimentation through aesthetic and linguistic means (see the contributions in Bies and Gamper 2011). 4 Just as Peter Sloterdijk describes evolution as a “continuum of life-form-experi‐ ments” (2009: 188), the same could certainly be said of the archive and laboratory of literature. Drawing on the working definitions of literature as a worldview machine and as experiments of thought and life, the main aim of this article is to explicate and test the hypotheses implied in the metaphor of literature as a laboratory for forms of the good life. To condense these hypotheses into a very abbreviated form: It is heuristically fruitful to conceptualise literature as a laboratory in which experiments in thought and life are conducted with the help of aesthetic and linguistic representational procedures. If literature is understood as “the artful linguistic representation of experi‐ ence” (Bieri 2011: 25-26), this seemingly simple definition would already reveal three respects in which the metaphorical designation of literature as a laboratory is both meaningful and valid. Firstly, literature is a linguistic rather than e.g. a scientific or visual laboratory in which new forms of thought and speech are tested, i.e. a “laboratory for words” (Bies and Gamper 2011). Secondly, the adjective ‘artful’ refers to the aesthetic ways in which the models of life sketched out in literary works are distinguished from other discourses by their artistic design and literary form. Thirdly, literature is a laboratory in which experiences can be represented and examined. It can therefore be assumed that readers’ aesthetic experiences in the laboratory of literature can shape and change their 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 84 Ansgar Nünning ideas of what constitutes forms of the good life. With the help of imagination, experiments in the laboratory of literature result not only in linguistic works of art, but also in new ideas about the various forms of human life and society. These metaphorical working definitions of literature do not, of course, say anything about whether a fictional text is affirmative, critical, or subversive of the hitherto existing forms of life or the socially prevailing discourses, values, and knowledge systems represented in a particular case. With regard to forms of a good life, these scientific metaphors foreground questions about the functional potential and value of literary texts. How do literary works represent both the prevailing and alternative forms of life in an epoch? Are these forms of life merely mimetically depicted or are they also the objects of analysis, reflection, and criticism? To what extent can literature probe and conceptualise new forms of a successful and good life? As the introductory remarks suggest, this contribution - an essay in the original sense of the word - pursues three main goals: As the hypothesis of literature as a laboratory for forms of the good life in the title indicates, the first aim of this chapter is to explore the potential of the laboratory metaphor in literary studies and to explicate the hypotheses implied in it regarding the value of literature. Secondly, drawing on Mieke Bal’s meta-scientific metaphor of “travelling concepts” (Bal 2002; see also Nünning and Neumann 2012), an attempt will be made to conceptualise the relationship between the forms of life produced in literary thought experiments and experiments in life, and the socially prevailing forms of life by means of the travelling metaphorical concept of the laboratory. Thirdly, this article aims to shed light on the ways in which literary worldbuilding takes place and to analyse the functions of literature as a medium through which forms of the good life can be represented, reflected on, and critiqued. Following these initial considerations, the next section will examine the concept of the laboratory as a travelling concept and literary metaphor. Section 4 will go on to conceptualise literary representations of forms of the good life as either aesthetic ways of worldbuilding or as the appropriation, configuration, and reconfiguration of existing forms of life. Subsequently, several hypotheses on the functions of literature as a medium for the representation, reflection, and critique of forms of the good life will be formulated, all of which can be derived from the metaphor of literature as a laboratory for conducting aesthetic experiments in life (section 5). Finally, this essay will conclude with a brief discussion of the cultural relevance of literary research into forms of the good life and its contribution to literary and cultural studies in the twenty-first century (section 6). 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life 85 3 The Laboratory as a Travelling Concept and a Metaphor for Literature Starting with the meta-scientific metaphor of ‘travelling concepts’, it is neces‐ sary to first briefly examine the complexity of transferring concepts as well as the risks and opportunities involved. By transferring the scientific concept of the ‘laboratory’ into literary studies, the potential of the metaphor in fostering our understanding of literature and the functions it can fulfil will be further illuminated (see Nünning 2011). Like other scientific concepts, the notion of the laboratory is highly bound to certain disciplinary contexts and has, through its position in the practice and culture of the natural sciences, already been predetermined. As in many cases of concept transfers across disciplinary boundaries, shifting the concept of the ‘laboratory’ from the natural sciences into literary studies involves a process of metaphorization as the term is used only figuratively in the context of literary works (see also Baumbach, Michaelis, and Nünning 2012). On the one hand, it remains clear that literature is not a physical location of scientific work and research. On the other hand, the metaphor can emphasise aspects and dimensions of literature that cannot be fully captured by other, more commonly used metaphors that, for example, describe literature as a ‘mirror of society’. Thus, the designation of literature as a ‘laboratory’ is a conceptual metaphor that links and projects two phenomena from fields and contexts that are not usually associated with one another: Through this metaphor, the location of biological, chemical, physical, or technical experiments is brought into alignment with literature. The metaphor of the laboratory can refer either to the societal sphere designated by the literary industry as its own social system or, according to a more textual-studies-based understanding of literary works, to a specific symbolic system that is characterised by certain aesthetic features that differ from texts in other social subsystems. Regardless of whether the metaphor of the laboratory refers to the social or symbolic systems of literature, it nevertheless transfers the connotations, denotations, and associations of the term ‘laboratory’ that are considered relevant to the field of literature. Similarly to other metaphors, the metaphor of the laboratory acts like a “double filter” (Peil 1990: 228; see also Hrushovski 1984: 18) in that it is only permeable to those features of the donor and recipient fields that are significant and fruitful for the present context. If we consider what an ideal and typical scientific laboratory consists of, it immediately becomes apparent that many of these elements are not present in literature and, therefore, clearly not relevant for the metaphorical use of the term in the context of literary studies: 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 86 Ansgar Nünning 5 For more information on the approaches of “Laboratory Studies” and “Science and Technology Studies”, see Knorr-Cetina (1995). From a collection of instruments and apparatus in a workroom with tables and chairs, shelves of chemicals and glass jars, refrigerators and freezers full of carefully labelled samples and source materials […]. All source materials are specially produced and cultivated for the laboratory. Most of the substances and chemicals are pre-prepared; they have been isolated and purified and come from industries working specifically for science and from other laboratories. […] these substances are as much the product of human production as the measuring instruments or the scientific articles on the desks. Nature does not appear in the scientific laboratory unless one defines it from the outset as the product of scientific work. (Knorr-Cetina 1991: 23) 5 When considering the notion of the double filter as an established concept in metaphor theory, it is understandable why most of the components of an actual laboratory mentioned in the above quotation are not relevant to the context of literature: The filter is simply not permeable to it. Yet, at the same time, the metaphor draws attention to the similarities and correlations between the domains of the laboratory and literature that might have been invisible or overlooked without the metaphor. The conceptual object of the laboratory corresponds to a set of connotations, denotations, and associations that highlight important facets of literature that otherwise do not always receive the attention they deserve in literary studies. Some of the most important of these features, which are projected as metaphorical implications from the original domain onto the recipient field of literature, are mentioned and briefly analysed below. A particularly suitable introduction to this argument lies in a quotation from one of the few studies in which the metaphorical concept of the laboratory is used in the context of literature and aesthetic experience: The term ‘laboratory’ proves particularly apt here as it brings together three kinds of attitude which we tend to think of as incompatible with each other, but which are in fact typical of the artistic sphere […]. Even if their methods are not ‘scientific’ in the usual meaning of the term, our aesthetic experiences relate to an attitude of (collective) experimentation which corresponds closely with how we imagine the laboratory: a space that is temporarily isolated from the daily world becomes a place of investigation, where we test certain limits of what can be done, perceived, felt, discovered, thought or justified. To be more precise, artistic modernity has taught us to make our encounter with the work the occasion for an ‘experience’ (of cognitive dissonance). (Citton 2017: 151) 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life 87 6 Cf. e.g. Ricœur: “new genres have appeared, in particular the novel, that have turned literature into an immense laboratory for experiments in which, sooner or later, every received convention has been set aside” (1985 [1984]: 7). As already mentioned in the working definitions of literature presented in the first section, the metaphor of the laboratory emphasises that literature is an independent institution or medium within which aesthetic experiments are carried out under specific conditions and using linguistic means. 6 Biological, chemical, or physical experiments are carried out under equally specific labo‐ ratory conditions in the natural sciences. Thought experiments in literature are similarly isolated from the daily world, exploring human life under laboratory conditions, albeit with aesthetic means. Literary experiments in life are charac‐ terised by the fact that they design possible worlds and juxtapose different forms of life, providing readers with aesthetic experiences and fostering an attitude of experimentation. Reception aesthetics and cognitive narratology have described the cognitive mechanisms by which recipients (re)construct the mental models of the world, possible worlds, or storyworlds (Herman 2002: 5) evoked by a literary text, combining textual information and the readers’ own inferences. More important than such cognitive processes for the question of forms of the good life, however, is the insight, accentuated by the metaphor of the laboratory, that literary works can also be understood as experimental arrangements through which different forms and models of life can be represented, contrasted, and tested. Like the experiments done in scientific labs, the experiments in life that we encounter in literary works also entail the “possibility of discovery” (Edwards 2010: 3): Literary works are not confined to merely representing already existing forms of life, they can also discover or generate alternative forms of life that do not yet exist. A second important parallel between the laboratory and literature is that both conduct experiments to generate something new which results in knowledge production. The renowned historian of science Peter Galison has called the laboratory a “‘knowledge-generation institution’” (quoted from Edwards 2010: 27). Although the empirical knowledge of the natural sciences is, of course, different from the kind of ‘life-knowledge’ that literature provides (see Ette 2004), it is hard to deny that literary works represent, generate, and convey important knowledge about forms of a good life. What is generated in the laboratory of literature, apart from aesthetic experiences, are above all new forms and possibilities of human life and coexistence. In order to characterise the products of literary knowledge generation, one could define literature, in the context of this volume, analogously as the artful linguistic representation of forms of human life and coexistence. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 88 Ansgar Nünning Thirdly, laboratories and literature are similar in that the respective products of science and literature are not only highly context-specific but are also internally structured or prefigured. In the case of scientific experiments, the “contextuality of knowledge construction” is particularly evident in the fact that the laboratory functions both as a “selection context” for many decisions and as a “context of discovery” (Knorr-Cetina 1991: 31, 28). Just as the “products of science are context-specific constructions marked by the situational specificity and the structures of interest from which they were generated” (ibid.: 25), the field of literature is also an independent social subsystem in which specific conventions prevail that do not apply in more pragmatic contexts. Foremost amongst these are the aesthetic and polyvalence convention, both of which regulate the production and reception of texts classified as literary (see Barsch 2013). While the aesthetic convention suspends all references to facts as well as to the criteria of true/ false and useful/ useless that are valid outside of art, the polyvalence convention implies an acceptance and appreciation of ambiguity, which is not considered a deficit in literary works, but rather a sign of quality. Due to the diametrically opposed conventions that apply in the scientific and literary fields, the respective products of knowledge that are produced in the laboratories of natural science and those of literature must, fourthly, be regarded as highly internally structured both by the institutions from which they emerge and by the process of their production (Knorr-Cetina 1991: 25). In contrast to the conventions of reproducibility, falsifiability, and verifiability of scientific experiments, literary experiments in life are distinctive precisely because of the fact that the forms of life produced are characterised by a high degree of aesthetic and linguistic individuality, innovation, creativity, ambiguity, and originality. A fifth analogy between the experiments in a scientific laboratory and in those testing the forms of life and society in literature is that, despite the differences between these respective contexts, they use similar formal strategies in what analytical philosopher Nelson Goodman calls “ways of worldmaking” (1992 [1978]). Similar to natural science experiments, literary experiments in thought and life select, exemplify, highlight, and manipulate those elements and phenomena that are considered particularly relevant and worthy of investigation: “Like an experiment, a work of fiction selects and isolates, manipulating circumstances so that particular properties, patterns, and connections, as well as disparities and irregularities are brought to the fore” (Elgin 2007: 49). For a reconstruction of literary experiments that draft forms of the good life, it is therefore indispensable that we analyse the aesthetic procedures of representation or cultural ways of worldmaking. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life 89 Sixthly, the metaphorical concept of the laboratory emphasises that literary experiments in life, with their aesthetic and formal arrangements, have the capacity to play through different possibilities and test new concepts. In her anthropology of the natural sciences, science historian Karin Knorr-Cetina emphasises that “laboratory work seems to be dominated by attempts to determine what the case might be and what, in retrospect, should and could be done with regard to it” (1991: 212). Literary explorations of forms of the good life use aesthetic procedures to do something very similar. The metaphor of the laboratory thus emphasises that literary works continually go beyond a mere reproduction of existing forms of life by conjuring up, exploring, and testing alternative ways of living. Finally, the metaphor accentuates the future as the dominant dimension of time. This distinguishes it, for example, from the metaphor of the archive, which has brought literature to the fore as a medium of cultural memory and as a repository of past ideas about forms of life. However, this difference is relativised by the fact that literary works of past epochs, at the time of their publication, would also have functioned as contemporary media, social criticism, and as future-oriented laboratories for alternative forms of life. Nevertheless, these examples illustrate once again how loaded and presupposition-rich the respective metaphors are and how strictly they are to be understood as implicit literary theories. As these metaphorical implications might already have shown, the metaphor of the laboratory - like other key concepts - is characterised by the fact that it functions as an operative concept and that it is by no means merely a neutral, descriptive category, but that it has a clear “reality-defining” character (Bachmann-Medick 2007: 385). The productive and heuristic power of the metaphor of the laboratory is primarily based on the fact that, as an operative concept, it can shape our perception of phenomena and constitute the respective objects of investigation in the first place. Metaphors are characterised by the fact that they can, to a great extent, shape the perception of cultural phenomena and theories (see Nünning, Grabes, and Baumbach 2009). In contrast to the long-dominant metaphor of literature as a ‘mirror of society’, which implies and expresses a mimetic notion of literature and thus a mimetic literary theory, the metaphor of the laboratory emphasises the poietic, reality-constituting, and reality-producing power of literature. Although these explanations should already have shown that adapting the concept of the laboratory opens up new perspectives and opportunities for literary studies, such concept transfers are also linked to some risks. These risks include the inadmissible simplification or reduction of complexity, the loss of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 90 Ansgar Nünning theoretical consistency and terminological precision, as well as the danger that incommensurable concepts or incompatible theories may be brought together. Furthermore, when concepts cross disciplinary boundaries and scientific cul‐ tures, there is always a danger that they become mere commonplaces. As a result, concepts cannot only lose their heuristic and epistemological power, but the concept as a whole can also dissolve. These unavoidable risks are, however, more than outweighed by the oppor‐ tunities that the transfer of concepts can open up. The adoption of concepts from other disciplines or scientific cultures can prove to be a fruitful heuristic step in that it can draw attention to hitherto overlooked aspects of a phenomenon. As the example of the metaphorical understanding of literature as a laboratory has hopefully made clear, the productive potential of the metaphor is based primarily on the fact that the adaptation of the laboratory concept can lead not only to a revision of disciplinary assumptions, limitations, and questions, but also to the discovery of new phenomena and research questions as well as to reflection and debate. As Mieke Bal rightly points out: “concepts can trigger and facilitate reflection and debate on all levels of methodology” (Bal 2002: 29). Since the metaphorical concept of literature as a laboratory generates new questions, its transfer can contribute to disciplinary renewal and methodological innovation in literary studies. Implicit in the metaphor is the task of reconstruct‐ ing both the historical variability and the synchronic diversity of the forms of a good life that are designed in the laboratories of literary works from different periods and cultural circles. From the perspective of literary history, the question also arises as to whether the description of literature as a laboratory is a transhistorically valid hypothesis or rather a specifically modern quality of literature produced since the establishment of literature as a distinct domain in the eighteenth century. Linked to this is the question of whether the hypothesis can only claim validity for a notion of ‘autonomous’ literature or ‘highbrow’ literary fiction, or if it could also be used for genre fiction or popular literature. If one tries to weigh the opportunities and risks of transferring concepts, there is much to suggest that, in the case of the laboratory, this travelling concept can make a significant contribution to the future development of literary studies. Important clues as to the question of whether the transfer of a concept can be considered to be better or worse can be gleaned from Brian McHale’s take on the evaluation of literary histories: “‘better’ not in the sense of objectively truer (a criterion discredited by the constructivist approach), but in terms of such criteria as rightness of fit, validity of inference, internal consistency, appropriateness of scope, and above all productivity” (McHale 1992: 9). Additional criteria that the transfer of concepts should fulfil include e.g. plausibility, relevance, inter‐ 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life 91 subjective comprehensibility, problem-solving capacity, and a contribution to scientific innovation. Moreover, as Koepsell and Spoerhase (2008: 372) suggest, one should not only reject the merely eclectic, fashionable, and superficial adoption of concepts from other academic disciplines, but should also emphasise that assessing the legitimacy and usefulness of concept transfers ultimately depends on whether new questions and results - which would not have been possible without the import of the concept - can be achieved in the ‘receiving discipline’. 4 Literary Representations of Forms of the Good Life: Adoption, Configuration, and Refiguration of Forms of Life The metaphor of literature as a laboratory for forms of the good life brings three aspects into view that are of great importance for conceptualising the relationship between socially established forms of life and the representation or construction of such forms in the laboratories of literature. Firstly, the metaphor draws attention to the fact - forgotten by deconstruction and post-structuralism - that literature is not merely autonomous and self-reflexive, but that it also always refers and relates to the world. While these references are aesthetically mediated, they generate new forms of life alongside worldviews, value systems, and orders of knowledge (see Nünning 2009b). Secondly, this approach raises the equally long-neglected question of the literary forms of representation, configuration, interpretation, and critique of forms of life or, respectively, of the ways in which aesthetic-fictional worlds are created. Thirdly, the hypothesis that literature can be understood as a laboratory for forms of life draws attention to the functions of literature which, in the heyday of structuralism, deconstruction, and post-structuralism, played a subordinate role at best. Goodman’s phrase “ways of worldmaking” draws attention to the symbolic forms and procedures through which literature can both represent and generate forms of life, worldviews, and knowledge. Novels and other literary genres resemble laboratories in that they function as a medium for the generation of forms of human life (see Basseler, Hartley, and Nünning 2015). With specific literary means such as perspectivisation, narrative mediation, and relationships of correspondence and contrast, they can both represent and fictionalise the cultural knowledge, prevailing forms of life, and value systems of their time. In doing so, literary works have the capacity to generate alternative ideas of a successful and good life through literary reconfigurations. Wolfgang Iser provides a detailed description of the complex processes of world appropriation, representation, and interpretation: 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 92 Ansgar Nünning the fictional text contains many identifiable fragments of reality, which are taken from the socio-cultural textual environment as well as from the literature that precedes the text. In this respect, therefore, a thoroughly recognisable reality returns in the fictional text, which is now considered to be intrinsically fabricated. (Iser 1993: 37) Iser’s functional differentiation between various fictionalising acts, with the help of which literary representations of forms of the good life can be described, provides further clues for a more precise definition of the outlined processes. Iser attempts to dissect this process on the basis of a poietic understanding of the literary text as a product of an act of looking at the world, which creates something that does not exist in the real world represented by the text. To this end, he distinguishes between three acts of fictionalisation, which he calls ‘selection’, ‘combination’, and ‘self-disclosure’, all three of which he characterises as different forms of border-crossing (Iser 1993: 24). If we look at the question of literary appropriations and representations of forms of life from a narratological perspective, it becomes clear that Iser’s model needs to be supplemented by the discursive procedures of literary mediation, narration, and perspectivisation: In addition to the questions of selection and combination, the discursive axis of the implicit and explicit construction of meaning through narrative forms of perspectivisation must also be taken into account. On the one hand, this includes the question of how the narrative mediation of the forms of life and the hierarchies of values outlined by a text are shaped. On the other hand, the configuration of focalisation, as well as the entirety of literary representational procedures, play an important role in describing the processes of appropriation, representation, interpretation, and construction of forms of life in literary works. What is meant by the hypothesis implied by the metaphor of the laboratory can briefly be outlined with the help of Paul Ricœur’s concept of a “circle of mimesis” (1984: 71), a three-dimensional model that can be used to conceptualise the relationship between the forms of life portrayed by literature and those that exist in the real world. Ricœur’s model consists of three stages, viz. prefiguration, configuration, and reconfiguration. Firstly, literature is both related to and shaped by a prior, extra-literary reality or lifeworld in which certain forms of life (see Jaeggi 2014) prevail and can be observed as a context of social practices (prefiguration): Literary works are created in the context of cultures in whose symbolic orders certain forms of life, values, and models of reality (actualised in social interaction, texts in the literary tradition, and media of other symbolic systems) already circulate. Secondly, literary texts can represent, compare, and contrast different world views, value systems, and ways of life (configuration): Both individual and collective ideas of a good life, as well as socially excluded, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life 93 marginalised, and repressed forms of life can be depicted and analysed in the fictional space through specific aesthetic procedures. Thirdly, such literary representations or stagings of various forms of life and cultural values can have an effect and impact on the reality outside of literature (reconfiguration): Literature has been and is significantly involved in both reshaping and reflecting on forms of the good life, values, and knowledge. Literary studies oriented towards the concept of eudaimonia (see Pawelski and Moores 2014; Nünning and Nünning 2020b) focuses on both the repre‐ sentational and the constructional aspects of literature as an active medium for generating forms of the good life - and thus on the interfaces between prefiguration and configuration on the one hand, and between configuration and reconfiguration on the other. Firstly, such an approach asks how and with which processes forms of life and cultural knowledge are represented in literary texts. From this perspective, literature is conceived of as a medium for the representation of existing forms of life, value systems, and cultural knowledge. Secondly, when the interest of literary studies is directed towards the ways in which forms of life and worlds are aesthetically produced, literature emerges as a primary medium for the construction of forms of the good life and of literary counter-worlds. When examining the connection between configuration and refiguration, the functional-historical question of the value of literary works in their contemporary society and culture becomes paramount. What functions can literature fulfil in the generation, modelling, and transformation of ideas about forms of the good life and the cultural value systems implicit in them? 5 Literature as a Laboratory for Aesthetic Experiments in Life: Representation, Reflection, Critique and Construction of Forms of the Good Life If one understands literature as a laboratory for conducting aesthetic experi‐ ments in life, two dimensions of the relationship between literary works and non-literary forms of life come into view: Firstly, the relationship is concerned with the specific ability of literature to make use of aesthetic forms to thematise, stage, problematise, and criticise both the hegemonic forms of life and knowl‐ edge within particular cultural contexts. Secondly, the potential of literature as an aesthetic medium to actively construct new forms of the good life as well as new collective ideas, values, and norms that, in turn, shape alternative value systems. In short, literature is not only a medium of representation, reflection, and criticism, but also a medium for modelling and constructing new forms of life, world views, and hierarchies of values. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 94 Ansgar Nünning From a functional-historical point of view, novels, plays, poems, biographies, and other literary genres do not only represent historically and culturally prevailing ideas of the ‘good life’, but they also function as ethical laboratories for reflecting on norms, values, and the hierarchies of values. It is not without reason that Ricœur notes that one of the oldest functions of art is “that it constitutes an ethical laboratory where the artist pursues through the mode of fiction experimentation with values” (1984: 59). As the metaphor of literature as a laboratory emphasises, literary works open up a fictional space of exploration in which experiments with a plurality of individual perspectives and ways of life are designed and within which different values can be compared. Thus, through the explicit thematisation and literary staging of ethical questions, literature can function as a medium for representing and reflecting on forms of the good life. As a medium of cultural self-reflection (see Butter 2007), literature fulfils three further functions: It not only contributes to the “critique of forms of life” (sensu Jaeggi 2014), but it also probes alternative ways of living, generating new ideas regarding what constitutes a good life. In this respect, literature can function both as a “culture-critical metadiscourse” and “imaginative counter-discourse” (Zapf 2016: 95). The function of literature as a culture-critical metadiscourse is realised in the “representation of typical deficits, bias, blind spots, and contradic‐ tions of the dominant political, economic, ideological, or pragmatic-utilitarian systems of civilisational power” (Zapf 2002: 64). Furthermore, as an imaginative counter-discourse, literature has the potential to represent “what is marginal‐ ised, neglected, or suppressed in the cultural systems of reality” (ibid.) in the relative freedom of the fictional space. In addition, literary works can function as “reintegrative interdiscourse[s]” by “bringing together the marginalised and the cultural systems of reality” (ibid.: 66). In doing so, literature also generates knowledge about social and cultural aspects of human coexistence. Perhaps one of the most important functions that literary works - such as the great realist novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through their complex multiperspectivity - fulfil, is to sensitise readers to the complexity of the observational layers and the perspectival conditionality of our knowledge about forms of the good life. It is certainly no coincidence that the philosopher Michael Hampe (2009) does not discuss the eponymous Perfect Life in a discur‐ sive-expository manner. Instead, he develops a literary thought experiment and a frame narrative within which he embeds, and juxtaposes, four very different philosophical conceptions. Rather than argumentatively developing a particular conception of the pursuit of happiness, Hampe designs his own narrative world with an imaginative philosophical canon. In an epilogue, the author explains 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life 95 why the formal juxtaposition of voices and perspectives is inextricably linked to the question of happiness and the good life: In this respect, the form of this book is related to one of the insights it seeks to pass on: that of Cavell, that the recognition of differences is the basic condition of happiness and that the inability to accept differences is the first step towards unhappiness. To be able to recognise, consider, and endure differences on issues that affect human life in a very ‘elementary’ way - albeit not for all of them! - is a form of peacefulness. (Hampe 2009: 274) When Hampe describes the literary procedure of multiperspectivity as “an appreciative showing of differences” he also illustrates in an exemplary way how closely literary forms or techniques of representation in the laboratory of literature are linked to questions of content about forms of the good life. We may speak of a semanticisation of literary forms in this context, since such representational procedures and formal structures function as independent carriers of meaning. In the concluding chapter, which bears the telling title “Polyphony”, the hitherto uncommented and unmediated contrasting of points of view are explored in conjunction with both Plato’s dialogues and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of polyphonic novelistic art (Hampe 2009: 265). The procedures of multiperspectivity and polyphony are characteristic both of literature and of Hampe’s description of his procedure as “an activity that is autotelic in the examination and description of all points of view, but that avoids adopting any particular one” (2009: 278). These procedures characterise in an exemplary way how important the consideration of literary forms is for an understanding of the forms of the good life as conceptualised in literature. In this way, the laboratory called ‘literature’ can also function as a self-re‐ flexive medium for generating metaknowledge about the limits, scope, and validity of different forms of the good life, as well as about the social and cultural relativity, contingency, and variability of knowledge of life and orders of knowl‐ edge. Even if he is primarily concerned with the reorientation of philosophy, Michael Hampe illustrates the questions that arise in such a formal-aesthetic and functional-historical approach to the forms of the good life through the literary representations and stagings of diverse perspectives and voices: “What is possible in this way of life or of thinking? What prices are paid for this to be possible? What is now excluded and what has become impossible in the long run? What can be changed? ” (2009: 277). The representation, reflection, critique, and construction of forms of the good life, thus, finally lead to the culturally controversial question of how we can and want to live in a future world with increasingly limited resources. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 96 Ansgar Nünning 6 How do We Want to Live? On the Cultural Relevance of Literary Research on Forms of the Good Life To briefly summarise the hypothesis implied in the metaphor of literature as a laboratory from a functional-historical point of view, literary works could not only be described as media for the construction of forms of the good life, but also as possible answers to the question posed by the philosopher Peter Bieri in the title of his book Wie wollen wir leben? (2011). Bieri, furthermore, gives a concise answer to the question of why literary works in particular are so insightful when it comes to possible forms of the good life: “What we read in literary texts opens up a spectrum of conceptual possibilities: We experience how diverse living human lives can be. We would not have thought of that before, and now the radius of our imagination has become larger” (Bieri 2011: 24). Literature thus expands the “sense of the possible, i.e. imagination, fantasy” (ibid.: 12). Especially with regard to the question of forms of the good life, literary works, perhaps like no other art form, sharpen that ‘sense of possibility’ through their depiction of the inherent plurality in ways of living. Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1978 [1930]) paraphrases this sentiment as follows: “Thus the sense of possibility could be defined as precisely the ability to see the good in everything and not to take what ‘is’ as more important than what ‘is not’” (Musil 1978: 16). Literature turns readers into a species that Musil aptly calls “possibility people” (ibid.: 16), who are, by nature, juxtaposed with what he calls “reality people” (ibid.: 17). The former neither simply accept the model of reality and socially prevailing forms of life as given, nor do they see it as a fact of life with no alternative. Instead, they question dominant ideas and imaginatively look for alternatives. Literature promotes the development of new possibilities and ideas that are “nothing but realities not yet born” (ibid.), and that literature, thereby, offer “a sense of possible reality” (ibid.) for alternative forms of the good life. The significance of the hypothesis and metaphor of literature as a laboratory for conceptions of identity (see Alber 2021) and for forms of the good life is based, in no small part, on the potential of literary works to cultivate such a sense of possibility in the reader. As these remarks on the literary representation, staging, and generation of forms of life have hopefully been able to show, the metaphor of literature as a laboratory draws attention both to the literary ways of generating forms of the good life and to the functional potential of literature to construct new ideas of what constitutes a successful life, while also disseminating the associated hierarchies of values throughout society. While the actual impact of certain literary works can only be clarified by empirical research into their reception and effects, the most urgent task for literary history and literary studies is 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life 97 to reconstruct the genealogy of forms and ideas of the good life, which have often been forgotten. A fascinating array of different forms of life has been, and continues to be, constructed in literary laboratories from antiquity, throughout the Middle Ages and Early Modern era to contemporary literature. Exploring this rich repository of forms of the good life that we find in the archive of literature does not require a “eudaimonic turn” (Pawelski and Moores 2014), but careful philological and narratological textual analyses as well as the contextualisation of these within cultural studies. As I have tried to show, the metaphor of literature as a laboratory lends such a project valuable impetus and generates new research questions. The cultural relevance of literary research into forms of the good life is, furthermore, based on its ability to contribute both to the recovery of intellectual complexity and to further reflection and debate on hierarchies of values. Since experiments in the laboratory of literature are characterised by a particular aesthetic, structural, and linguistic complexity, they are, on the one hand, excellently suited to “confronting readers with intellectual complexity” (Gumbrecht 2004: 115) and to opening up important facets of life knowledge. On the other hand, in a neo-liberal and late capitalist society oriented only towards digitalisation, efficiency, productivity, and quantifiable success parameters, cultural and life-science-oriented literary studies (Ette 2007; Nünning 2009a) can contribute to the reassessment of dominant value hierarchies by examining forms of the good life. In doing so, they can remind us of the usefulness of the otherwise seemingly useless (see Ordine 2013). Therefore, it seems meaningful to conceptualise literary works and the aesthetic experiences they facilitate as “valorization laboratories” (Citton 2017: 150) within which “the immersion in an aesthetic experience leads to the valorization of previously unexpected sensations and feelings, and/ or the modification of associated valorizations” (ibid.). Moreover, the historical variability and synchronic diversity of forms of the good life, stored in the archives of literature and cultural memory and tested in the literary laboratories of the present, reveal many options for overcoming the path of dependency on a modernist ideology of continual economic growth. The forms of life generated in the laboratory of literature can thus serve as a counterweight and perhaps even an antidote to the determinism of digital technologies that have shaped the dominant forms of contemporary life in the late capitalist age of “24/ 7”, which the art historian Jonathan Crary (2014) uses as an umbrella term for round-the-clock communication and consumption. In view of the empirically proven unsustainability of the dominant forms of life in late modernity and capitalism, the appeal in the title of Peter Sloterdijk’s 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 98 Ansgar Nünning book, Du mußt dein Leben ändern (You must change your life), is now directed at the vast majority of nations and their citizens. As “the diffusely ubiquitous and growing realisation that things cannot go on like this” (Sloterdijk 2009: 699) has now become irrefutable, the archive and laboratory of literature could serve as important sources for the development of new forms of the good life which we need for future reorientation: “Old forms are to be tested for their reusability, new forms are to be invented” (2009: 698). Not least in view of the proliferation of crises, crisis narratives, and crisis scenarios in the twenty-first century (see Nünning and Nünning 2020a), the radical uncertainty (see Heffernan 2021) about the future associated with them, and the increasing heteronomy of algorithms, the value of literature as a laboratory for the creation of new possibilities of thinking, speaking, and living can hardly be overestimated. The unstoppable rise of digital media has not only brought about a radically changed economy and ecology of attention (Citton 2017; Wu 2017), but has also significantly increased society’s dependence on ‘smart’ technology, deliberately brought about by the monopolistic digital corporations, to such an extent that more and more decisions are now made or, at least, predetermined by algorithms (see Alter 2017). In the context of the increasing call for resistance against the attention economy (cf. Odell 2019), it is precisely the slow reading of literary works and the preoccupation with the forms of the good life constructed by literature that could gain new significance. Recentring the value of literature as an archive, critique, and laboratory for long-forgotten, marginalised and new forms of life could not only aid in sensitising people to the contingency of socially dominant forms of life, but could also serve to present them with vivid alternative forms of life that allow them to regain control over their attention and increase their self-determination. As an essay on literature as a laboratory would be the worst possible place to answer the question “how do we want to live in the future? ” in a normative way, I leave the penultimate word to Peter Bieri, who, even without referring to the laboratory’s methods, succinctly summarises what literature always reminds us of and what it promotes: “For beings like us, who are concerned with self-determination, the category of the possible is of great importance: the idea that there is not only the one way, one’s own way, to lead a human life, but that there are many different and diverse ways of living” (Bieri 2011: 12, original emphasis). In any event, the diversity and multiplicity of forms of human life designed in the laboratories of literature remind us forcefully of the insight, forgotten in an era of TINA-politics (There Is No Alternative), that is succinctly summed up in the title of Harald Welzer’s book Alles könnte anders sein (2019), i.e. everything could be different. Since the prevailing forms of life in 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life 99 the late capitalist Western world have proven to be unsustainable because they destroy the very foundations of life on this planet, we would be well advised to look for new forms and models of the good life. Both the archives of literary history and the laboratories of contemporary literature - especially the booming genre of speculative fiction - offer rich and vivid material with a plurality of models for how to lead successful and good lives through which we can rediscover old forms, test alternatives, and find or invent new forms of the good life. For research into the open and vital question of what contemporary ideas of a good life might look like, there could hardly be a better source than the laboratories of literature in which forms of the good life are created and tested. If we want to get beyond the impasse of late capitalism and its ideologies of unlimited growth and 24/ 7 consumption, we arguably need to experiment with new and sustainable syntheses between the Western European traditions of eudaimonia and the art of living on the one hand, and indigenous concepts such as buen vivir and the more spiritual ways of life promoted in many Asian cultures on the other. One of the most important affordances of works of fiction is arguably their power to run through experiments in the laboratory called ‘literature’ and to explore vivid what if-scenarios in their fictional story-worlds. Thanks to their capacity to evoke a wide range of what if-scenarios, fictional narratives are uniquely equipped to enhance readers’ imagination and unlock “the power of possibility” (Liu and Noppe-Brandon 2009). What human beings need in this age of uncertainty (see Heffernan 2021), in which it is unclear what the future trajectories of human society could look like, are “agile imaginations that can shift in an instant from thinking on a scale of seconds to a scale of years” (Krznaric 2020: 32). In that respect fictional narratives can be considered as paradigm examples of how we can get from What Is to What If, to quote the felicitous title of Rob Hopkins’ (2019) thought-provoking book. One might even go so far as to argue that anyone interested in Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want, to quote the equally felicitous and telling subtitle of Hopkins’ book, would be hard put to find a medium better suited to that task than the laboratories of literary fictions. Since “human beings thrive on striving for meaningful future goals that gives their lives purpose and direction” (Krznaric 2020: 138), the experiments in life conducted in literary works can arguably foster human flourishing and well-being. The hypothesis that the laboratories of literature can extend the imagination is not the same as claiming that literary works can anticipate future develop‐ ments or that they have Cassandra-like prognostic or even prophetic potential. Although I agree with Jürgen Wertheimer’s opinion that the “prognostic poten‐ 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 100 Ansgar Nünning tial of literature, its seismic abilities are substantial” (Wertheimer 2021: 20-21), I should like to maintain that its value resides mainly in enhancing the horizon of possibility by running through experiments and possible developments. Therefore, in addition to having anticipatory quality or even prophetic potential, fictional narratives can serve as a laboratory in which new experiences and possible trajectories can be simulated, mentally preparing readers for various kinds of crises, developments, and scenarios. Moreover, as a laboratory of the mind, literature is not only uniquely equipped to foster the imagination but also to enhance key dimensions of what Frederik Pferdt (2024: 5) has called “a future-ready mindstate”, including “optimism, openness, curiosity, experimentation, and empathy” (ibid.). The experiments in life that readers encounter in the laboratory called ‘literature’ make them “mentally prepared to experiment and test solutions” (ibid.: 150). Fostering a habit of “perpetual experimentation” (ibid.: 119-150), the laboratory called ‘literature’ shares with other kinds of labs what David Edwards in his fascinating book about artscience labs calls their “core mission”: “they provide mechanisms to help ideas mature and eventually reach audiences outside the lab” (2010: 13). By systematically researching the forms and models of a good life generated by literature, the fields of philology, literary studies, and comparative literary studies can show what kind of knowledge of life literature contains and how this knowledge can be made accessible by scholarly means. At the same time, research on this topic could help to ensure that the study of literature might be given the high status it should justifiably claim in a future of an ever faster-changing informationand knowledge-based society. 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