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Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature ISBN 978-3-8233-8366-6 In the wake of the ‘ethical turn,’ there have been intense debates about the ethical dimension of literary works and the ways in which they serve to represent and disseminate values and norms. Against the backdrop of the current legitimation crisis of the humanities in an increasingly digital age, the present volume puts the value of literature itself onto the agenda of literary studies. The articles in this volume explore the cognitive, ethical, and cultural value of literature, demonstrating why literature matters and why it is worthwhile to read literary texts. The collection shows that literary fictions serve as important ways of meaning-, senseand world-making, and that they are powerful laboratories for revalorising our hierarchies of values and for fostering cultural resources of resilience. 36 Volume 36 (2020) The Value of Literature Edited by Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Volume 36 Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature General Editors Tobias Döring · Winfried Fluck Ansgar Nünning · Donald E. Pease 36 The Value of Literature Edited by Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning All rights including the rights of publication, distribution and sales, as well as the right to translation, are reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording, taping, or information and retrieval systems - without written permission of the publisher. © 2021 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, D-72070 Tübingen www.narr.de · eMail: info@narr.de CPI books GmbH, Leck ISBN 978-3-8233-8366-6 (Print) ISBN 978-3-8233-9366-5 (ePDF) ISBN 978-3-8233-0304-6 (ePub) ISSN 0723-0338 Editors Tobias Döring, LMU München, Department für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Schellingstr. 3, D-80799 München, Germany Winfried Fluck, Freie Universität Berlin, John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Lansstraße 5-9, D-14195 Berlin, Germany Ansgar Nünning, Universität Gießen, Institut für Anglistik, Otto-Behaghel-Straße 10, D-35394 Gießen, Germany Donald E. Pease, English Department, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA Advisory Board Jonathan Arac (University of Pittsburgh), Catherine Belsey (University of Wales), Marshall Brown (University of Washington), Ronald Shusterman (Université Jean Monnet), Werner Sollors (Harvard University), Arne Zettersten (University of Copenhagen) Contents Contributors Preface & Acknowledgements Introduction V era N üNNiNg & a Nsgar N üNNiNg Literature as Mind Changer, ‘Valorisation Laboratory,’ and Cultural Resource of Resilience 15 Conceptualising the Value of Literature The Cognitive Value of Literature J aN a lber Literature as Identity Laboratory 57 Storyworld Possible Selves and Boundary Expansions V era N üNNiNg The Value of Literature for the ‘Extension of our Sympathies’ 73 Twelve Strategies for the Direction of Readers’ Sympathy a lexaNdra s trohmaier On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy 99 William James’s Pluralism and the Knowledge of Literary Narratives a Ngela l ocatelli Literature as an Ecological Space of Self-Awareness, and Perspective-Taking 119 With a Reading of The Voyage Out s usaNNe K Naller When Law Meets Literature 131 The Emotional Value of Literary Texts The Social, Cultural, Ethical, and Ecological Value of Literature in the Twenty-First Century F rederiK t ygstrup Literature and Democracy 149 i sabel c apeloa g il The Risky NPV of Literature in Dos Passos and Pessoa 167 e lizabeth K oVach Collapsing the Economic and Creative Values of Contemporary Literature in Sheila Heti’s Motherhood and Ben Lerner’s 10: 04 185 m arioN g ymNich The Value of Literature in an Aging Society 201 J aN r upp Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing 219 s usaN a rNdt P(r)oEthics: 239 Imaginary In(ter)vention, FutureS, and the Agency of Dream*Hopes h ubert z apF Literature, Sustainability, and Survival 261 The Value of Literature and the Reader in Recent Approaches in Literary Studies m ichael b asseler The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction 277 Listening to the Ghosts of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo a lexaNder s cherr Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the Value of Literature 297 The Proleptic Agency of Texts c hristiNe s chwaNecKe Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age 315 Internet-Related Fiction and the Ecology of Attention J ürgeN s chlaeger Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? 339 Epilogue h eta p yrhöNeN Literature as a Lifeline 361 The Value of Literature for a Cognitively Non-Typical Reader Contents Contents 9 c oNtributors a lber , J aN . Institut für Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Romanistik RWTH Aachen Kármánstraße 17/ 19, 52062 Aachen, Germany a rNdt , s usaN Fakultät für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften (Anglistik / Amerikanistik) Universität Bayreuth Universitätsstraße 30, 95447 Bayreuth, Germany b asseler , m ichael International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen Alter Steinbacher Weg 38, 35394 Gießen, Germany g il , i sabel c apeloa Research Centre for Communication and Culture Catholic University of Portugal Palma de Cima, 1649-023 Lisbon, Portugal g ymNich , m arioN Institut für Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Keltologie Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn Regina-Pacis-Weg 5, 53113 Bonn, Germany K Naller , s usaNNe Zentrum für Kulturwissenschaften Universität Graz Attemsgasse 25/ II, 8010 Graz, Austria K oVach , e lizabeth International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen Alter Steinbacher Weg 38, 35394 Gießen, Germany l ocatelli , a Ngela Department of Languages and Comparative Literature University of Bergamo Sede di Rosate, Piazza Rosate 2, 24129 Bergamo, Italy N üNNiNg , a Nsgar . International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen Alter Steinbacher Weg 38, 35394 Gießen, Germany N üNNiNg , V era Anglistisches Seminar Universität Heidelberg Kettengasse 12, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany p yrhöNeN , h eta Department of Philosophy, History and Art Studies University of Helsinki P O Box 3/ Comparative Literature, Fabianinkatu 33, Fin-00014 Helsinki, Finland r upp , J aN Anglistisches Seminar Universität Heidelberg Kettengasse 12, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany s cherr , a lexaNder Institut für Anglistik Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen Otto-Behaghel-Straße 10 B, 35394 Gießen, Germany s chlaeger , J ürgeN Großbritannien-Zentrum / Centre for British Studies Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Mohrenstraße 60, 10117 Berlin, Germany s chwaNecKe , c hristiNe Anglistisches Seminar Universität Mannheim Schloss EW 280, 68131 Mannheim, Germany s trohmaier , a lexaNdra Institut für Germanistik Universität Graz Harrachgasse 21/ VI, 8010 Graz, Austria t ygstrup , F rederiK Department of Arts and Cultural Studies University of Copenhagen Karen Blixensvej 1, 2300 Copenhagen, Denmark z apF , h ubert Philologisch-Historische Fakultät (Anglistik / Amerikanistik) Universität Augsburg Universitätsstraße 10, 86159 Augsburg, Germany Contents 11 p reFace & a cKNowledgemeNts In the wake of the ‘ethical turn,’ there have been intense debates about the ethical dimension of literary works and the ways in which they serve to represent and disseminate values and norms Against the backdrop of the current legitimation crisis of the humanities in an increasingly digital age, the present volume puts the value of literature itself onto the agenda of literary studies The articles in this volume explore the cognitive, ethical, and cultural value of literature, demonstrating why literature matters and why it is worthwhile to read literary texts. The collection shows that literary fictions serve as important ways of meaning-, senseand world-making, and they are powerful laboratories for revalorising our hierarchies of values and for fostering cultural resources of resilience The articles in this volume testify to the great relevance of the topic both for the directions future research will take in literary studies and for the survival of the discipline itself *** The present volume would not have been possible without the international conference that was held at the conference centre of Justus Liebig University, the castle of Rauischholzhausen, in June 2019, at which experts in their respective fields discussed the value of literature from their respective vantage points This three-day event not only enabled and inspired very productive discussions between the contributors; it also fostered collaboration, dialogue, and exchange, and enhanced the coherence of the book as a whole We have very fond and vivid memories of this event, which underscored how essential collegiality, collaboration, and conviviality are for successful academic work Our cordial thanks go to Hannah Klaubert, who did a marvellous job in organising the conference from start to finish. We are very grateful to all the colleagues who contributed to the conference and who wrote articles for this volume for accepting our invitations, for being extremely cooperative, and for meeting all the deadlines We should also wish to thank the contributors for the fascinating exchange of ideas on a topic that is as important for the survival of literary studies as it is dear to all our hearts We are greatly indebted to our excellent research assistants Theresa Krampe and Dr Alexander Scherr for their invaluable help in editing the volume, proofreading the articles, and checking numerous details We should especially like to thank Theresa for the superb job she did in helping with the copy-editing and getting to grips with the technical aspects involved in preparing the collection for publication We should also like to thank our research assistants Jana Christoffel and Anna Tabouratzidis for their help in proofreading the articles in the page-proofs-stage, and Max Cannings and Rose Lawson for carefully proofreading the introduction Ansgar & Vera Nünning, March 2021 i NtroductioN 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 V era N üNNiNg & a Nsgar N üNNiNg Literature as Mind Changer, ‘Valorisation Laboratory,’ and Cultural Resource of Resilience Conceptualising the Value of Literature 1 Valuable, Compared to What? : Coming to Terms with the Value of Literature Although there has been a lot of research on the ways in which literary works represent and disseminate ethical values and cultural norms in the wake of the ‘ethical turn’ since the 1980s, the value of literature itself has only recently appeared on the agenda of literary studies While debates about values, evaluation, and the ethical dimension of literary works have been “central to critical theory for at least the past two hundred years,” 1 as Barbara Herrnstein Smith observes at the beginning of her excellent essay on the critical terms of “Value/ Evaluation,” in recent years we have witnessed the emergence of serious concerns about the value of literature in an increasingly digital age, and about the state of literary studies, and even the humanities at large, which have been faced with a whole series of crises In a pioneering essay, the renowned American critic and literary historian Marjorie Perloff delineated one of the earliest and most convincing attempts at responding to the “Crisis in the Humanities” and at “Reconfiguring Literary Study for the Twenty-first Century,” as the title and subtitle succinctly put it Perloff not only rejects practical solutions revolving around suggestions for job prospects; she also questions the prevailing assumption that “we have a clear sense of what the humanities do and what makes them valuable ” 2 Perloff does an excellent job of reminding us what the term ‘humanities’ means today and of what the real strengths of the study of literature are or could be Moreover, her overall diagnosis that one of the main problems is the “bad fit between an outdated 1 Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Value/ Evaluation,” Critical Terms for Literary Studies, eds Frank Lentricchia/ Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1995), 177 2 Marjorie Perloff, Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, 2004), 2 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 curriculum and the actual interest of potential students,” 3 may well be as true today as it was almost twenty years ago However, we would go even further and argue that the fit has become worse rather than better during the last two decades, in two ways: Firstly, literary studies has failed to catch up with many of the new concerns that have emerged since the millennium; secondly, it has so far failed to respond convincingly to the challenging debates about the uses of literature and the usefulness of literary and cultural studies Moreover, we are also convinced that Perloff is spot-on in claiming that the discipline has largely failed to come up with good reasons for why reading and studying literature still matters today: “But without clear-cut notions of why it is worthwhile to read literary texts, whether by established or marginalised writers, in the first place, the study of ‘literature’ becomes no more than a chore, a way of satisfying distribution requirements ” 4 Someone who has arguably done more than any other scholar to answer the question of why it is worthwhile to read literary texts and to reconfigure literary studies for the 21st century is the American literary theorist Rita Felski In a series of important interventions and highly stimulating books, Felski has not only redirected attention from the hitherto prevailing forms of critique to other modes of reading and to positive Uses of Literature, to quote the felicitous title of her ‘manifesto’ that was published in 2008 In her books, she has also provided some of the most convincing answers to the question that she raised in the introduction to her book The Limits of Critique (2015): “Literary studies is currently facing a legitimation crisis, thanks to a sadly depleted language of value that leaves us struggling to find reasons why students should care about Beowulf and Baudelaire Why is literature worth bothering with? ” 5 In her interventions and manifestoes, Felski has managed to outline a new vision for literary studies that has redirected scholarly attention away from critique towards the affordances and uses of literature Taking our cue from Rita Felski and other researchers engaged in arguing for the usefulness of literature and the arts, we should also like to make a modest attempt to answer the two questions of why literature is still worth bothering with in the 21st century and how the value of literature can be conceptualised By providing answers to these questions, we also hope to make some suggestions as to how literary studies could be reconfigured in ways that would enhance its chances of coping with its current legitimation crisis 3 Ibid , 15 4 Ibid 5 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago, IL/ London: U of Chicago P, 2015), 5 16 V era N üNNiNg & a Nsgar N üNNiNg 17 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 Conceptualising the Value of Literature and securing a blossoming future Acknowledging the changed, and changing, contexts in which literature is embedded and the pressing concerns that have emerged in the wake of the catastrophes and crises that have shaped the new millennium should be complemented by a positive vision of what makes literature so valuable and what literary studies could look like and what it might have to offer At first glance, one might jump to the conclusion that in our current age of multiple crises and catastrophes, ranging from environmental crises and the spread of infectious diseases to growing divisions within societies, that the reading and study of literature might be a mere luxury Moreover, in a world increasingly dominated and shaped by digital communication and new media, skim-reading has become the new norm, while the kind of deep or literary reading seems in danger of becoming a relic of the past 6 In today’s capitalist and neoliberal societies, the value of literature, the arts and philosophy can no longer be taken for granted Although there have been some powerful pleas for the indispensability of literature and philosophy like the Italian critic Nuccio Ordine’s book The Usefulness of the Useless, in a world largely dominated by digital and social media that generates clicks and money, the cultural and financial value of literature is difficult to gauge. There may well be agreement that literary value cannot be measured by quantifiable data, and that it is defined by several intersecting institutions, and not just by ‘the economy,’ but there is no consensus about what the defining qualities of literature are Literary critics, theorists, and philosophers have been engaged in an uphill battle in their attempts to delineate the specifics of aesthetic value and the value of literature at large Due to what Rita Felski called “a sadly depleted language of value,” in today’s age, more than ever before, the value of anything seems to be equated with its price More than a hundred years ago, Oscar Wilde’s Lord Henry already quipped: “Nowadays, people know the price of everything and the value of nothing ” 7 This cynical statement seems to be even more applicable to the 21st century than to the 19th in that the price of everything is defined by facts, figures, and numbers: Money and price tags seem to have become the only true measure of value Curiously enough, however, even some scholars working on the value of literature agree on the importance of neoliberalist definitions of value, stressing that readers’ and authors’ notions of literature and literary value are large- 6 For a detailed exploration of the impact that the distraction of digital technology and social media has on our changing reading patterns, see Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (New York: HarperCollins, 2018) 7 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890; London et al : OUP, 1974), 46; Wilde reused this phrase to define cynics in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 18 V era N üNNiNg & a Nsgar N üNNiNg ly shaped by capital 8 Joshua Clover and Christopher Nealon even go so far as to argue that “the division of the political and the economic into discrete domains is a fetish of bourgeois thought” and it is impossible “to separate aesthetic value from its economic counterpart ” 9 In this framework, the only question concerning the value of literature is the negotiation of the relations between cultural and economic definitions of literary value. Above all, value is related to capital While we certainly do not deny the relevance of economic factors in this context, 10 we will use a broader frame for the conceptualisation of literary value and seek to establish a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the value of literature, one that is not divorced from the cultural context, but that still aims at analytically distinguishing between societal domains and different definitions of value even though these are, in practice, intricately interrelated With this in mind, we are going to use the following two approaches: Firstly, we will use insights from several disciplines in order to achieve a better understanding of the meanings of the term ‘value’ that is much more multifaceted than a look at the discourse of economics would make us believe; secondly, we shall focus on specific conceptions of the value of literature that are advanced in different theoretical approaches to the study of literature In addition, many articles in this volume explore the ways in which specific genres or literary works challenge and negotiate neoliberalist and other conceptions of literary value In the remainder of this introduction, we will attempt to come to terms with the manifold value of literature by delineating several angles of enquiry The second section will provide a brief overview of recent conceptualisations of the intrinsic value of literature In section three, we will turn our attention to the extrinsic value of literary works, a complex issue that has been discussed at great length and in a host of ways by philosophers, psychologists, and literary critics Focusing on some of the most important approaches to this topic, we will explore conceptions of the cognitive value of literature (section 3), the ethical value of literature (section 4), and broader notions of the cultural value of literature (section 5). In section 6 we will take a look at the significance of lit- 8 See e g Emily Johansen, “Neoliberalism and Contemporary Anglophone Fiction,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 22 August 2017, https: / / oxfordre com/ view/ 10 1093/ acrefore/ 9780190201098 001 0001/ acrefore-9780190201098-e-185, n p 9 Joshua Clover/ Christopher Nealon, “Literary and Economic Value,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 27 July 2017, https: / / oxfordre com/ view/ 10 1093/ acrefore/ 9780190201098 001 0001/ acrefore-9780190201098-e-123, n p 10 In this volume, Isabel Gil’s and Elizabeth Kovach’s articles are concerned with exploring the collapse between economic and creative values in contemporary culture 19 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 Conceptualising the Value of Literature erature with regard to more encompassing notions of value, one that includes such values as ‘freedom’ and ‘benevolence,’ a notion that is at the centre of public debates about the ‘crisis of values’ in postmodern societies. In the final part we will provide a brief overview of the structure of this volume and of the articles that follow (section 7) 2 The Aesthetic Experience: On the Intrinsic Value of Literature Any discussion of the value of literature depends on the underlying definition of literature, and this has, of course, changed quite substantially throughout the centuries and differs from culture to culture Since the end of the eighteenth century, new ideas concerning the autonomy of literature began to gain currency in Europe, freeing authors of literary works from the obligation to ‘delight and instruct’ and the concomitant expectation that the usefulness of literary works resided in their potential to teach their readers moral truths or practical knowledge Ever since the Romantic era, there has been an implicit tension between what can for convenience’s sake be dubbed the intrinsic and extrinsic value of literature, between the esteem in which literary works are held on the basis of their intrinsic properties and the value that is attached to literature on the basis of “the properties that an entity possesses in relation to other properties ” 11 Recent publications on the value of literature tend to focus on the extrinsic, derivative, or instrumental value of literature, sharing a belief that the reception of literature will entail positive consequences 12 The widespread belief in the intrinsic value of literature is closely connected to debates about the aesthetic specificity of literature. This can be traced back at least to Aristotle and his notion of literature as dealing with the realm of the possible rather than the actual or real In the early nineteenth century a complex cultural change emerged in the ways in which works of literature and the arts were valorised, culminating in the conception of l’art pour l’art, and the movements associated with the aesthetes and decadents of the Victorian fin de siècle. The views of the latter were popularised in Great Britain and North America by Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, whose collection of aphorisms on the nature and value of literature in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1899) provoked the Victorian establishment, challenging as they did any belief in the moral usefulness of literary works According to the conceptualisation of literature as being autonomous, the value of fiction is 11 Rafe McGregor, The Value of Literature (London/ New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016), 8 12 See, for instance, the volumes edited by Rüdiger Ahrens/ Laurenz Volkmann, by Marion Gymnich/ Ansgar Nünning, and by Jan Alber et al 20 V era N üNNiNg & a Nsgar N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 inextricably connected to the specific and unique properties of literature and distinct from that of all other texts The intrinsic value of literature is often identified as its aesthetic value. Though any work can be read for a variety of purposes that are extrinsic to literature - such as acquiring knowledge about foreign countries, gaining insights into the lifeworld of earlier periods or other cultures - notions about the intrinsic value tend to be linked to the aesthetic, formal, or stylistic quality of literature, which distinguishes literary works from other text-types or domains of writing, such as factual narratives, documentaries, journalism, or academic writing. There are two basic ways of defining this value: one line of argument is based on the belief in specific intrinsic properties of literary works, while the other proceeds from the recognition of the uniqueness of the aesthetic experience that is offered during the reception of works of art 13 Frequently, however, these two perspectives are merged, especially when theorists argue that it is the aesthetic specificity of literature which provides the basis for an aesthetic appreciation that is equivalent to the intrinsic value of literature Martha Nussbaum and Rafe McGregor, for instance, stress the uniqueness of literary works, which is based on the inseparability of form and content: Literary form cannot be detached from its content, which means that the content cannot be extrapolated or expressed in any other way without major changes to the meaning of a work A mere summary of a literary text or an extraction of its ‘message’ is therefore not an adequate rendition of its content, which cannot be expressed in any other form than that embodied in the forms of a literary work In this view, the intrinsic value of literature depends on this inseparability of form and content, which enables a reading experience of “literary appreciation, the evaluation of literature qua literature ” 14 This kind of appreciative reading is often regarded as the key to the intrinsic or aesthetic value of literature, which is based on the unity of form and content The aesthetic value of a given text thus resides in the potential to give rise to an aesthetic experience characterised by pleasure in the appreciation of a verbal work of art: “Literary value is the value of the experience of literary appreciation ” 15 The lineage of this notion of literature and literary value, which can be traced back to Kant and Schiller, is long and impressive Virginia Woolf’s essays, for instance, endorse this view of literature, stressing the unity of form and content as a precondition for a specific kind of reading 13 Discussions of the intrinsic properties of literary works frequently focus on the relation between form and content See e g Richard Eldridge, “Form and Content: An Aesthetic Theory of Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 25 (1985), 303-316 14 McGregor, The Value of Literature, viii; see also ibid , 44 f and passim 15 Ibid , viii 21 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 Conceptualising the Value of Literature experience which is an end in itself and entails rapture 16 At the same time, Woolf also acknowledges that there are different kinds of reading, and that literary works can also be read in a non-literary way, for instance with a view to gaining knowledge or prestige Instead of neatly separating the intrinsic dimension from the extrinsic value of literature, some thinkers claim that the cognitive or ethical (extrinsic) value of literature is part and parcel of its aesthetic (i e intrinsic) value Since aesthetic appreciation depends on the intrinsic properties of literature, it is difficult - if not impossible - to detach this aesthetic appreciation from the cognitive processes that form a part of the mental response to literary works If literary form and moral or thematic content cannot be separated, then it can be argued that the unique knowledge conveyed by fictional works is the basis of the intrinsic value of literature, too 17 A similar view is put forward by John Joughin and Simon Malpas, who emphasise that literature can have social or political benefits because of its specific aesthetic qualities. 18 3 Literature as a Mind Changer: Gauging the Cognitive Value of Literature The study of the cognitive value of literature has been one of the most productive fields of research on the potential functions of literary works for the last two decades or so The cognitive value of literary works is often held to be inextricably tied to their aesthetic quality, thus constituting an interface between the intrinsic and extrinsic value of literature The cognitive value of literature has been conceptualised in a variety of ways, for instance with regard to the potential of literature to provide a specific kind of knowledge or to help readers clarify their ideas and attitudes A different and more promising approach to the cognitive value of fiction is pursued by psychologists and narratologists who study how reading fiction can enhance abilities of social cognition. A specific aspect of this, the value of fiction for changing readers’ ingrained paths of automated perceptions, was already recognised by the Russian formalists at the beginning of the twentieth century Developing the important concept of defamiliarisation, Viktor Shklovsky famously argued that literature serves to make the familiar appear strange, showing things in 16 Cf Vera Nünning, “‘A Theory of the Art of Writing’: Virginia Woolf’s Aesthetics from the Point of View of Her Critical Essays,” English Studies 98 8 (2017), 978-994 17 See McGregor, The Value of Literature, 18f , 38 f , 44, 126, and passim 18 See John J Joughin/ Simon Malpas, “The New Aestheticism: An Introduction,” The New Aestheticism, eds eid (Manchester/ New York: Manchester UP, 2003), 1-19 22 V era N üNNiNg & a Nsgar N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 a new and unexpected way Prolonging the process of perception, literature can enable readers to break out of automatic perceptual routines, and to see, appreciate, and evaluate things in a new way 19 The cognitive value of fiction is often defined by specifying the kind of knowledge that literary works can offer Though many readers take away some kind of information after reading a literary work and enlarge their store of knowledge, say, about the Tudor period by reading works such as Hilary Mantel’s Woolf Hall or about the layout of the streets of London by reading works as diverse as Arthur Canon Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, this is not what scholars have in mind when they explore ‘the knowledge of or in literature,’ which is usually situated beyond the realm of everyday facts 20 Scholars from different disciplines base their analyses on the idea that literature can be “a potential source of knowledge rather than just an object of knowledge ” 21 This notion has gained some traction in recent years Literature is increasingly regarded as a medium of generating rather than representing knowledge Three social scientists have even gone so far as to claim that literary representations can be seen as a “source of authoritative knowledge ” 22 As Roy Sommer notes, there is a growing appreciation of “the insights made possible by and through fiction.” 23 Rather than turning to literature for information or knowledge, however, readers frequently assume that literary works can give them new kinds of experiences and insights into a ‘higher truth,’ e g making them aware of problems and ideas that they had not reflected on 19 See Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, eds Lee T Lemon/ Marion J Reis (1917; Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1965), 3-24, especially 12-13 It must be stressed, however, that the Russian formalists were concerned with the intrinsic, aesthetic quality of literature - which is sometimes difficult to separate neatly from the extrinsic value of literary works 20 See, for instance, the discussions in and contributions to Zeitschrift für Germanistik XVII (2007, 2008), which was triggered by Tilmann Köppe’s article “Vom Wissen in Literatur,” Zeitschrift für Germanistik XVII (2007), 398-410 See also Ottmar Ette, “Literaturwissenschaft als Lebenswissenschaft: Eine Programmschrift im Jahr der Geisteswissenschaften,” Lendemains 125 (2007), 7-32 For a concise and precise overview of current positions on ‘the knowledge of literature,’ see Michael Basseler, An Organon of Life Knowledge: Genres and Functions of the Short Story in North America (Bielefeld: transcript, 2019), 51-64 21 Felski, The Limits of Critique, 84 22 David Lewis/ Dennis Rodgers/ Michael Woolcock, “The Fiction of Development: Literary Representation as a Source of Authoritative Knowledge,” Journal of Developmental Studies 2 (2008), 198-216 23 Roy Sommer, “‘Reading form’: A Narratological Guide to Textual Analysis,” Methods of Textual Analysis in Literary Studies: Approaches, Basics, Model Interpretations, eds Vera Nünning/ Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2020), 108 23 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 Conceptualising the Value of Literature before The cognitive value of literature is thus closely intertwined with the kinds of experiences and of knowledge that are represented in, disseminated through, and produced by literary works Cognitivists are specifically interested in the unique kind of knowledge offered by literary works, which they deem to be part and parcel of the aesthetic and intrinsic value of literature They claim that both knowledge and the value of literature are implied in the aesthetic appreciation of literary works Literature “is valuable because it is a source of knowledge […] bearing upon the extra-fictional world.” 24 There are different approaches to the kind of theoretical or practical knowledge that can be gained by reading literary works Noël Carroll, for instance, argues that the knowledge readers can acquire through reading fictional works is situated on a higher level of abstraction, claiming that works of art have the capacity to yield “propositional knowledge about the conditions of application of our concepts ” 25 Other scholars proceed from the insight that literature, especially narrative fiction, provides non-propositional knowledge which cannot be reduced to any other kind of knowledge 26 This kind of knowledge has important epistemic functions, since propositional knowledge of general rules and principles alone cannot lead to an understanding of human life worlds or psychological states Instead, one has to take into account the importance and complexity of specific situations, to which several - often contradictory - guiding principles or maxims can be applied In literary works we are usually confronted with complex characters and situations that eschew simple descriptions and thus cannot be expressed by declarative sentences The truths offered by literary works can only be expressed by showing rather than telling, by representation rather than abstract conceptualisation This kind of non-propositional knowledge acquires epistemic importance at the point where the explanatory potential of concepts, reasons, and logical statements ends 27 24 David Davies, Aesthetics and Literature (Ann Arbor, MI: Continuum, 2007), 143; for key tenets of cognitivism, see McGregor, The Value of Literature, 18 f , 97 f , 126 25 Noël Carroll, Art in Three Dimensions (Oxford: OUP, 2012), 189 26 Cf e g Alexandra Strohmaier’s article in this volume; she demonstrates how the epistemic value of literature played an important role in William James’ philosophy of pluralism 27 See Christiane Schildknecht, “‘Ein seltsam wunderbarer Anstrich’? Nichtpropositionale Erkenntnis und ihre Darstellungsformen,” Darstellung und Erkenntnis. Beiträge zur Rolle nichtpropositionaler Erkenntnisformen in der deutschen Philosophie und Literatur nach Kant, ed Brady Bowman (Paderborn: mentis, 2007), 32: “Mit diesem sehr weiten Begriff des Nichtpropositionalen sind Formen des Erkennens gemeint, deren epistemische Relevanz dort beginnt, wo […] Erkenntnis prinzipiell nicht oder nicht in einem ihr adäquaten Sinne ausgesagt werden kann und damit in Opposition zur propositionalen, d h aussageartigen Struktur des Urteils bzw des Satzes steht […]: Klarheit (nicht 24 V era N üNNiNg & a Nsgar N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 The cognitive value of literature, in this sense, lies precisely in the fact that literary works do not present abstract principles and generalisations, as in the case of many works of philosophy and sociology Instead, they can help us to “grasp […] complex and frequently fine-tuned qualitative distinctions, [and avoid] that obtuseness [that] results from a premature reduction of these to quantitative distinctions ” 28 In this conceptualisation, the value of literature resides in its providing a kind of practical (implicit and tacit) non-propositional knowledge that we need in order to make sense of our lives and act responsibly Through reading literary works, we can thus obtain “knowledge for living,” 29 addressing questions that are important for human beings who want to live their lives consciously and in an ethically responsible manner In a somewhat similar vein, Terry Eagleton observes: “Art […] represents an alternative mode of cognition to Enlightenment rationality, clinging as it does to the specific without thereby relinquishing the whole.” 30 Through the combination of this alternative mode of cognition and the focus on specific situations and individual characters, literature can also be an important means of fostering readers’ insights into their own selves Noël Carroll and Jèmeljan Hakemulder, for instance, stress that reading literature can lead to (self)-clarification, thus echoing and sharing an idea already expressed by Marcel Proust Proust explained that he hoped his readers would be “the readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his customers - […] I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves ” 31 Being confronted with intense scenes, images, or metaphors and with the behaviour, feelings, and thoughts of vividly delineated char- Deutlichkeit) der Begriffe; Vermittlung, Aufweisen bzw Zeigen (nicht Mitteilung, Aussage bzw. Sagen) und Vergegenwärtigung bzw. Versinnlichung (nicht begriffliche Bestimmung) des jeweils Gemeinten; Adäquatheitsanspruch (nicht Wahrheitsanspruch); analogisches (nicht logisches) Denken.” On the specificity of aesthetic non-propositional forms, see also ibid , 36: “erfahrungsnicht objektgebundene Art der Individuierung, präsentationale Funktion sinnlicher Qualitäten und nicht-begrifflicher Gehalt von Erfahrung ” 28 Martha Nussbaum, “Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and Literature 22 (1988), 348 29 Ottmar Ette, “Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Studies as Science for Living,” PMLA 125 4 (2010), 986 30 Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2012), 66; see also ibid , 64: “Literary works represent a kind of praxis or knowledge-in-action, and are similar in this way to the ancient conception of virtue They are forms of moral knowledge, but in a practical rather than theoretical sense ” 31 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. Vol. 6: Time Regained & A Guide to Proust, trans Andreas Mayor/ Terence Kilmartin (London: Vintage, 1996), 432 25 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 Conceptualising the Value of Literature acters that may well appear alien and strange at first can lead to moments of insight and trigger “self-scrutiny” and “heightened self-understanding ” 32 Similarly, Hakemulder has tested the notion that reading literature or, more precisely, the kind of perspective taking prompted by literary works, can involve self-clarification. 33 Carroll proposes a wider understanding of “clarificationism,” claiming that readers can gain insight into virtue concepts and thereby clarify their moral understanding 34 Moreover, several psychologists and literary scholars proceed from the presupposition that the cognitive value of fictional works is based on the concept of the truth of coherence In this perspective on the value of literature, the similarity between the rules governing the real world and the storyworlds of fiction or the experiential worlds in poetry makes it possible for readers to simulate the cognitive processes that they need in order to deal with the challenges of their daily lives Readers can thus have ‘vicarious’ experiences, enlarge their knowledge about the human mind, and hone their social skills by reading literary works 35 The value of literature for enhancing readers’ cognitive abilities has been explored empirically by psychologists like Keith Oatley and Raymond Mar, but literary scholars specialised in cognitive narratology have also shed new light on this issue, drawing on insights gained in the cognitive sciences As early as 2003, David Herman demonstrated that fiction serves as a “Tool for Thinking,” disseminating means for making sense of a chaotic wealth of stimuli In the wake of Oatley, Mar, and Herman, numerous scholars have explored the potential of fictional works enhancing readers’ abilities of social cognition Summarising a wealth of empirical studies on the effect of stories on readers’ social cognitive abilities, Katrina Fong and her colleagues conclude that “narrative fiction is associated with greater social ability. […] [T]his association appears to be a reliable finding, observed across populations.” 36 32 Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 24, 30 33 Jèmeljan Hakemulder, The Moral Laboratory: Experiments Examining the Effects of Reading Literature on Social Perception and Moral Self-Concept (Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2000), 92-95, 140 34 Noël Carroll, “Art, Narrative, and Moral Understanding,” Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, ed Jerrold Levinson (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), 128; cf also McGregor, The Value of Literature, 24 35 For a brilliant summary of the results of experiments and possible reasons for the enhancement of social cognitive skills by means of (fictional) stories, see Keith Oatley, “Fiction: Simulation of Social Worlds,” Trends in Cognitive Science 20 8 (2016), 618-628 36 Katrina Fong/ Justin Mullin/ Raymond Mar, “What You Read Matters: The Role of Fiction Genre in Predicting Interpersonal Sensitivity,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts 7 4 (2013), 374 26 V era N üNNiNg & a Nsgar N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 These insights about how the power and value of literature can foster mental processes crucial for social cognition have been substantiated by recent research in narrative theory, especially the branch known as ‘cognitive narratology ’ This area of study provides a link between the cognitive sciences and literary studies, proceeding from the assumption that there is a reciprocal relation between reader and text: Readers use their cognitive schemata in order to make sense of the features of the text and to generate a mental model of its content. In addition, these schemata can be practised and refined during reading Cognitive narratologists frequently analyse how the potential of literature can instigate specific cognitive processes. 37 More recently, there has been a pronounced interest in the empirical study of readers’ reactions to specific books or passages from books. In this volume, Jan Alber delineates the extent to which empirical studies can validate the hypotheses that literature can help readers to try out possible self-images and serve as a laboratory for the modification of their identities. Another aspect of the cognitive value of literature that deserves to be mentioned is the persuasive power that literary works can exert on readers’ attitudes and beliefs Melanie C Green and her colleagues have demonstrated in a host of experiments that fictional stories can - if read in a state of immersion - change readers’ beliefs Far from merely ‘suspending their disbelief,’ readers tend to accept what they read when they are immersed in a work of fiction, thus tacitly acquiring a kind of ‘knowledge’ and unconsciously integrating it into their cultural encyclopaedia While the value of literature has often been conceptualised as a kind of subversion, as the disruption, disorientation, and challenge of common beliefs and practices, reading fiction can just as well be a means of reinforcing ideologies, propaganda, or stereotypes Although we need much more research before we can really get to grips with the persuasive potential of literature, there can be little doubt that the cognitive value of literature and its impact on readers’ beliefs is even more pervasive than is usually assumed Moreover, a great part of the cognitive value of literature resides in the fact that reading literary fiction can foster empathy and hone readers’ skills of understanding other human beings As Suzanne Keen has shown in her monograph Empathy and the Novel, the immersion in literary fiction can have a wide range of empathetic effects on readers, inducing in them the feeling of narrative empathy 38 By inviting readers to take the perspective of characters, 37 See e g Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 2006) Zunshine focuses on the potential of literature to practice “theory of mind”-abilities 38 See Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: OUP, 2007) 27 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 Conceptualising the Value of Literature literary works enhance people’s abilities to understand the beliefs, feelings, wishes, and intentions of others In order to understand the complex constellation of characters and the rich storyworlds delineated in novels, readers have to use cognitive abilities necessary for making sense of social relations and human interaction 39 More specifically, novels offer ideal conditions for practising perspective taking because they often not only juxtapose a broad range of characters and their perspectives, but are also often told from different points of view Therefore, readers inevitably engage in shifting perspectives and adopting the points of view of fictional individuals, whether they are aware of it or not Summing up the cognitive value of literature, one could go so far as to argue that reading fiction is one of the most powerful ways of changing human minds, in a positive rather than a harmful direction, one might add While the renowned British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield has provided a detailed account of how digital technologies are leaving their mark on our brains and changing (especially young) people’s minds, 40 recent research in literary studies has shown that reading literary works can have a wide range of salutary effects and benefits: Reading fiction can change readers’ beliefs, foster their empathic feelings, hone their skills at perspective taking, and thus improve their abilities in understanding others 41 4 Literary Works as ‘Valorisation Laboratories’: Exploring the Ethical Value of Literature No less important than its potential for fostering readers’ cognitive abilities is literature’s ethical value, the more so because these two dimensions are closely intertwined The fact that readers can acquire non-propositional knowledge and enhance their social cognitive skills through reading already points to the close relation between the cognitive and ethical value of literature Advanced 39 For similar results for the improvement of empathy, see Raymond A Mar/ Keith Oatley/ Jordan B Peterson, “Exploring the Link between Reading Fiction and Empathy: Ruling Out Individual Differences and Examining Outcomes,” Communications 34 (2009), 407-428, especially 407-408; for theory-of-mind abilities, see David C Kidd/ Emanuele Castano, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” Science 342 (2013), 377-381 40 See Susan Greenfield, Mind Change: How Digital Technologies Are Leaving Their Mark on Our Brains (London: Penguin, 2014) 41 For a detailed account based on research in neuroscience and psychology, see Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014) 28 V era N üNNiNg & a Nsgar N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 cognitive and social skills are, after all, preconditions for making sound ethical deliberations and for moral actions Since literature offers insights into the working of the human mind and allows readers to have vicarious experiences of the complexity of human behaviour in various situations, reading fiction can invite readers to exercise their ethical dispositions Conceptualisations of the value of literature can thus be located on a scale between the poles of cognition and ethics Some of the most pertinent definitions of the functions of literature are based on a combination of its cognitive value and the ethical value of reading: The conceptualisation of literature as a thought experiment, the power of literature to create possible worlds, its potential to stimulate readers’ imagination, and its ability to foster their sense of possibility We should like to take a brief look at these four notions of literature in order to shed additional light on the value of literary works and the cultural work they do The conception of literature as “a vast laboratory for thought experiments,” 42 proposed by eminent philosophers like Catherine Elgin and Paul Ricoeur, among others, is situated squarely between a cognitive and ethical understanding of the value of literature. This conceptualisation of fiction has a long tradition, and it has been criticised just as fervently by some scholars as it has been defended by others. Claims for the relevance of fiction as a thought experiment are built on the insight that literature provides non-propositional knowledge, which defies abstract definition, and deals with the specific. Catherine Z Elgin describes a thought experiment as “an imaginative exercise designed to determine what would happen if certain conditions were met ” 43 Literary works can be understood as aesthetically created thought experiments which project complex storyworlds with a wide range of characters, thus testing different models of viable or good forms of life This is what makes literature so valuable, since it is exactly the kind of knowledge necessary for ethical reasoning in daily life Literary works enable the reader to have new experiences and to acquire non-propositional knowledge, which is tied to specific circumstances, while also allowing insights into other perspectives and into the perspectivity inherent in all perception Moreover, it is worthwhile remembering that “adopting an alien perspective can be epistemically rewarding even if the adopted perspective is not accurate ” 44 As thought experiments, fictional works “advance understanding by exemplify- 42 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans Kathleen Blamey (1990; Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992), 148 43 Catherine Z Elgin, “The Laboratory of the Mind,” A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge, eds John Gibson et al (New York: Routledge, 2007), 47 44 Ibid , 52 29 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 Conceptualising the Value of Literature ing features and playing out their consequences They constitute imaginative settings in which particular constellations of features are salient and display their significance. They thus afford reason to think that we would do well […] to consider such features salient elsewhere ” 45 The fact that literature has the power of creating possible worlds also shows the close connection between the cognitive and ethical value of literary works The capacity of literature to make possible worlds is crucial, for instance, for Umberto Eco’s notion of the novel as “a machine for producing possible worlds ” 46 Engaging with the possible storyworlds of fictions, readers are induced to imagine alternatives to the real world The novelist Ali Smith may have this in mind when she claims that literature “allows us not just to imagine an unreal different world but also a real different world ” 47 As testified by its ability to generate possible worlds, literature is one of the most important means of stimulating readers’ imagination A great part of the value of literature resides in the fact that it cultivates the imagination, encouraging human beings to make full use of their creative abilities Writers as different as Virginia Woolf and Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, concur in the belief that reading literary works is characterised by a surprisingly high degree of freedom 48 In her essays, Woolf insisted again and again that the highest task of authors is to inspire the imagination of readers and to “lay an egg” in their minds, an egg that will develop into something which writers cannot control 49 In this volume, the value of literature for stimulating readers’ imagination and inciting them to change their attitudes and actions is discussed by Susan Arndt, who emphasises the importance of dreams for envisioning and bringing about alternative futures By fostering and refining readers’ imagination, literary works also boost their sense of possibility Literary works do not merely depict the real world as it is, but rather delineate emergent forms of life and imagine alternative life-forms, thus raising important questions about which forms of life and world-models can be regarded as desirable or valuable 50 By doing so, literary 45 Ibid , 47 46 Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1984), 246 (italics in the original) 47 Ali Smith, Artful (London: Penguin, 2013), 188 48 Cf Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? Trans Bernard Frechtman (1949; London: Routledge, 2001), 37 49 Virginia Woolf, “Fishing,” The Moment and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1947), 176 50 For a detailed exploration of these issues, see the articles in Michael Basseler/ Daniel Hartley/ Ansgar Nünning, eds , Emergent Forms of Life in Anglophone Literature: Conceptual Frameworks and Critical Analyses (Trier: WVT, 2015) 30 V era N üNNiNg & a Nsgar N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 fiction extends and fosters what the German novelist Robert Musil called the ‘sense of possibility,’ which he pitted against the sense of reality According to Musil, the sense of possibility is a creative disposition that allows human beings to imagine alternative possibilities and scenarios to what is really the case in the real world: “So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not ” 51 Fostering readers’ imagination, the value of literature thus resides in its power to turn readers into a new kind of species that Musil calls “possibilitarians” (Möglichkeitsmenschen), human beings who show appreciation and respect for possible, albeit as yet not realised, states of affairs The cultivation of this sense of possibility is closely related to ethics in a book devoted to the ethical and cognitive value of narratives written by the Finnish narrative theorist Hanna Meretoja She reaches a number of conclusions which are pertinent not only to narratives, but also to the understanding of the value of literary works For Meretoja, the potential of narratives “to cultivate and expand our sense of the possible is ethically crucial ” 52 According to Meretoja, this expansion of the sense of the possible is of vital importance for a number of other properties and functions of narratives, which can (2) contribute to personal and cultural self-understanding; (3) provide an ethical mode of understanding other lives and experiences non-subsumptively in their singularity; (4) create, challenge, and transform narrative in-betweens; (5) develop our perspective-awareness and our capacity for perspective-taking; and (6) function as a mode of ethical inquiry 53 All of these functions can similarly be fulfilled by non-narrative literary works such as poems or plays, which serves to underscore the great value of literature in general and not just of narrative fiction. The ethical value of literary works has also been defined in more general terms, emphasising e g literature’s potential to provide insights into moral (and immoral) human behaviour and its power to foster the abilities and knowledge that readers need in order to act as responsible citizens in a democracy In The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, Wayne C Booth, one of the founding fathers of ethical criticism and narrative theory (avant la lettre), for instance cogently argued that literature disseminates ethically valuable 51 Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans Sophie Wilkins (1930-43; London: Picador, 2017), 11 52 Hanna Meretoja, The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (Oxford: OUP, 2018), 35 53 Ibid , 35; see also ibid 90 31 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 Conceptualising the Value of Literature ideas as a form of “moral guidance” or “moral education ” 54 Although such claims might sound a bit old-fashioned in this day and age, they should not be dismissed too lightly, since literature arguably still plays a prominent role in the dissemination of ethical values and moral norms 55 The full potential of the ethical value of literature is probably most pertinently explored in many influential publications by the eminent philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who argues that the inherent properties of literature are of crucial importance for ethical knowledge and reasoning What is more, Nussbaum makes explicit what, in many other conceptualisations, is merely tacitly presupposed but usually not discussed in detail: The fact that not every literary work has great value, while some novels written in the nineteenth century have an outstanding ethical value The latter depends not only on the way of reading, but also on the aesthetic and formal features of the work in question For Nussbaum, “certain truths about human life can only be fittingly and accurately stated in the language and forms characteristic of the narrative artist ” 56 According to Nussbaum, ethical questions are explored in fictional narratives that convey distinct non-propositional knowledge and negotiate morally salient particulars The realm of literature thus serves as a medium of thought and exploration, which engages the full range of readers’ affective and cognitive faculties Nussbaum maintains that certain realist novels can thus “cultivate and reinforce valuable moral abilities” which are necessary for “public deliberations in democracy ” 57 Key among these moral abilities is the capacity to feel not just empathy, but also compassion: Focusing “on the role of the imagination in promoting compassion, I argue that certain specific literary works develop those imaginative abilities in a valuable way.” 58 Many of Nussbaum’s insights anticipate major tenets of the psychological exploration of the value of literature for enhancing social cognition The latter includes e g the potential of literature to offer vicarious experiences which go beyond what readers are likely to encounter in their everyday lives, the concern with particulars of daily experience, and the importance of an immersive reading process that not only includes affective processes but also testifies to 54 Wayne C Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1988), 211 55 Cf Astrid Erll/ Herbert Grabes/ Ansgar Nünning, eds , The Dissemination of Values through Literature and other Media (Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2008) 56 Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: OUP, 1990), 5 57 Martha Nussbaum, “Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and Literature 22 (1988), 346 58 Ibid., 350. In this volume, the affective value of fiction for fostering readers’ sympathy and compassion is explored by Vera Nünning 32 V era N üNNiNg & a Nsgar N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 the simultaneity of engagement (and intimacy) on the one hand, and aesthetic distance on the other 59 While some of the insights of the psychological study of the cognitive value of literature can be mapped onto Nussbaum’s exploration of its ethical value, Nussbaum is not only highly aware of, but even bases her argument on the uniqueness of literary narratives, which are treated in the same vein as factual stories by most psychologists, who largely neglect the formal features of fiction. If one wanted to put the ethical value of literature and of aesthetic experiences in a nutshell, one could hardly find a better shorthand for it than the phrase ‘valorisation laboratories’ coined by the French literary historian Yves Citton in his brilliant book The Ecology of Attention Citton emphasises that “the immersion in an aesthetic experience leads to the valorization of previously unexpected sensations and feelings, and/ or the modification of associated valorizations ” 60 Literary works can indeed be fruitfully conceptualised as laboratories of cultural, ethical, and moral revalorisations Such aesthetic laboratories not only encourage us to question and reflect on our modes of valorisation, they also serve to challenge the hegemonic mode in capitalist societies, viz “CAP- ITALISTIC VALORIZATION, which measure the value of a good or activity based only on its capacity for maximizing the profits of an investor ” 61 The notions of literature as valorisation laboratories and modes of revalorisation thus lead on to the question of what the cultural, social, and economic value of literature might reside in 5 Literature as a Cultural Resource of Resilience: Outlining the Cultural, Social, and Ecological Value of Literary Works There is, however, more that needs to be reckoned with concerning the extrinsic value of literature than what we have outlined in the sections above about the cognitive and ethical value of literary works Nonetheless, the cognitive and ethical benefits delineated in the last two sections provide the basis for a range of more encompassing dimensions involved in the broader cultural value of literary works. We will briefly sketch out how the cultural, ecological, and social value of literature can be conceptualised by singling out one approach and example for each of the approaches and facets we will explore 59 For a discussion of the major tenets of the cognitive value of literature, see Vera Nünning, Reading Fiction, Changing Minds, especially chapters 2, 3, and 5 60 Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention (Cambridge/ Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2018), 150, original emphasis 61 Ibid , original emphasis 33 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 Conceptualising the Value of Literature One of the most comprehensive approaches for coming to terms with the cultural functions and thus the extrinsic value of literature was developed by Hubert Zapf in his important work on ‘literature as cultural ecology ’ Zapf proposed a sophisticated “functional theory of imaginative text ” 62 According to his tripartite model, the subtleties of which defy any attempt at summarising it briefly, the “cultural-ecological function of literature can be described as a combination of three main procedures ” First, literature not only represents but also balances, lays bare, and critiques typical contradictions, deficits, and deformations displayed by the economic, political, and social systems of a given society. By doing so, literature fulfils “the function of a cultural-critical metadiscourse ” Secondly, literature often focuses on those dimensions of the real world and the “collective unconscious” (sensu Jameson) that are marginalised, neglected, or repressed by the hegemonic discourse, thus confronting society with alternative models or possible storyworlds that serve to put the dominant world-models into perspective Zapf’s term for this is “the function of an imaginative counter-discourse ” Thirdly, literature serves to confront that which is marginalised or repressed in a given system with the hegemonic worldview and to synthesise or reintegrate the various discourses that are usually separated in society (e g the discourses of the systems of politics, economics, law, education, etc.), thus fulfilling “the function of a reintegrative inter-discourse ” In addition to, and closely linked to these three cultural functions, literature also fulfils important normative functions because it often serves to represent, disseminate, critique, and generate norms and values The relationship between the values widely accepted in any given society and those projected by literary texts may again vary dramatically On the one hand, literature can authorise and subscribe to hegemonic values and norms, e g propagating ideologically charged views of colonialism or imperialism Late-Victorian fictions and poetry of empire, for instance, projected norms of behaviour associated with Victorian family life onto the relationship between England and her colonies, mapping the feelings, norms, and values of the private sphere of the family onto the relationship between England and her colonies By doing so, literary texts can fulfil ideological and even propagandistic functions, serving as a means of nurturing the culture’s dominant fictions. On the other hand, however, literature can also fulfil critical functions vis-à-vis the norms and values generally accepted by society Instead of supporting dominant 62 Hubert Zapf, “Literature as Cultural Ecology: Notes Towards a Functional Theory of Imaginative Texts, with Examples from American Literature,” Literary History/ Cultural History: Force-Fields and Tensions (REAL 17), ed Herbert Grabes (Tübingen: Narr, 2001), 85; for the following quotes in this paragraph from this article, see ibid , 93 34 V era N üNNiNg & a Nsgar N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 ideological fictions and that culturally sanctioned system of ideas, beliefs, presuppositions, and convictions which constitutes hegemonic mentalities and world-views, literature can just as well critique the prevailing norms and values, clichés, and the discourses of power, confronting them with alternative systems of thought and new hierarchies of values, thus revalorising norms The main reason for the fundamental cultural value of literature concerns the creation of communities of interpretation and of narrative communities As Jerome Bruner already observed, narratives (and one can extend this to literary works) offer much more than just stories or fictional characters: “Stories, finally, provide models of the world […]. To tell a story was to issue an invitation not to be as the story is but to see the world as embodied in the story In time, the sharing of common stories creates an interpretive community, a matter of great moment […] for promoting cultural cohesion ” 63 Although Bruner was not concerned with literature per se, fictional stories and literature in general can also create ‘interpretive communities’ and ‘cultural cohesion ’ Such interpretive and narrative communities are united by more than just the norms and values embodied in the texts, or the kind of heroes and villains presented They also provide people with what Bruner felicitously called “a community’s stored narrative resources and its equally precious toolkit of interpretive techniques: its myths, its typology of human plights, but also its traditions for locating and resolving divergent narratives ” 64 Literary works thus offer interpretations and evaluations of experience, providing a common ground and shared framework for readers Works of literature also offer scripts and patterns for the interpretation of experiences, thus fostering the cohesion of communities bound together by a common way of understanding life Perhaps this value of literature adds fuel to canon debates, which, though they purport to be about (aesthetic) values and identity, can also be regarded as negotiations of ways of understanding lives and the creation of specific kinds of community The American cultural psychologist Dan P McAdams has further illuminated the cultural value of literature by explaining how narratives and cultures mutually reflect and shape each other: I would submit that life stories are more reflective of and shaped by culture than any other aspect of personality Stories are at the centre of culture More than favored goals and values, I believe, stories differentiate one culture from the next I have argued throughout this book that the stories people live by say as much about culture as they do about the people who live and tell them Our own life stories draw 63 Jerome Bruner, Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (2002; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003), 25 64 Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, MA/ London: Harvard UP, 1990), 67-68 35 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 Conceptualising the Value of Literature on the stories we learn as active participants in culture - stories about childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and aging Stories capture and elaborate metaphors and images that are especially resonant in a given culture Stories distinguish between what culture glorifies as good characters and vilifies as bad characters. 65 The cultural value of literature thus resides in its capacity to create interpretive communities, to disseminate communal values, and to foster social cohesion between the members of a community In his contribution to this volume, Frederik Tygstrup sheds additional light on the relation between literature and the community, arguing that communities are at the very root of artistic creativity Embedded in communal activities, the creation and reception of literary works also fosters attitudes and practices which are at the core of democracies, as Tygstrup shows Moreover, literary works often have an impact on the way in which topics of cultural debate - e g infectious diseases, ghetto life, treatment of animals - are understood by the population One of the founders of modern sociology, Robert E Park, stressed that people learn more about how to understand society and communicate with each other “from literature and the arts” than “from experience,” and that the symbolic communication via literature “profoundly influences sentiment and attitudes” 66 which form the basis of our actions Another important dimension of the cultural value of fiction concerns its formative role for leading a good life This topic is not only at the core of Martha Nussbaum’s reflections; such an understanding of the role of literature also builds on the capacity of works of fiction to provide non-propositional knowledge, engage readers’ affections, and incite ethical reflection and self-clarification. As proponents of the so-called ‘eudaimonic turn’ (James O. Pawelski and D J Moores) have argued, 67 literary studies has good reasons to involve itself more strongly than previously in the interdisciplinary discussion on what constitutes a good life in that literature itself creates important life-knowledge and cultural models of what a good life could look like Literary works delineate aesthetically created thought experiments that test different models of viable or good forms of life (section 2) The knowledge of literature, however, does not entail explicit or normative recommendations 65 Dan P McAdams, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (Oxford: OUP, 2013), 284 66 Robert E Park, qtd from Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008), 143 67 See e g James O Pawelski/ D J Moores, eds , The Eudaimonic Turn: Well-Being in Literary Studies (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2014) 36 V era N üNNiNg & a Nsgar N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 on how to lead one’s life, but is based more on the aesthetic modes and literary techniques used for representing forms of life 68 As we have elsewhere tried to show, one could even go further and argue one of the most important aspects of the value of literature is its capacity to foster well-being and to help human beings to stay healthy 69 In the wake of such approaches as the medical humanities and narrative medicine there have been quite a few research projects and publications that seem to support such a hypothesis Autobiographies and other literary narratives, for instance, foster readers’ ‘sense of coherence,’ which is Aaron Antonovsky’s key term for the definition and understanding of salutogenesis. A person’s sense of coherence is not only one of the most crucial factors for people’s sense of mental and physical well-being; it is also almost certainly connected to narrative competence and the reading of fictional, and factual, narratives. One study has even demonstrated that “book readers experienced a 20% reduction in risk of mortality over the 12 years of follow up compared to non-book readers ” 70 Other innovative approaches that have been developed since the turn of the millennium have also underscored the value of literature by redirecting scholarly attention towards broader ecological concerns Particularly interesting cases in point include, for instance, such recent approaches as ecocriticism and cultural ecology, both of which open up new horizons for conceptualising the value of literature in interesting ways Both are concerned with the relation between literature and the environment Cultural ecology is interested in the role that aesthetic forms of narratives play in shaping our views of the environment, the natural world, and the planet at large During the last two decades, ecocritics have drawn attention to the potential of literature in depicting endangered species and environmental crises and catastrophes, making readers aware of such looming threats as deforestation, the destruction of natural habitats, and global warming Literary works about climate change, for instance, do not only reflect processes of slow change that occur in the real world; they also shape public perception of a large variety of phenomena involved in such global phenomena Moreover, since literary works engage 68 Vera Nünning/ Ansgar Nünning, “Literaturwissenschaft und der eudaimonic turn: Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen zum Lebenswissen der Literatur und zu Axel Hackes Wozu wir da sind als literarisches Gedankenexperiment für ein gelungenes Leben,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 70,1 (2020), 53-83 69 Ansgar Nünning/ Vera Nünning, “How to Stay Healthy and Foster Well-Being with Narratives, or: Where Narratology and Salutogenesis Could Meet,” How to Do Things with Narrative: Cognitive and Diachronic Perspectives, eds Jan Alber/ Greta Olson (Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2017), 157-186 70 Avni Bavishi/ Martin D Slade/ Becca R Levy, “A Chapter a Day: Association of Book Reading with Longevity,” Social Science & Medicine 164 (2016), 44 37 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 Conceptualising the Value of Literature readers’ emotions, they are more likely to prompt a change in people’s attitudes towards the environment and incite them to action than sober factual accounts or statistics Instead of examining only complex literary works, ecocritical researchers have also demonstrated the value of genres that were not deemed to be worthy of scholarly attention such as science fiction or “cli-fi,” genres which frequently evoke a future after a climate catastrophe 71 For an understanding of the value of literature, the approach that has come to be known as ‘cultural ecology’ is particularly illuminating In his conceptualisation of literature as cultural ecology, Hubert Zapf goes beyond traditional ecocritical approaches to emphasise the unique potential of cultural forms of expression, particularly of literature, to continually restore the richness, diversity, and complexity of those inner landscapes of the mind, the imagination, the psyche, and of interpersonal communication which make up the cultural ecosystems of modern humans, but are threatened with impoverishment by an increasingly overeconomised, standardised, and depersonalised contemporary culture 72 Literature can imagine and explore alternative value systems and attitudes that have been marginalised and repressed, but which are necessary “for an adequately complex account of humanity’s existence within the fundamental culture—nature relationship ” Literary works can also serve as an “imaginative sounding board for hidden problems, deficits and imbalances of the larger culture ” Through narrative techniques like multiperspectivity or fragmentation, novels can capture part of the complexity of the entangled relationships between (non)human lives and diverse environments Zapf’s conception of the ecological force of literature integrates central tenets of the cognitive and ethical value of literature, which are enriched by ecological deliberations In his article in this volume, Zapf continues his explorations by focusing on the value of literature for survival We should like to conclude this section by venturing the hypothesis that literature, just like other artifacts and fictions, is one of the most important, albeit often neglected cultural resources of resilience This arguably holds true both for the individual and the collective level of society As especially Heta Pyrhönen’s essay, but also some of the other articles in this volume show, 71 See e g Astrid Bracke, Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) 72 Hubert Zapf, Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 3; the quotes in the next paragraph are from this book, ibid , 4 See also Hubert Zapf, ed , Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology (Berlin/ Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2016) 38 V era N üNNiNg & a Nsgar N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 literary works can serve as a powerful resource of resilience in that they help people to come to terms with, and possibly even to master, crises As the editors of, and contributors to, a recent volume on the topic of Europe’s Crises and Cultural Resources of Resilience have demonstrated, Europe’s literary traditions do not only constitute one of the most important connecting elements of the various European cultures and nations; they have also served as powerful resources of resilience that Europe has at its disposal in order to respond creatively to the series of challenges and crises that we have witnessed during recent decades 73 6 The Value of Literature in Relation to ‘Concepts of the Desirable’ The cultural value of literature for health and well-being or for gaining a better understanding of environmental concerns are just two instances of why literary works are not just worth bothering with but what makes them so valuable. Just like the financial and market value of works of art, these cultural and ecological considerations are intricately related to value judgements made by individuals and institutional acts of valorisation In the context of public debates about such fundamental values as justice, benevolence, or liberty, however, a different definition of the term ‘value’ comes to the fore. In this sense, values always refer to abstract “concepts of the desirable,” 74 which guide people’s attitudes, thoughts and behaviour. In a famous definition, Clyde Kluckhohn posits that a “value is a conception, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic of a group, of the desirable which influences the selection of available modes, means and ends of action.” Values serve as guiding principles of individual (and collective) behaviour This conceptualisation of value, too, can fruitfully be applied to explore additional facets of the value of literature According to this definition, values are characterised by affective and cognitive elements Values do not only “refer to desirable goals that motivate action,” they are also “linked inextricably to affect ” 75 They engage the emo- 73 See Michael, Basseler/ Imke Polland/ Sandro Moraldo/ Ansgar Nünning, eds , Europe’s Crises and Cultural Resources of Resilience: Conceptual Explorations and Literary Negotiations (Trier: WVT, 2020) 74 Clyde Kluckhohn, “Values and Value-Orientations in the Theory of Action,” Toward a General Theory of Action, eds Talcott Parsons/ Edward Shields (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1951), 395; the other quote in this paragraph is from the same page 75 Shalom H Schwarz, “An Overview of the Schwartz Theory of Basic Values,” Online Readings in Psychology and Culture 2 1 (2012), 3 39 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 Conceptualising the Value of Literature tions and can even motivate people to perform actions which may not serve their own interests Values are thus broad desirable goals that apply to human behaviour at a middle level of abstraction They are related to attitudes, which concern the positive or negative evaluation of particular entities and are thus more specific than values, since they “can evaluate people, behaviors, events, or any object, whether specific (ice cream) or abstract (progress).” 76 Values, in contrast, form the basis of the evaluation of specific objects; they are not tied to specific entities, but instead guide our behaviour across various domains and situations Moreover, values “motivate people’s action and serve as guiding principles in their lives ” 77 A prominent dimension of the extrinsic value of literature is based on this general notion of values as abstract ‘concepts of the desirable’: Literary works can serve to shape, negotiate and disseminate such fundamental values as autonomy, benevolence, or loyalty It is not yet quite clear, however, how the literary representation of such values, which are embedded in particular works, can be explored by textual analysis, because they are inextricably intertwined with both the text and the storyworld as a whole and specific aspects of non-propositional knowledge that defy conceptualisation Since values are ‘trans-situational’ and can be applied (or ignored) in specific situations, it is difficult to tease them out of literary works, a task which requires sophisticated methods of textual analysis to get to grips with the complex ways in which they are represented in narrative fiction. Notwithstanding these problems, it is acknowledged that literature is an important means of representing, negotiating, and even generating cultural values An important extrinsic value of literary works resides in their ability to disseminate or popularise prevailing values, but also of course to challenge, modify, question, and subvert hegemonic hierarchies of values, including constructing and disseminating new values Literature can also serve an important means of reflecting on concepts of the desirable which guide moral conduct Since the importance of literature for the distribution or critique of values has been dealt with in other publications already, 78 it will not be one of the key concerns explored in this volume 76 Ibid , 16 77 Lilach Sagiv/ Sonia Roccas/ Jan Cieciuch/ Shalom H Schwartz, “Personal Values in Human Life,” Nature Human Behaviour 1 9 (2017), 630 78 See e g Sibylle Baumbach/ Herbert Grabes/ Ansgar Nünning, eds , Literature and Values. Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating and Constructing Norms and Values (Trier: WVT, 2009); Astrid Erll/ Herbert Grabes/ Ansgar Nünning, eds , The Dissemination of Values through Literature and other Media (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008); Hanna Meretoja et al , eds , Values of Literature (London: Rodopi, 2015) 40 V era N üNNiNg & a Nsgar N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 In its capacity as a laboratory for reframing the concepts of value and values, 79 and for revalorising prevailing hierarchies of cultural norms and values, literature could become an important force in the ongoing attempts to reinvent value as a key concept, and to talk and think about values in a way that is fit for the emerging new challenges of the 21st century. Literary studies could certainly do worse than taking some inspiration from Kate Raworth’s brilliant book Doughnut Economics, in which the innovative Oxford economist delineates “Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist,” as the felicitous subtitle succinctly puts it Focusing on the unique ecological, economic, and social challenges of the 21st century, Raworth develops a comprehensive model for reframing the economy, changing its main concepts and goals, and redirecting our attention from the hitherto prevailing master narrative of relentless growth and profit to the central question of “what enables human beings to thrive? ” 80 As we have tried to show in this introduction, that is a question about which literature has a lot to say, and it is high time for literary studies to engage in these debates about value(s) As far as rethinking the concept of value is concerned, Mariana Mazzucato’s book The Value of Everything provides particularly thought-provoking suggestions The radical economist Mazzucato not only questions the conventional values and wisdom of her discipline; she also offers nothing less than a new vision of what constitutes real values in our society Convincingly explaining “why value theory matters,” 81 Mazzucato demonstrates that there is much more to value and value creation than either “MSV” (i e maximising shareholder value) or maximising the rate of GDP growth Part of the great value of literature consists in offering alternative visions of what constitutes real value and what makes life worth living If Raworth is right that “talking about values and goals is a lost art waiting to be revived,” literary works could well be among the most important means of reviving that art and showing how we could get from prioritising metrics, quantity, and statistics to appreciating values that really matter for humans and their well-being Anyone looking for a “twenty-first-century compass” and interested in how we can achieve 79 On the processes involved in reframing, see Nora Berning/ Ansgar Nünning/ Christine Schwanecke, eds , Reframing Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies: Theorizing and Analyzing Conceptual Transfers (Trier: WVT, 2014) 80 Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (London: Penguin Random House, 2017), 43; for the second quote, see ibid , 42 81 Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (London: Random House, 2018), 11; for “MSV,” see ibid , 17, 165-174 41 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 Conceptualising the Value of Literature “A BETTER FUTURE FOR ALL,” 82 is unlikely to find better, richer and more thought-provoking models than those offered by great works of literature 7 Introducing the Structure and Articles of the Volume: A Brief Overview This volume explores a broad range of ways in which the value of literature can be freshly conceptualised for the challenges and concerns of the 21st century, where an unprecedented conglomeration of crises and the urgent need to cope with them provide new challenges to the relevance of literary studies The articles in this volume show that the study of literature is anything but a luxury or a nice-to-have in that it can help us come to terms with some of the key current challenges and concerns, and to develop literary and cultural studies into a problem-solving paradigm rather than just disciplines revolving around critique 83 Highlighting the value of literary works, the editors of and contributors to this volume attempt to show not only why literature and literary studies still matter, but why literary works and their scholarly analysis may be more important than ever before Literary works can help us to understand multiple viewpoints, competing logics and divergent attitudes, and they can create interpretive communities, disseminate knowledge, change prevailing perceptions of current crises, and imagine alternative forms and ways of life Exploring and illuminating literary ways of worldmaking can thus help us to challenge the hegemonic master narratives and economic fictions that capitalist societies live by, and to reframe the ways in which we deal with the most challenging concerns and conjunctures of the new millennium In the light of the plethora of crises occurring in the 21st century, above all in the face of the epistemological crisis of truth, the cognitive, ethical, cultural, and ecological value of literature as delineated in the respective sections above are of crucial importance Focusing on the value of literature is arguably one of the most promising ways of re-aligning literary studies with current challenging and emerging concerns Recalibrating the notions of value and values as key concepts for literary studies, the articles in this volume move beyond the paradigm of critique by focusing on the question of what 82 Raworth, Doughnut Economics, 43; Mazzucato, The Value of Everything, 279 (capital letters in the original) 83 For an attempt at sketching a blueprint for the study of culture, see Ansgar Nünning, “Taking Responsibility for the Future: Ten Modest Proposals for Shaping the Future of the Study of Culture as a Problem-Solving Paradigm,” Futures of the Study of Culture: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Global Challenges, eds Doris Bachmann-Medick/ Jens Kugele/ Ansgar Nünning (Berlin/ Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2020), 29-65 42 V era N üNNiNg & a Nsgar N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 exactly makes literary works so valuable for readers and society at large, while at the same time enriching our conceptual and theoretical frameworks Anchored in different traditions of literary studies, the contributors adopt a wide range of angles, approaches, and methods, but they all revolve around the positive uses and value of literature, asking what we can gain by reading literary works Although the breadth and scope of arguments, texts, and topics that the essays cover is so wide that any neat division into categories will be somewhat artificial, the articles can be loosely grouped under three major umbrellas Therefore, the volume is divided into three parts, concluding with an epilogue The articles in the first part are all devoted to various aspects of what can be called “The Cognitive Value of Literature,” which has attracted quite a lot of attention in literary studies in the wake of what has been dubbed ‘the cognitive turn,’ especially by scholars working in fields like cognitive narratology, cognitive poetics, and cognitive literary studies in general The section begins with two essays that can be located in the field of cognitive narratology. Jan Alber explores the role of “Literature as Identity Laboratory: Storyworld Possible Selves and Boundary Expansions ” Joining insights from narrative theory and psychology, Alber adopts an empirical perspective and sketches how one can verify the cognitive value of literature as a testing ground for trying out new self-images and identities Redirecting attention from the cognitive to the affective dimension, Vera Nünning is concerned with a specific affective value, 84 viz with the “Value of Literature for the ‘Extension of our Sympathies.’” Building on findings from philosophy, psychology, and narratology, she identifies twelve narrative conventions that have the potential to direct and extend readers’ sympathies, inciting them to affectively engage with the perspectives of particular characters, while also appreciating new ideas and values Her argument not only draws on George Eliot’s poetics and Martha Nussbaum’s work; it also refers to premises of the role of the reader in the ‘new sincerity,’ discussed by Michael Basseler in section three The next two essays are concerned with issues related to the knowledge of literature In her article “On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy: William James’ Pluralism and the Knowledge of Literary Narratives,” Alexandra Strohmaier asks to what extent and in which way literature influenced the philosophy of William James Focusing on a German tradition so far neglected by James scholarship, she argues that “James’s commitment to 84 See also Vera Nünning, “The Affective Value of Fiction: Presenting and Evoking Emotions,” Writing Emotions: Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature, eds Ingeborg Jandl et al (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017), 29-54 43 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 Conceptualising the Value of Literature plurality as one of the reigning features of his ontology and epistemology entails an appreciation of particularity, of temporality, change, contingency, processuality, and multiperspectivity,” thus identifying a range of features of the form of literary narratives that influenced the content of James’ pluralist philosophy In her essay “Literature as an Ecological Space of Self-Awareness and Perspective-Taking,” Angela Locatelli expands her wide-ranging work on the knowledge of literature by concentrating on cognitive abilities (such as empathy, theory of mind, and perspective-taking) which are fostered by the reading of literary works She relates these skills to the irreducible quality of literature, using Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out as an example to illustrate and support her theses The last contribution to the first section extends the purview of previous work on the cognitive value of literature to the burgeoning field of literature and law Susanne Knaller’s article “When Law Meets Literature: The Emotional Value of Literary Texts” focuses on the relations between the emotions, law, and literature Doing full justice to the complexity of each of these phenomena, ranging from problems of language and representation to institutional issues, Knaller not only analyses literary texts from the middle of the 19th to the early 20th century, but also provides a “short methodological proposal of how to deal with the triad law, literature, and emotion followed by an example of legal practice ” This essay therefore provides a bridge between the cognitive value of literature and broader social, cultural, and ethical concerns, which are examined in the following section The articles in the second part of the volume explore the social, cultural, ethical, and ecological value of literature, mainly focusing on concerns that have emerged in the 21st century Some of the essays in this section are inspired by insights of what has been dubbed the ‘institutional turn,’ which has ushered in “a departure from thinking about literature as a social institution, toward a sociological approach that examines the many and varied organisations and institutions in and through which literature and its value are produced, distributed, and consumed ” 85 Building on recent insights about the importance of the institutional framings of literature and the many layers and complex interactions between literary texts and the huge social infrastructures that surround them, Frederic Tygstrup explores the value of literature as a specific mode of existence and way of worldmaking that turns literary works into a source for democratic citizenship In his wide-ranging, 85 Jeremy Rosen, “The Institutional Turn,” Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Literature, 25 June 2019, https: / / oxfordre com/ view/ 10 1093/ acrefore/ 9780190201098 001 0001/ acrefore-9780190201098-e-1028, n p 44 V era N üNNiNg & a Nsgar N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 yet cogently argued and coherent essay “Literature and Democracy,” he also shows how literary works can be understood in their relations to this social and institutional infrastructure, and how they can, as textual constructs, “produc[e] a potential common language of sense-making ” The next two essays also approach works of literature in the wider context of their complex social and institutional framings, relations, and interdependencies The title of Isabel Gil’s essay, “The Risky NPV of Literature in Dos Passos and Pessoa,” already highlights her focus on, in managerial terms, the question how “a creative cash flow of sorts defines literature’s NPV (Net Present Value) ” Her interest in the wider question implied in this ambivalent metaphor, viz the nature of the relation between literature and the economy, is geared towards the representational power of a hegemonic discourse “that uses the language and the tropes of the economy to articulate the shape of our common forms of living together.” Using the specific problem of financial risk in John dos Passos’ The Big Money (1936) and Fernando Pessoa’s The Anarchist Banker (1922) as case studies, she analyses how literature “as a system and a structure of exchange aggregates the vocabulary and the images of money culture to understand the rhetoric and interpret the narratives of neo-liberalism or socialism, welfare, crisis, austerity, growth, and risk ” In her essay “Collapsing the Economic and Creative Values of Contemporary Literature,” Elizabeth Kovach also addresses the relations between the institutional and economic structures in which literature is embedded In addition, she focuses on the ways in which two categories or conceptualisations of value - economic value vs. cultural or ideational value - are negotiated in a specific genre, contemporary ‘novels of commission,’ which highlight “a consideration of the value of literature as something that is at once economic and creative ” Marion Gymnich and Jan Rupp pursue a more specific approach to the social and cultural value of literature in their respective articles Exploring “The Value of Literature in an Aging Society,” Gymnich’s essay proceeds from the insight that the demographic changes in Western societies and the new predominance of people over 65 warrants a new take on fields as various as health care, employment and social insurance, retirement, and the economy Gymnich shows that literary works can play an important role in fostering a better understanding of the perception of old age and the complex processes of aging, something that is arguably a crucial premise for designing new public policies. Using a wide definition of literature, Jan Rupp explores the importance of storytelling for migrants who employ narratives as a means of restoring their sense of human dignity In his felicitously entitled piece “Telling Stories, Saving Lives,” he analyses the value of a diverse body of recent narratives which he calls ‘new refugee writing,’ an emerging corpus 45 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 Conceptualising the Value of Literature of diverse genres which includes testimonial and fictional narratives. Rupp shows that such texts can fulfil the function of an ‘art of survival,’ thereby introducing the notion of storytelling and literature as a “lifeline” that Heta Pyrhönen develops and elaborates in the last essay of this volume The last two articles in the second part of this book open up additional new perspectives on the social and cultural value of literature, reframing the central topic in significant ways: Susan Arndt is mainly concerned with the ethical, but also political value of literature as an imaginary intervention, while Hubert Zapf provides a new look at the ecological value of literature In “P(r)oEthics: Imaginary In(ter)vention, FutureS and the Agency of Dream*Hopes,” Arndt focuses on a very “precious value of literature [that] imagines invention in order to intervene, while displaying the agency of dream*hopes that are nourished by emotions and empathy, while reflecting moralities, p(r)o-Ethically.” Duly highlighting the role of the imagination and relating it to the creation of hopeful dreams, Arndt convincingly delineates the potential of literary works to transport readers to unknown territories and to visit the impossible In “Literature, Sustainability, and Survival,” Hubert Zapf builds on his well-known theory of the ecology of literature and its great, but often unacknowledged value for re-imagining the environment and for potentially changing readers’ perception of, and relation to, the environment Moreover, he manages to bridge the apparent gap between literature (often held to be part of culture) and survival (usually perceived as part of nature or a biological mode) Citing scientists who have shown the importance of the arts for the evolution and well-being of humans, Zapf goes on to focus on the importance of the ecological dimension of literature in the face of environmental crises, while also exploring the value of works of literature for cultural and ecological sustainability, and thus for the survival of human and non-human species The third and last section of this volume, which we have entitled “The Value of Literature and the Reader in Recent Approaches in Literary Studies,” comprises four articles which, even more so than the articles in section two, stress that the value of literature is inextricably intertwined with, and the result of, valorisation processes. The first two essays are situated in what may be called ‘post-critique,’ since they build on Rita Felski’s exposure of the shortcomings of the prevailing paradigm of ‘critique’ and the hermeneutics of suspicion, and on her insights into what kinds of responses art and literature can elicit Moreover, like Felski, Michael Basseler and Alexander Scherr also make good use of Bruno Latour’s rethinking of the importance of networks consisting of human and non-human agents, which leads them to emphasise the agency of the reader (Basseler) and the text (Scherr), respectively In his article “The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century 46 V era N üNNiNg & a Nsgar N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 Fiction,” Basseler explores the question of the role of the reader in the “conceptualisation of the project of new literary-aesthetic movements such as the new sincerity,” which he exemplifies with an enlightening interpretation of George Saunders’s Booker-Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo. Alexander Scherr’s essay “Towards a Postcritical Understanding of Literary Value: The Proleptic Agency of Texts” proceeds from similar premises and focuses on the communicative agency of texts, which Scherr identifies as ‘proleptic.’ Examining processes of ‘self-canonisation’ in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, he argues that the novel authorises a discourse of its own future reception which rhetorically activates a Romantic framework of aesthetic judgment and valorisation Christine Schwanecke takes up contemporary challenges to the value of literature and the very process of reading in her essay “Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age: Internet-Related Fiction and the Ecology of Attention ” She discusses entanglements between literature and the economy as well as other factors shaping the literary environment in new ways, focusing on the co-presence of two diametrically opposed ways of reading (viz immersive reading vs ‘skim-reading’) and on the changing conditions for authors and readers who struggle with a lack of time often associated with digitalisation In particular, she explores internet-related fictions in order to analyse in how far they represent and criticise new channels of communication and media formats, laying specific stress on their revalorisation of literature “as a medium that both demands and deserves immersion and deep attention ” In the last contribution to this section, Jürgen Schlaeger critically evaluates and questions “The Eudaimonic Turn in Literary Studies,” a turn which explores the value of literature for the health and well-being of its readers While Hubert Zapf mentions in passing a statistical study at Yale which asserts that readers live significantly longer than non-readers, Jürgen Schlaeger pursues an in-depth appreciation and critique of this extrinsic value of literature which might burn down to “yet another effort to re-focus critical attention away from analysing texts systematically to using them for specific, timebound and as such limited and limiting purposes,” therefore losing sight of the intrinsic value of literature The volume closes with an epilogue that goes beyond a mere scholarly investigation of literary value In her essay “Literature as a Lifeline: The Value of Literature for a Cognitively Non-Typical Reader,” Heta Pyrhönen, a renowned literary scholar from Finland, approaches the value of literature from a different, experiential perspective, which Jürgen Schlaeger might call ‘praxeological ’ Rather than taking the stance of the academic who explores the value of literature by employing abstract concepts and categories, Heta 47 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 Conceptualising the Value of Literature Pyrhönen allows us a unique insight into her personal experience as a temporally cognitively impaired, hospitalised, and thus non-typical reader Her gripping account of how literature quite literally served ‘as a lifeline’ for her during that critical period, a lifeline that enabled her to fight her way back into her health and profession, should give anyone who questions the value of literature reason to pause Her essay clearly demonstrates the existential value and life-saving quality that literature can have for an avid reader at a very critical phase in her life Taken together, the articles in this volume demonstrate that reading and studying literary works not only continues to matter; they also show that the value of literature consists in enabling us to imagine new world-models and alternative futures, and thus to tell better future narratives Instead of accepting the stories disseminated either in the realms of politics and the media or the largely apocalyptic and dystopian visions of the future in popular culture, we should bear in mind Grossberg’s wise and witty reminder that “Bad Stories Make Bad Politics! ” 86 Our final and overarching point in arguing for the value of literature is thus that literary works not only scrutinise the hegemonic master narratives of unlimited growth and technological progress that no longer make sense of the world as it is and that cannot cope with the crises and concerns of the 21st century; they also encourage us to invent much better future narratives We in literary studies will only have a future if the scholars working in the field are prepared to take full responsibility for it and take Tegmark’s wise words that “we need more mindful optimists” to heart 87 It is certainly imperative that we “re-orientate ourselves from an exclusive pre-occupation with retrospectively making meaning(s) to the creative activity of making future(s), prospectively.” 88 In his best-selling book Homo Deus, the historian Yuval Noah Harari observes that in the 21st century, “fiction might […] become the most potent force on earth, surpassing even wayward asteroids and natural selection Hence, if we want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough. We must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world ” 89 Taking our cue from Harari and heeding his clarion-call, 86 Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (Durham, NC/ London: Duke UP, 2010), 64, original emphasis 87 Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (London/ New York: Penguin, 2017), 334 88 Christoph Bode/ Rainer Dietrich, Future Narratives: Theory, Poetics, and Media-Historical Moment (Berlin/ Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2013), 107 (bold-print emphasis in the original) 89 Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (London: Harvill Secker, 2016), 151 48 V era N üNNiNg & a Nsgar N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 we should like to suggest that it is high time we begin putting the examination of the fictions that cultures live by onto the research agenda of literary and cultural studies We should like to leave the second but last word (or rather paragraph) to Harari, whose argument about the great importance of fictions in an age that has been associated with ‘post-truth’ and that is permeated by ‘fake news’ and fictions of all sorts (e.g. economic, legal, political, social, and technological fictions) also pertains to the value of literature, whose forms and functions as immaterial cultural resources have not received the amount of scholarly attention that they deserve: In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth Homo sapiens is a posttruth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. Ever since the Stone Age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives Indeed, Homo sapiens conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions. […] As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws, and can thereby cooperate effectively. 90 The proliferation of various kinds of fictions that Harari and others have observed is also a great challenge and opportunity for the study of literature in that it opens up important new fields of research. As we have tried to show above, literary fictions do not only serve as important ways of meaning-, sense-, and world-making; they are also among the most powerful laboratories for revalorising our hierarchies of values and for fostering cultural resources of resilience The articles in this volume explore a wide range of aspects and dimensions that together constitute the value of literature and that we have merely tried to sketch out in this introductory overview We very much hope that they will show why literature is still worth bothering with and why it is also worthwhile to study literary texts Being experts in the critical analysis of fictions and in cultural ways of worldmaking, students and professors of literature would be well-advised to extend their research to non-literary fictions and to apply their conceptual expertise, methodological know-how, and analytical research techniques to understand how economic, ideological, legal, and political fictions are constructed and disseminated. By doing so, literary and cultural studies could not only develop clear-cut notions of why it is worthwhile to read literary texts; they would also be much better equipped to engage in interdisciplinary research on some of the most important challenges and concerns of the 21st century 90 Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (London: Jonathan Cape, 2018), 233 49 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 Conceptualising the Value of Literature Works Cited Ahrens, Rüdiger/ Laurenz Volkmann, eds Why Literature Matters: Theories and Functions of Literature. Heidelberg: Winter, 1996 Alber, Jan/ Stefan Iversen/ Louise Brix Jacobsen/ Rikke Andersen Kraglund/ Henrik Skov Nielsen/ Camilla Møhring Reestorff, eds Why Study Literature? Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 2011 Basseler, Michael An Organon of Life Knowledge: Genres and Functions of the Short Story in North America. 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London: Bloomsbury, 2016 ---, ed Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology Berlin/ Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2016 Zunshine, Lisa Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 2006 Conceptualising the Value of Literature 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0001 t he c ogNitiVe V alue oF l iterature 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0002 J aN a lber Literature as Identity Laboratory Storyworld Possible Selves and Boundary Expansions Literature has many values because it serves a wide variety of different functions Among other things, it provides knowledge of distant times and places, and it enhances our understanding of other minds and emotions In addition, literature invites us to exercise our evaluative and ethical dispositions, and it provides training in ideological complications Furthermore, literature enables us to examine alternatives to the status quo, and it sometimes even urges us to conceptualise physical, logical, and human impossibilities Finally, literature often involves defamiliarising effects: It takes us out of our automated perceptions and thus creates new perspectives on the world 1 In this paper, I will zoom in on the cognitive functions of literature 2 I am interested in the complex interaction between the mental and bodily processes that recipients undergo on the one hand, and literature on the other 3 More 1 For an overview of the functions that are listed here, see Rüdiger Ahrens/ Laurenz Volkmann, eds , Why Literature Matters: Theories and Functions of Literature (Heidelberg: Winter, 1996); Marion Gymnich/ Ansgar Nünning, eds , Funktionen von Literatur: Theoretische Grundlagen und Modellinterpretationen (Trier: WVT, 2005); as well as Jan Alber et al , eds , Why Study Literature? (Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 2011) 2 I am of course not the first person to address the cognitive functions of literature. My research builds on the following work on cognitive literary studies: Monika Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (London/ New York: Routledge, 1996); Manfred Jahn, “Frames, Preferences, and the Reading of Third-Person Narratives: Towards a Cognitive Narratology,” Poetics Today 18 4 (1997), 441-468; Peter Stockwell, Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002); Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2004); Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004); Alan Palmer, Social Minds in the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2010); Monika Fludernik, “Narratology in the 21st Century: The Cognitive Approach to Narrative,” PMLA 125 4 (2010), 924-930; David Herman, Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013); and Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014) 3 Like Karin Kukkonen and Marco Caracciolo, I conceptualise the relationship between our bodies and our minds in terms of reciprocity In other words, I foreground the embodiment of mental processes and their extension into the world through material artefacts and cultural practices I am primarily interested in practical engagements regarding the question of ‘what it is like’ to have an experience through a dynamic un- 58 J aN a lber 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0002 specifically, I want to address how readers relate to literature on the basis of their cognitive architectures, while also paying attention to the question of how literature influences them in return. 4 In Oneself as Another (1990), Paul Ricoeur defines literature as “a vast laboratory for thought experiments.” 5 I want to build on this idea by arguing that literature also serves as an identity laboratory, i e as a platform that enables us to experiment with our identities and to experience boundary expansions and self-modifications. This paper was inspired by the concept of the storyworld possible self (SPS), which was developed by María-Ángeles Martínez 6 In short, Martínez argues that readers address alternative identities by relating to fictional characters in specific ways. 7 According to her, recipients blend their self-concepts with the perceived attributes of characters, thus creating what she calls “storyworld possible selves (SPSs) ” 8 These alternative selves or SPSs enable us to try out other identities and ways of dealing with the world, and they have an effect on us We can, for example, use them in the context of artistically motivated forms of self-transformation Regarding the underlying motivaderstanding of literature based on our sensorimotor skills See Karin Kukkonen/ Marco Caracciolo, “Introduction: What is the ‘Second Generation’? ,” Style 48 3 (2014), 261-274; Jan Alber et al , “Introduction: Unnatural and Cognitive Perspectives on Narrative,” Poetics Today 39 3 (2018), 429-445; and Jan Alber, “Logical Contradictions, Possible-Worlds Theory, and the Embodied Mind,” Possible-Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology, eds Alice Bell/ Marie-Laure Ryan (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2019), 157-176 4 On the question of what literature does to readers and/ or their self-concepts, see David S Miall/ Don Kuiken, “A Feeling for Fiction: Becoming What We Behold,” Poetics 30 4 (2002), 221-241; Don Kuiken/ David S Miall/ Shelley Sikora, “Forms of Self Implication in Literary Reading,” Poetics Today 25 2 (2004), 171-203; Raymond A Mar/ Keith Oatley, “The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3 3 (2008), 173-192; Marc Sestir/ Melanie C Green, “You Are Who You Watch: Identification and Transportation Effects on Temporary Self-Concept,” Social Influence 5 4 (2010), 272-288; Raymond A Mar/ Joan Peskin/ Katrina Fong, “Literary Arts and the Development of the Life Story,” New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development 131 (2011), 73-84; David S Miall, “Emotions and the Structuring of Narrative Responses,” Poetics Today 32 2 (2011), 323-348; David Comer Kidd/ Emanuele Castano, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” Science 342 (2013), 377-380; Tobias Richter/ Markus Appel/ Frank Calio, “Stories Can Influence the Self-Concept,” Social Influence 9 (2014), 172-188; and Ansgar Nünning/ Vera Nünning, “How to Stay Healthy and Foster Well-Being with Narratives, or: Where Narratology and Salutogenesis Could Meet,” How to Do Things with Narrative: Cognitive and Diachronic Perspectives, eds Jan Alber/ Greta Olson (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 157-186 5 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, (1990; Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992), 148 6 See María-Ángeles Martínez, “Storyworld Possible Selves and the Phenomenon of Narrative Immersion: Testing a New Theoretical Construct,” Narrative 22 1 (2014), 110-131; and María-Ángeles Martínez, Storyworld Possible Selves (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018) 7 Martínez, Storyworld Possible Selves, 123-133 8 Martínez, “Storyworld Possible Selves,” 119 Literature as Identity Laboratory 59 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0002 tions, the media psychologist Michael D Slater and his colleagues state that the identification with fictional characters provides “a means individuals may use for temporary relief from the task of self-regulation and from the limitations of individual personal and social identities ” 9 They argue that such boundary expansions are inspired by an interest in “autonomy, agency, and affiliation that cannot be entirely satisfied within the confines of the personal and social self ” 10 In what follows, I will explain Martínez’ approach, which is based on cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, and possible-worlds theory, in greater detail. To begin with, the concepts of empathy and identification play an important role for her The term ‘empathy’ is usually used to refer to a simulative mechanism that involves the attempt to understand others by putting ourselves into their shoes 11 It is a more intense reaction compared to ‘sympathy’ where we remain in our own shoes and only support the ideas or actions of someone else from our perspectives 12 The phenomenon of ‘identification’ is even more intense than empathy because it involves a loss of self-awareness 13 In the words of Jonathan Cohen, the term denotes the mechanism through which audience members experience literature “as if the events were happening to them ” 14 Indeed, according to Juan-José Igartua, identification is a “construct with at least two dimensions: empathy (cognitive and emotional) 9 Michael D Slater et al , “Temporarily Expanding the Boundaries of the Self: Motivations for Entering the Story World and Implications for Narrative Effects,” Journal of Communication 64 3 (2014), 439 10 Ibid , 446 11 See Eva Maria Koopman/ Michelle Hilscher/ Gerald C Cupchik, “Reader Responses to Literary Depictions of Rape,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 6 1 (2012), 66-73; Eva Maria Koopman/ Frank Hakemulder, “Effects of Literature on Empathy and Self-Reflection: A Theoretical-Empirical Framework,” Journal of Literary Theory 9 1 (2015), 79-111; and Eva Maria Koopman, Reading Suffering: An Empirical Inquiry into Empathic and Reflective Responses to Literary Narratives (Rotterdam: ERMeCC, 2016) 12 See Keith Oatley, “Meetings of Minds: Dialogue, Sympathy, and Identification in Reading Fiction,” Poetics 26 (1999), 439-454 13 On identification, see e.g. Keith Oatley, “A Taxonomy of the Emotions of Literary Response and a Theory of Identification in Fictional Narrative,” Poetics 23 (1994), 53-74; Gerald C. Cupchik, “Identification as a Basic Problem for Aesthetic Reception,” The Systemic and Empirical Approach to Literature and Culture as Theory and Application, eds Tötösy de Zepetnek et al (Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 1997), 11-22; and Maria Kotovych et al., “Textual Determinants of a Component of Literary Identification,” Scientific Study of Literature 1 2 (2011), 260-291 14 Jonathan Cohen, “Defining Identification: A Theoretical Look at the Identification of Audiences with Media Characters,” Mass Communication and Society 4 (2001), 245 60 J aN a lber 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0002 and the sensation of becoming the character, or merging ” 15 In this context, it is perhaps worth noting that etymologically speaking, ‘identification’ may be translated from Latin as ‘making oneself the same as someone or something ’ For instance, many readers and film viewers identify with the figure of Harry Potter who is treated rather condescendingly by his stepparents, the Dursleys, but then turns out to be an important wizard who can fight the evil Lord Voldemort. What makes the figure of Harry Potter so attractive for readers? And what exactly happens when we identify with a fictional character? The neuroscientist Daniel L Ames and his colleagues have used fMRIs to demonstrate that conscious attempts to adopt another person’s perspective activate the brain regions that are typically engaged in self-referential thought Furthermore, they show that forms of strong alignment between the test person and the perspective of someone else lead to “a blurring of the distinction between self and other ” 16 Along similar lines, the social psychologist Jason P Mitchell writes that perceivers can use their own mental states as proxies for other minds […] We might imagine experiencing the same constellation of events, predict what we ourselves would subsequently think and feel, and infer that another person would experience roughly the same states 17 This kind of research confirms the metaphor of ontological crossing, which plays a central role in cases of absorption (or immersion), i e the subjective impression of being transported from the actual world into an alternative possible world which one then inhabits and experiences Richard Gerrig, for instance, argues that recipients are metaphorically transported into fictional worlds by engaging in participatory responses to the narrative 18 An extreme 15 Juan-José Igartua, “Identification with Characters and Narrative Persuasion through Fictional Feature Films,” Communications 35 4 (2010), 349 16 Daniel L Ames et al , “Taking Another Person’s Perspective Increases Self-Referential Neural Processing,” Psychological Science 19 7 (2008), 643 17 Jason P Mitchell, “Inferences about Mental States,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (Biological Sciences) 364 1521 (2009), 1310 18 Richard J Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993) On absorption, see also Melanie C Green/ Timothy C Brock/ Geoff F Kaufman, “Understanding Media Enjoyment: The Role of Transportation into Narrative Worlds,” Communication Theory 14 4 (2004), 311-327; Jean-Marie Schaeffer/ Ioana Vultur, “Immersion,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, eds David Herman et al (London: Routledge, 2005), 237-239; Rick Busselle/ Helena Bilandzic, “Measuring Narrative Engagement,” Media Psychology 12 (2009), 321-347; Moniek Kuijpers et al , “Exploring Absorbing Reading Experiences: Developing and Validating a Self-Report Scale to Measure Story World Absorption,” Scientific Study of Literature Literature as Identity Laboratory 61 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0002 case of ontological crossing occurs in computer games such as Doom 19 (1993) or Call of Duty 20 (2003) in which a real-world player assumes the role of a game-internal character (namely the first-person shooter) who then becomes the player’s avatar Although we cannot directly influence the attributes or actions of the target characters, we still experience an overlap between self and other when we read literature: Readers blend their self-concepts with the perceived attributes of the characters Indeed, the media psychologist Christoph Klimmt and his colleagues have shown that recipients who identify with James Bond […] experience - for the moment of exposure - that they are James Bond This means that they ascribe Bond’s salient properties […] to themselves For most people, their image of themselves under the condition of identification with James Bond would differ substantially from their usual self-image. 21 One might thus argue that identification involves the blending of features. But what exactly does ‘to blend’ mean in this context? Mark Turner explains the process of blending by pointing out that “cognitively modern human beings have a remarkable, species-defining ability to pluck forbidden mental fruit - that is, to activate two conflicting mental structures […] [such as tree and person, J A ] and to blend them creatively into a new mental structure […] [such as speaking tree, J A ] ” 22 In a similar way, we can blend our self-concepts with fictional characters that then serve as model persons for new experiences. Since we can leave fictional narratives at any point, they are ideal environments to try out new roles and types of behaviour without facing the risks we usually face in real-life situations The computer games Doom and Call of Duty, for instance, enable real-world players to shoot fictional characters without ever facing the danger of being shot themselves The players remain safe at their desks in the real world They experience a merging of self and other that enables them to experience what someone else is experiencing while simultaneously maintaining a sense of their own selves Through the phenomenon of metonymic immersion (which concerns the fact that we are only partly absorbed because we can interrupt 4 1 (2014), 89-122; and Markus Appel et al , “The Transportation Scale-Short Form (TS- SF),” Media Psychology 18 2 (2015), 243-266 19 DOOM, devs John Carmack/ John Romero (id softare, 1993) 20 Call of Duty, dev. Infinity Ward (Activision, 2003). 21 Christoph Klimmt/ Dorothee Hefner/ Peter Vorderer, “The Video Game Experience as ‘True’ Identification: A Theory of Enjoyable Alterations of Players’ Self-Perception,” Communication Theory 19 4 (2009), 356 22 Mark Turner, “Double-Scope Stories,” Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed David Herman (Stanford, CA: CSLI, 2003), 117 62 J aN a lber 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0002 the process of immersion at any point), fictional narratives are perfect platforms for experiments with identities, boundary expansions, and self-transformations To shed more light on the process of identification with fictional characters, I would like to introduce the notion of the self-concept The social psychologist Hazel R Markus argues that the self-concept is a complex mental structure which consists of two types of interrelated networks, namely self-schemata on the one hand, and possible selves on the other While self-schemata concern what we think we are in a social sense, possible selves closely correlate with what we could be or become at some point (including what we desire and fear). Markus defines self-schemata as “cognitive generalizations about the self” which are “derived from past experiences ” In addition, they “organize and guide the processing of the self-related information contained in individuals’ social experience ” 23 Self-schemata have been confirmed by our experiences and function as self-perceived category memberships for oneself They include physical characteristics, psychological predispositions, social and professional roles, gender, ethnicity, ideological beliefs, skills, particular interests, and hobbies Possible selves, by contrast, represent individuals’ ideas of what they might become, what they would like to become, and what they are afraid of becoming, and thus provide a conceptual link between cognition and motivation […] They function as incentives for future behavior […] and they provide an evaluative and interpretive context for the current view of self 24 Possible selves have not been confirmed by social experience and include desired options (such as the loved and admired self, the successful self, the good-looking self, or the self you ought to be) but also dreaded options (such as the lonely self, the incompetent self, the depressed self, the unemployed self, or the criminal self) Possible selves are usually private and sometimes even repressed, particularly when they involve socially condemned behaviour such as infidelity, promiscuity, jealousy, hatred, revenge, irresponsibility, or other forms of norm breaking However, these hidden possible selves can be tried out within the safe simulation environment that literature provides It is in fact the permanent interaction between our self-schemata and our possible selves that determines our identities, i e our perception, our emotions, and our motivations The immediate effects of this interaction are 23 Hazel R Markus, “Self-Schemata and Processing Information about the Self,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35 2 (1977), 63 24 Hazel R Markus/ Paul Nurius, “Possible Selves,” American Psychologist 41 (1986), 954 Literature as Identity Laboratory 63 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0002 usually of course only temporary ones and concern what one might call the working self-concept, but if the intensity of one’s exposure to these alternative models is increased, they may eventually become more permanent and reach the deeply ingrained core self-schemata Martínez argues that we can test and potentially reconfigure our identities by relating ourselves to fictional characters in specific ways. According to her, the blends between our self-concepts and the perceived attributes of a narrative’s central experiencer may result in different storyworld possible selves (SPSs), which she defines as “imaginings of the self in storyworlds.” 25 The creation of SPSs is of course highly subjective and differs from recipient to recipient Nevertheless, one can distinguish between four central types of SPSs To begin with, in cases of self-schema SPSs, we identify with a character because we consider this figure to be similar to ourselves. In such cases, the experience of boundary expansion is minimal or perhaps even non-existent Martínez argues that readers are “willingly involved in self-schema matches with a focalizer, so that, while sharing this character’s experiences in the simulated situation, [they] will prime opportunities for behavioral training in the self-schema domain ” 26 For instance, as professors of English literature we might fuse our self-schemata with characters such as Philip Swallow, Morris Zapp, Sybil Maiden, or Fulvia Morgana in campus novels like David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975) or Small World (1984) because we consider these academics to be as ordinary, square, nerdy, boring, or idiosyncratic as we think we are I would like to speculate that realist, modernist, and what one might call post-postmodernist types of literature often trigger the creation of self-schema SPSs as well Although there is a high degree of overlap between our self-schemata and the character traits in such cases, we can train ourselves in the self-schema domain through such blends Second, desired self SPSs involve fusions between our possible selves and characters that possess traits we wish for In such cases, we engage in forms of wishful identification and we do experience a certain degree of boundary expansion The recipient assumes the identity of someone whose bodily appearance or psychological set-up is radically different from her or his and uses the SPS to imagine having characteristics or predispositions that he or she would like to have For example, certain readers like to experience the world from the perspective of James Bond because they would in fact enjoy being as courageous, cool, good-looking, charismatic, or polygamous as 007 is, while others perhaps want to be able to rebel against patriarchal ideology 25 Martínez, “Storyworld Possible Selves,” 119 26 Ibid , 122 64 J aN a lber 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0002 in the manner of Sophie Fevvers, the central protagonist of Angela Carter’s postmodernist Nights at the Circus (1984): Fevvers is a fabulous bird-woman and moves away from the unhealthy Victorian ideal of femininity towards a spectacle of bodily presence, eroticism, appetite, autonomy, and self-determination. Depending on one’s specific desires and dreams, the characters in medieval romances, fantasy novels, super-hero stories, and science-fiction narratives may also trigger the creation of desired self SPSs Third, feared self SPSs involve blends between our possible selves and figures that display features that we dread The characters in question might be lonely, incompetent, unemployed, victimised, psychologically deranged, or perverse Interestingly, these features do not seem to prevent us from blending our possible selves with their attributes Indeed, Martínez points out that “we frequently feel irresistibly attracted by focalizers on the verge of social exclusion ” 27 Similarly, Guan Soon Khoo speaks of the paradoxical pleasures of tragedy and illustrates that we often identify with tragic heroes such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Macbeth although we do not want to be like them at all 28 Michael D Slater and his colleagues also show that recipients frequently choose grim stories to “immerse themselves in […] uncomfortable thoughts and feelings ” 29 Readers might, for instance, fuse their possible selves with Winston Smith, the central protagonist of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty- Four (1949), to create a feared self SPS Throughout this dystopian novel, Winston Smith feels suppressed by the telescreens, the system of doublethink, the language Newspeak, and the Anti-Sex League Later on, he is tortured by O’Brien inside the Ministry of Truth until he states that he believes that 2 + 2 = 5 if that is what the Party wants him to believe Even though most of us clearly do not want to share the fate of Winston Smith, it can be instructive to experience ‘what it is like’ to live in a totalitarian system like Oceania The creation of such SPSs might be motivated by our curiosity regarding the less fortunate, by our interest to prevent the development of certain possible selves, or simply by what Slater and his colleagues call “a release from the experience of the personal self ” 30 Other figures that prompt the creation of feared self SPSs are characters that suffer from psychophysical disturbances (such as Septimus Warren Smith in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway [1925] or the first-person narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” [1892]) as well as openly perverse figures like Humbert Humbert, the 27 Ibid , 124 28 Guan Soon Khoo, “Contemplating Tragedy Raises Gratifications and Fosters Self-Acceptance,” Human Communication Research 42 (2016), 271 29 Slater, “Temporarily Expanding,” 444 30 Ibid Literature as Identity Laboratory 65 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0002 paedophile narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955); Hannibal Lecter, the cannibalistic serial killer in Thomas Harris’s novels Red Dragon (1981), Silence of the Lambs (1988), Hannibal (1999), and Hannibal Rising (2006); or Patrick Bateman, the sadist and misogynist narrator of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991) In the case of past self SPSs, finally, a character reminds us of one of our past selves and we blend our understanding of this former identity and the character construct What Martínez has in mind here are self-schemata that used to play a role in the past and have fed into our present selves Examples are the good student self, the bullied teenage self, or the holiday happy self Such SPSs enable us to share the character’s emotions, but also, and more importantly, to relive our own Compared to the creation of desired or feared self SPSs, the experience of boundary expansion is probably slightly less intense because we partly relive one of our past selves in these kinds of SPSs One reason why so many readers identify with Harry Potter might be that the condescending way in which his stepparents, the Dursleys, treat Harry Potter reminds them of their own neglected childhood self I am relatively certain that many of us feel that our parents did not recognise our true potential either, but then we managed to outgrow them - maybe not by going to Hogwarts to become the most important wizard in the world, but perhaps by going to university to work on a PhD or to do important intellectual or academic work According to Martínez, our emotional involvement through the creation of SPSs does not only concern the experiences of the characters but also their influence on us: Our emotional reactions are not “derived exclusively from empathic concern with the focalizer, but also from dynamic processes of self-schema modification.” 31 In other words, SPSs do not only touch us emotionally because we put ourselves into the shoes of others and experience what they experience, but also because they challenge and potentially transform our self-schemata Martínez’s concept of the storyworld possible self does not really enable us to generate new readings or interpretations (which I consider to be a relatively superfluous endeavour given that so many interpretations already exist anyway) Her concept rather calls for an empirical investigation of the question of how flesh-and-blood readers relate to fictional characters Such empirical investigations are important because cognitive scholars frequently talk about the question of how readers respond to fictional narratives, but they usually simply equate their own intuitions and speculations with readers as such 31 Martínez, “Storyworld Possible Selves,” 121 66 J aN a lber 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0002 Like Wolfgang Iser (who speaks for the so-called ‘implied reader’ 32 ) and Jim Phelan (who equates his readings with the so-called ‘authorial audience’ and also talks about what the ‘actual audience’ does 33 ), cognitive scholars typically rely upon hypothetical reader constructs that are based on their own reading experiences, and from my perspective, this method is not very instructive because it lacks in terms of generalisability 34 Martínez, by contrast, takes the individual reading experience into consideration She argues that SPSs allow us to study narrative engagement from “an individual standpoint” since they contain features that are “derived from personal, individual experience ” 35 I would like to end this article by proposing two empirical experiments that deal with SPSs In the context of empirical experiments, participants are typically presented with one or several textual passages which they are asked to read, while their reactions are measured One usually compares the effects of at least two conditions These conditions might have to do with different textual features, different reading groups, or different contexts of reception - depending on what one wishes to measure 36 To begin with, I want to determine whether certain groups of readers feel drawn to certain SPSs In this context, I would thus like to test the following four hypotheses: H1: Readers who are happy with their lives experience the highest degree of identification when they create self-schema SPSs. H2: Readers who suffer from stress or uncertainties experience the highest degree of identification when they create desired self SPSs. 32 See Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London: Routledge/ Kegan Paul, 1978) 33 See James Phelan, Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative (Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2007) 34 Jan Alber, “Rhetorical Ways of Covering Up Speculations and Hypotheses, or Why Empirical Investigations of Real Readers Matter,” Style 51 1-2 (2018), 34-39 35 Martínez, Storyworld Possible Selves, 23 36 On empirical literary studies, see Marisa Bortolussi/ Peter Dixon, Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response (Cambridge: CUP, 2003); David S Miall, Literary Reading: Empirical and Theoretical Studies (New York: Peter Lang, 2006); Marisa Bortolussi/ Peter Dixon, “The Scientific Study of Literature: What Can, Has, and Should Be Done,” Scientific Study of Literature 1 1 (2011), 59-71; Willie van Peer et al , Scientific Methods for the Humanities (Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2012); Gerhard Lauer, “Introduction: Empirical Methods in Literary Studies,” Journal of Literary Theory 9 1 (2015), 1-3; Marisa Bortolussi/ Peter Dixon/ Roy Sommer, “Introduction: Empirical Approaches to Narrative,” Diegesis 5 1 (2016), 1-3; Jan Alber/ Caroline Kutsch/ Sven Strasen, “Empirical Literary Studies,” Methods of Textual Analysis in Literary Studies, eds Vera Nünning/ Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2020), 273-296; and Jan Alber/ Sven Strasen, eds , Empirical Literary Studies, special issue of Anglistik 31 1 (2020) Literature as Identity Laboratory 67 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0002 H3: Readers who are bored with their lives experience the highest degree of identification when they create feared self SPSs. H4: Readers who like to reminisce about the past experience the highest degree of identification when they create past self SPSs. In order to test these hypotheses, I will have to determine different clusters of readers (for the sake of simplicity, I will call them happy, stressed, bored, and nostalgic-sentimental readers) This can be done by using a questionnaire that includes statements about the readers’ current self-schemata (such as “my current life has a clear sense of purpose,” “it is difficult for me to relax,” “I wish my life was more exciting,” or “I frequently engage in daydreams about the past”) followed by a seven-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (= totally agree) to 7 (= totally disagree) 37 I would then use a within-subjects design and confront the participants with four textual passages that invite them to create a self-schema, a desired self, a feared self, and a past self SPS respectively Next, I would use the identification scale developed by Igartua to measure the subjectively perceived degree of identification. 38 In a third and final step, I would compare the reader profiles with the degrees of identification in the four cases My second experiment concerns the degree of boundary expansion that readers experience when they create different SPSs Here is the hypothesis that I would like to test: H5: Readers will experience the highest degree of boundary expansion when they create feared self SPSs (followed by desired self and then past self SPSs) The creation of self-schema SPSs, by contrast, will involve a rather low degree of boundary expansion Again, I would use a within-subjects design and confront the participants with four textual passages that invite them to create a self-schema, a desired self, a feared self, and a past self SPS respectively Next, I would use the boundary expansion scale developed by Benjamin K Johnson et al in 2016 to measure the subjectively perceived degree of boundary expan- 37 This questionnaire could, for instance, be based on the following investigations and scales: Ed Diener et al , “The Satisfaction with Life Scale,” Journal of Personality Assessment 49 (1985), 71-75; Eunkook Mark Suh/ Ed Diener/ Frank Fujita, “Events and Subjective Well-Being: Only Recent Events Matter,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70 5 (1996), 1091-1102; and Michael F Steger et al , “The Meaning in Life Questionnaire: Assessing the Presence of and Search for Meaning in Life,” Journal of Counseling Psychology 53 (2006), 80-93 38 Igartua, “Identification,” 356. 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0002 68 J aN a lber sion in the four cases 39 One could then also try to connect the two experiments to determine which groups of readers are particularly interested in boundary expansions My intuition would be that it is primarily readers who wish to transcend their current lives because they feel stressed or bored (followed by the nostalgic-sentimental group that likes to re-experience or live in the past) Martínez does not only enable us to see literature as an identity laboratory in which people engage in various experiments with their self-schemata and possible selves She also paves the way towards empirical investigations of what exactly real readers do within this identity laboratory It seems to me that - as cognitive scholars of literature - we should accept this challenge and finally move beyond hypothetical reader constructs by investigating actual flesh-and-blood readers and the ways in which they deal with literature in greater detail Works Cited Ahrens, Rüdiger/ Laurenz Volkmann, eds Why Literature Matters: Theories and Functions of Literature. Heidelberg: Winter, 1996 Alber, Jan “Rhetorical Ways of Covering Up Speculations and Hypotheses, or Why Empirical Investigations of Real Readers Matter ” Style 51 1-2 (2018), 34-39 --- “Logical Contradictions, Possible-Worlds Theory, and the Embodied Mind ” Possible-Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology Eds Alice Bell/ Marie-Laure Ryan Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2019, 157-176 Alber, Jan/ Marco Caracciolo/ Stefan Iversen/ Karin Kukkonen/ Henrik Skov Nielsen “Introduction: Unnatural and Cognitive Perspectives on Narrative ” Poetics Today 39 3 (2018), 429-445 Alber, Jan/ Stefan Iversen/ Louise Brix Jacobsen/ Rikke Andersen Kraglund/ Henrik Skov Nielsen/ Camilla Møhring Reestorff, eds Why Study Literature? Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 2011 Alber, Jan/ Caroline Kutsch/ Sven Strasen “Empirical Literary Studies ” Methods of Textual Analysis in Literary Studies eds Vera Nünning/ Ansgar Nünning Trier: WVT, 2020, 273- 296 Alber, Jan/ Sven Strasen, eds Empirical Literary Studies, special issue of Anglistik 31 1 (2020) Ames, Daniel L / Adrianna C Jenkins/ Mahzarin R Banaji/ Jason P Mitchell “Taking Another Person’s Perspective Increases Self-Referential Neural Processing ” Psychological Science 19 7 (2008), 642-644 Appel, Markus/ Timo Gnambs/ Tobias Richter/ Melanie C Green “The Transportation Scale-Short Form (TS-SF) ” Media Psychology 18 2 (2015), 243-266 Bortolussi, Marisa/ Peter Dixon Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response Cambridge: CUP, 2003 39 See Benjamin K Johnson et al , “Entertainment and Expanding Boundaries of the Self: Relief from the Constraints of the Everyday,” Journal of Communication 66 3 (2016), 392 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0002 69 Literature as Identity Laboratory ---. “The Scientific Study of Literature: What Can, Has, and Should Be Done.” Scientific Study of Literature 1 1 (2011), 59-71 Bortolussi, Marisa/ Peter Dixon/ Roy Sommer “Introduction: Empirical Approaches to Narrative ” Diegesis 5 1 (2016), 1-3 Busselle, Rick/ Helena Bilandzic “Measuring Narrative Engagement ” Media Psychology 12 (2009), 321-347 Call of Duty. 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Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2012 Zunshine, Lisa Why We Read Fiction Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004 Literature as Identity Laboratory 71 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 V era N üNNiNg The Value of Literature for the ‘Extension of our Sympathies’ Twelve Strategies for the Direction of Readers’ Sympathy It may seem strange to take a famous statement by George Eliot as a cue for exploring the value of literature in the twenty-first century. After all, the values and worries of Victorian times are quite remote from our contemporary reality, and the didactic conception of literature as a means to delight and to teach, particularly regarding morals, is definitely a thing of the past. So why should we concern ourselves with Eliot’s belief that the greatest value of literature lies in its potential to extend our sympathies? 1 With hundreds of Facebook friends and constant communication via other social media, we seem to have extended our potential for sympathising with others to the limit Looked at more closely, Eliot’s conceptualisation of the value of literature is even more timely today than it was in the middle of the nineteenth century In the 1840s, Benjamin Disraeli tried to bridge the gap between what he called Two Nations within Britain, but today the divisions within societies seem to have multiplied There are growing chasms between different groups; a liberal’s view of the world differs profoundly from that of a conservative, and right-wing ‘populists’ work with prejudices and distort facts, creating yet another world for themselves In addition to politics, factors such as religion and the question of immigration foster divisions, which have grown in many countries during the last ten years 2 Even the process of globalisation adds to such rifts, for it concerns the spreading not only of capitalism, but also of a particular kind of conservative politics aimed at excluding others as well as the dissemination “of fundamentalist structures of feeling (not only in religion, but in politics, identity, etc )” 3 Communicative rules in social media 1 See George Eliot, “The Natural History of German Life,” Essays of George Eliot, ed Thomas Pinney (1856; London: Routledge/ Kegan Paul, 1963), 270 2 See Bobby Duffy et al , “BBC Global Survey: A World Divided? ” Ipsos MORI, 23 April 2018, www ipsos com/ ipsos-mori/ en-uk/ bbc-global-survey-world-divided 3 Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (Durham: Duke UP, 2010), 59 74 V era N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 are also involved in these changes and render it difficult to make one feel empathy with others; hate-speech has become an unfortunate and growing part of digital communication It does not come as a surprise, therefore, that the Dalai Lama thinks that “compassion for all living beings” is the first step in the attempt to counter nationalist and tribalist traditions in the twenty-first century 4 Modern scientists agree that an other-oriented feeling that makes us concerned for the welfare of others is at the root of altruistic behaviour 5 If this feeling plays such an important role for peaceful communication and cooperation, the value of fiction as a means for extending our sympathies can scarcely be overestimated. In order to explore this affective value of fiction, I will first of all clarify some key terms, such as sympathy and empathy, as well as their relation to fictional works. After briefly showing why literature can serve to foster sympathy, I will explore the narrative conventions that bear the potential to extend readers’ sympathies Though there are a host of strategies to be considered, one can arguably group them into six conventions relating to the level of narrative mediation and another six concerning plot patterns and the conceptualisation of characters The conclusion will focus not only on the benefits, but also on the dangers involved in the potential of fiction to arouse readers’ sympathies 1 Evoking Sympathy and Empathy in Works of Fiction: Clarifying Key Terms and Processes At the beginning of the twenty-first century, with the resurgence of nationalist traditions and growing rifts and divisions even within nations, the most important value of literature may be its potential to evoke sympathy and foster positive feelings for others. In order to explore this potential of fiction, however, one needs to consider related concepts, one of which can already be found in Eliot’s beliefs about literature: The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics re- 4 Quoted in Paul Ekman, ed , Emotional Awareness: Overcoming the Obstacles to Psychological Balance and Compassion: A Conversation Between the Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman (New York: Times Books, 2008), 186 For social media see Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now (London: The Bodley Head 2018), 74-80 5 Cf Daniel C Batson/ Nadia Ahmad/ David A Lishner, “Empathy and Altruism,” Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology, eds Shane J Lopez/ C R Snyder (Oxford: OUP, 2009), 418-420 The Value of Literature for the ‘Extension of our Sympathies’ 75 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 quire a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment 6 What one needs in order to extend one’s sympathy, is, first of all, the giving of attention to something or someone apart from oneself In the context of literary studies in the twenty-first century, this call for attention can be related to ‘deep reading’ or ‘immersion’ These terms signify more than simple concentration on any menial text, such as a cooking recipe or an instant message on social media While paying full attention to a broad range of activities plays an important role for the quality of one’s life and experience, 7 it does not entail the kind of positive effect that the absorption in literary works may have. In order to profit from the cognitive and affective potential of literature, one needs to fully immerse oneself in a book 8 Attention is one facet of this process of immersion 9 In addition, one needs to distinguish between sympathy and empathy When Adam Smith contributed to the popularisation of the value of sympathy in the eighteenth century, the term ‘empathy’ did not exist, and he used the word ‘sympathy’ to designate two meanings: that of empathy, i e feeling like someone else, and of sympathy, i e feeling for someone else, which usually signified pity or compassion. Empathy and sympathy are closely related, and literary characters can evoke both feelings Nevertheless, for clarity’s sake, it is helpful to differentiate between them In literary works, empathy, the sharing of the feelings of characters, can be induced in different ways One important means of inciting empathy is 6 Eliot, “Natural History,” 270 For Eliot’s conceptualisation of the value of literature for the extension of our sympathies see, e g , Ansgar Nünning, “‘The Extension of our Sympathies’: George Eliot’s Aesthetic Theory and Narrative Technique as a Key to the Affective, Cognitive, and Social Value of Literature,” Values of Literature, eds Hanna Meretoja et al (London: Rodopi, 2015), 117-137 7 See Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 128 8 See Melanie C Green/ Timothy C Brock, “The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives, “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79 5 (2000), 701-721 See also Keith Oatley, “Fiction: Simulation of Social Worlds,” Trends in Cognitive Science 20 8 (2016), 618-628 9 See Moniek M Kuijpers et al , “Towards a New Understanding of Absorbing Reading Experiences,” Narrative Absorption, eds Frank Hakemulder et al (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017), 29-47 They stress that attention, mental imagery, emotional engagement and transportation are involved in what they call narrative absorption These four facets have also been emphasised in previous research, for instance in many studies by Melanie Green, some of which are specifically referred to below. 76 V era N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 the use of focalisation (for instance by free indirect discourse), which enables readers to see and feel the situation through the eyes of a character 10 A second mode of evoking empathy with characters involves putting them into a difficult situation, which may lead either to a good or bad outcome. This can prompt readers to imagine themselves being in that difficult situation; this has been called “situational empathy” 11 This feeling provides an incentive for caring about the future of the characters Placing literary characters in a precarious position reduces the distance towards them and is an important basis for the readers’ willingness to take their perspective; this device has been popular for centuries in Western literature The problems the characters have to deal with differ significantly according to the genre in question, and they may range from trying to escape from a gruesome prison on an isolated island to choosing the right husband Sympathy, in contrast, presupposes a certain distance between the reader and character, with the reader acting as an observer who is moved by the fate of the character Rather than sharing emotions such as insecurity, fear or sadness, readers can respond with a different feeling, namely compassion This feeling can even be evoked when the character is not troubled by problems and is not feeling any negative emotions such as fear or sadness, which the reader could share In George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch (1871-72), for instance, readers may feel pity for Dorothea, when she herself is full of happy anticipation for the (from her point of view) exciting and meaningful life she will lead together with her husband-to-be, Casaubon Knowing more about Casaubon’s intentions and desires than Dorothea, however, readers are able to foresee a very different, sad future for the heroine and therefore feel compassion for her In Eliot’s novels, the authorial narrators play an important role in evoking the audience’s sympathy, since they often explicitly appeal to the pity of readers or explain the characters’ motives and (mis)conceptions, which puts readers in a superior position, enabling them to feel compassion with a broad range of characters However, it is impossible to make any generalisations about ‘the effect’ of literature, since there are differences with regard to both readers and works of literature Not everyone is able to fully immerse themselves in a novel; some genres and individual works lend themselves more to immersive reading than others, and even the same reader may at one time be deeply engaged with a novel, and at other times might not be able to concentrate on the con- 10 The importance of focalisation will be discussed below 11 See Patrick C Hogan, The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), 140 The Value of Literature for the ‘Extension of our Sympathies’ 77 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 tent of the same book at all As Melanie Green shows, some readers are more able to feel transported and to forget their surroundings while focusing on fictional narratives, and books of high quality invite more immersive reading than others, for instance those written by psychologists for test purposes 12 The kind of story world and type of plot (for instance of adventure fiction or romance) and literary style also play a role in the readers’ response to a literary work 13 Moreover, readers of different ages and experiences have heterogeneous preferences for particular genres and works: What is too complex for one person may well be too boring for someone else Even though it is impossible to predict the effect of works of fiction on specific readers, it is possible to explore the potential of specific texts and narrative features for evoking readers’ empathy and pity As the quote by Eliot shows, she was aware that not every book can extend readers’ sympathy For her, only “a great artist” can achieve this feat As most authors in the nineteenth century, she confidently distinguished between great and minor authors, some of which she criticised in her essay on “silly lady novelists” Nowadays it is a matter of dispute as to which works can be said to be of high quality and in how far it is possible to differentiate between ‘canonical works’ and merely ‘popular’ ones Moreover, there is no direct relation between literary fiction and the evocation of positive emotions; instead, our sympathies can also be engaged by reading extremely popular works such as Joanne K Rowling’s Harry Potter (1997-2007), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) or even Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) - probably much more so than by some postmodern novels The distinction between ‘great’ and ‘minor’ artists therefore does not help to elucidate the question of which literary works are able to achieve the extension of readers’ sympathies Instead, it is worthwhile to ask which kind of works can extend one’s sympathy to others who are not similar to oneself After all, feeling empathy and sympathy with those who belong to one’s family and close friends or are similar to oneself is, fortunately, a rather common reaction 14 The difficulties become much more pronounced when unfamiliar and dissimilar people or members from out-groups are concerned In order to explore the question of which works are able to elicit the readers’ sympathy, it is necessary to shed some light on the concept of sympathy As a meticulous study by Howard Sklar demonstrates, the interdisciplinary research on narrative sympathy encompasses several components: A reader’s 12 Melanie C Green, “Transportation into Narrative Worlds: The Role of Prior Knowledge and Perceived Realism,” Discourse Processes 38 2 (2004), 248-249 13 See Kujpers et al , “Towards a New Understanding,” 34-37 14 See Batson et al , “Empathy and Altruism” 78 V era N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 awareness that the suffering of the character should be alleviated and is frequently judged to be unfair, “‘Negative’ feelings on behalf of the sufferer, [and a] Desire to help” 15 That ‘sympathy’ is a pejorative term for some scholars may be due to their belief in the alleged superiority of the observer and the allegedly egoistic desire to help the sufferer 16 The negative attitude towards the concept can also be related to the denigration of the ‘sentimentalism’ of the second half of the eighteenth century, when Adam Smith and David Hume introduced their reflections about the moral importance of sympathy. However, in the culture of sensibility (a less pejorative term for ‘sentimentalism’), sympathy, benevolence and other refined feelings were not divorced from rationality; in fact, the link to reason was as close as to morality 17 Taking their cue from the meaning of the English term ‘sympathy’, literary scholars often work with a concept of sympathy that excludes positive feelings on the part of readers Sklar and others emphasise that “at the heart of sympathetic experience is a judgment of the unfairness or unpleasantness of another’s situation”, 18 which presupposes that the feeling of sympathy is more or less equivalent to that of pity or compassion: We feel sympathy for those who suffer Consequently, literary scholars have concentrated on narrative means of raising compassion for the characters in question The exploration of modes of directing readers’ sympathy is thus focussed on “‘Negative’ feelings on behalf of the sufferer” 19 This focus on affective responses to people in distress is shared by psychologists, who are interested in such reactions because they are the most important source for altruistic behaviour. As Daniel Batson and his colleagues confirm, there are many terms for these feelings, but most of them centre on an other-oriented emotional reaction to seeing another person in need This emotional reaction has variously been called “empathy” (Batson, 1987; Krebs, 1975; Stotland, 1969), “sympathy” (Eisenberg Strayer, 1987; Heider, 1958; Wispé, 1986, 1991), “sympathetic distress” (Hoffman, 1981), “tenderness” (McDougall, 1908), and “pity” or “compassion” (Hume, 1740/ 1896; Smith, 1759/ 1853) 20 15 Howard Sklar, The Art of Sympathy in Fiction: Forms of Ethical and Emotional Persuasion (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013), 53 16 Cf ibid , 38-39 17 See e g Michael L Frazer, The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Reflective Sentimentalism in the Eighteenth Century and Today (Oxford: OUP, 2010), 11 18 Sklar, The Art of Sympathy, 48 19 Ibid , 53 20 Batson et al., “Empathy and Altruism”, 418; the definition of what Batson and his colleagues call ‘empathy’, however, is broader: “an other-oriented emotional response elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of a person in need” (ibid , 417) The Value of Literature for the ‘Extension of our Sympathies’ 79 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 Though the terms differ, it has by now been demonstrated that this kind of ‘sympathy’ or ‘sympathetic distress’, which is caused by the observation of others who are suffering and in need of help, induces altruistic motivations Feeling “for the other - feeling sorry for, distressed for” 21 is related to pro-social behaviour Fictional works which have the potential of evoking such feelings can therefore foster altruistic motivations There is, however, another meaning of sympathy which should be taken into consideration In the Spanish, Italian, and German languages, ‘sympatía’ or ‘Sympathie’, denote a positive feeling for others, which leads to wishing them well and rejoicing in their good luck Psychologists have dubbed this feeling ‘symhedonia’, which is “more partial, selective, and, consequently, less wide ranging than sympathy proper [i e pity]” and “inherently biased toward those whom people especially care about” 22 In everyday situations, it is restricted to an interest in the good fortune of a few people who are close to us. By presenting likeable and attractive characters, fictional works often provide stimuli for feeling this positive counterpart to pity Works of literature thus serve to generate a feeling that is arguably ethically valuable and may make it easier for readers to engender it in everyday situations By feeling sympathy for long stretches of time, avid readers may reinforce and heighten their sympathetic dispositions and form a positive attitude towards the well-being of others, which can be translated into everyday life In the following, I will use the term sympathy as encompassing both sympatía and sympathy, symhedonia as well as compassion, and gauge its importance for the value of literature 2 Difficulties of Engendering Sympathy - and the Value of Fiction In our daily lives, sympathy is as necessary as it is precarious Partly, empathic feelings and sympathy for those in distress are automatic and take place without the observer being aware of it However, the devil is in the details, namely in the specific situation and in the identity of the human being involved Several kinds of bias impede feelings of sympathy and empathy and hinder or even block helping behaviour: “Although people tend to respond 21 Ibid , 419; see also Martin L Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice (New York: CUP, 2000), 30 22 Edward B Rozyman/ Paul Rozin, “Limits of Symhedonia: The Differential Role of Prior Emotional Attachment in Sympathy and Sympathetic Joy,” Emotion 6 1 (2006), 83, 91 80 V era N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 empathically to almost anyone in distress, they are vulnerable to bias” 23 Empathy and sympathy are modified by the “Family Bias”, the “Familiarity Bias”, the “In-Group Bias”, the “Friendship Bias”, and the “Similarity Bias” 24 Apparently, there are inhibitions that impede our helping others whose knowledge, beliefs, values, and personality traits differ from ours, while we are automatically inclined to aid members of our in-group, family, friends, and people who are similar to us These forms of bias are closely related, and in specific situations there is a mixture of several of them. In the following, I will refer mainly to the similarity and in-group bias, which seems to play a role in other predispositions (such as the family or familiarity bias) as well Even though it is important to overcome these impediments, it is anything but obvious as to why fictional stories can serve as means of achieving this feat An encompassing exploration of this question would need to consider a host of features not only of literature, but also of narratives 25 Here, I only want to stress a few important preconditions for this potential benefit of fiction First, as Beau Lotto succinctly states, summarising a wealth of research: “Imagined experiences encode themselves in our brains in nearly the same way as lived ones” 26 Though narrative fiction allows readers to have vicarious experiences, it gives rise to real emotions 27 There is no fundamental difference between the cognitive processing of real or imaginary events The neuronal processes involved in reading about a specific scene more or less match the processes involved in understanding the same event in real life Functional magnetic resonance imaging has shown that there seems to be a “shared neural basis for attempting to make sense of real people and for processing fictional representations of persons”. 28 Second, the imagination and the capacity to take the perspectives of others play a large role in the ability to feel sympathy for victims in distress Martin Hoffman, for instance, advises parents who want to foster their children’s altruism to encourage them “to imagine how someone close to them, someone 23 Hoffman, Empathy, 13 24 Ibid , 13, 197, 206-209 25 For a brief survey, see Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014), chapter 2 26 Beau Lotto, Deviate: The Creative Power of Transforming Your Perception (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2017), 234 27 See e g Katja Mellmann, “Biologische Ansätze zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Emotionen,” Journal of Literary Theory 1 2 (2007), 357-375 28 Raymond A Mar/ Keith Oatley, “The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3 (2008), 180; see also Roel M Willems/ Arthur M Jacobs, “Caring About Dostoyevsky: The Untapped Potential of Studying Literature,” Trends in Cognitive Science 20 4 (2016), 243-245 The Value of Literature for the ‘Extension of our Sympathies’ 81 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 they care a lot about, would feel in the stranger’s or absent victim’s place This is a way of turning empathy’s familiarity and here-and-now biases against themselves and recruiting them in the service of prosocial motive development ” 29 As Hoffman stresses, one only has to imagine victims, for instance by reading about them, to incite sympathy In order to imagine “someone they care a lot about” in a difficult situation one may just as well read a fictional story which evokes the plight of a fictional character in a predicament. The problem is that taking the perspective of another, which is at the heart of the reading experience, is actually surprisingly difficult to achieve in real life. As Nicholas Epley and others note: “Possessing this capability does not, however, mean that people will necessarily use their perspective-taking skills when they should, or that their skills will actually lead them to accurately identify another person’s mental states ” 30 A third precondition for the value of fiction is a collection of factors that foster the removal of any impediments from taking the perspectives of others In real life, people find it difficult to suspend their own beliefs and opinions. Moreover, they often do not know enough about the traits, attitudes and feelings of others in order to gauge how the others feel, and they lack the time - and perhaps even the interest - to think about the state of mind of people in distress. When reading fiction, in contrast, perspective taking occurs spontaneously 31 One cannot understand a story focusing on the actions and experiences of characters without adopting their perspective Moreover, there is no danger involved in immersing oneself in the minds and views of fictional characters; readers can try out new roles without having to fear negative consequences 32 As a rule, fictional stories provide the knowledge that is needed to understand the major characters Even though the information may remain sketchy, salient facts are usually given, and the nuanced contextual- 29 Hoffman, Empathy, 297 30 Nicholas Epley/ Eugene M Caruso, “Perspective Taking: Misstepping into Others’ Shoes,” Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation, eds Keith D Markman et al (New York: Psychology Press, 2009), 296 These authors also provide reasons for failing to perform this activity: “We believe that there are three critical barriers - activating the ability, adjusting an egocentric default, and accessing accurate information about others ” (Ibid ) 31 See Daniel M Johnson et al , “Reading Narrative Fiction Reduces Arab-Muslim Prejudice and Offers a Safe Haven from Intergroup Anxiety,” Social Cognition 31 (2013), 593. For a more extensive discussion of the potential and benefit of fictional stories to encourage perspective taking, see Nünning, Reading Fictions, chapter 5 32 This ‘safety argument’ is put forward by many scholars. The first ones to use it were, to my knowledge, Daniel C Batson et al , “Empathy and Attitudes: Can Feeling for a Member of a Stigmatized Group Improve Feelings Toward the Group? ” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 72 1 (1997), 105-118 82 V era N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 ised rendering of significant features often makes it possible to understand characters depicted in fiction better than in interactive situations. What would we know about Madame Bovary if she lived next door? The feeling that we know some of our favourite characters better than many of our friends, is explained by Keith Oatley: Fiction provides context to understand the elliptical It offers the context of characters’ goals and plans It gives a sense of how actions lead to vicissitudes It allows, too, the reader to experience something of emotions that can arise All of these elements are omitted from a faithful, empirically unexceptionable copy of real life 33 So far, it has been argued that sympathy is of vital importance for altruistic motivations and for communicating successfully and peacefully in the crises of the twenty-first century. In addition, some of the most important impediments to a sympathetic adoption of the perspective of others are next to non-existent when reading about the fate of fictional characters in narrative texts. But which characteristics of fiction enable readers to feel sympathy for unfamiliar characters? 3 Features of Narrative Fiction Fostering Readers’ Sympathy and Overcoming Counterproductive Biases An obvious point of departure for identifying works with a potential to induce readers’ sympathy for others is by way of their content. At first sight, books that feature characters from out-groups seem to be more valuable for the extension of our sympathies and the fostering of pro-social dispositions than others In the nineteenth century, social novels already used ‘explorer characters’, which cross cultural or social boundaries, as protagonists 34 Today, postcolonial novelists sometimes feature “bridge characters (sharing some traits with target audiences) and the construction of a wide array of character types, to maximize the chances that a reader can travel with one of the characters” 35 In addition, heroes who extend their sympathies to unfamiliar others can serve as role models that readers may identify with - a device 33 Keith Oatley, “Why Fiction May Be Twice as True as Fact: Fiction as Cognitive and Emotional Simulation,” Review of General Psychology 3 2 (1999), 108 34 For the strategies of evoking empathy in nineteenth-century social novels, see Mary-Catherine Harrison, “How Narrative Relationships Overcome Empathic Bias: Elizabeth Gaskell’s Empathy Across Social Difference,” Poetics Today 32 2 (2011), 255-288 35 Suzanne Keen, “Strategic Empathizing: Techniques of Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Narrative Empathy,” Deutsche Vierteljahreszeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 82 3 (2008), 490 The Value of Literature for the ‘Extension of our Sympathies’ 83 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 that was employed extensively in British sentimental novels in the eighteenth century A less obvious means of prompting readers to pay attention to characters who differ from themselves consists of presenting characters that embody conflicting hierarchies of values and show a common ground between them and the reader Novels that fulfil these criteria may be especially prone to evoke readers’ feelings for members of out-groups and overcome the similarity bias, but the value of fiction for the extension of readers’ sympathies exceeds such obvious examples As George Eliot stated, great artists can prompt readers to pay attention “to what is apart from themselves”, to characters and concerns that are beyond the pale of their daily lives and routines Inducing readers to feel for others is not limited to members of specific (social, ethnic, etc.) out-groups; the broader question is how to evoke sympathy for unfamiliar others, for people who are different from oneself even though they may be of the same social class, gender, or ethnicity. One can find individuals who are perceived as ‘different’, holding contrastive opinions and subscribing to conflicting values even in a close circle of friends or a family There can be differences within groups that cannot be explained with reference to well-established social categories such as class, age, or gender 3.1 Narrative Strategies for the Direction of Sympathy on the Discourse Level Narrative conventions for the direction of sympathy are just as important for the evocation of readers’ sympathies as the content of a given work After all, the depiction of characters, values, and actions of an out-group can evoke rejection, anger, or even disgust as well as sympathy. The value of fiction as a means of extending our sympathies hinges upon formal features, on the way in which unfamiliar characters are presented An important precondition for feelings of empathy and sympathy is the immersion of readers, which is linked to the degree of their affective engagement with the story world and the characters 36 Narrative genres that keep readers at a distance, such as novels of ideas, may serve important functions in so far as they induce readers to reflect upon the validity of their own values and attitudes, and even change them However, such works are unlikely to 36 For the following, see Nünning, Reading Fictions, chapter 5, with a host of references to the relevant psychological studies See also Martha Nussbaum, who states that “reading can only have the good effects we claim for it if one reads with immersion” (“Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and Literature 22 (1988), 353) 84 V era N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 induce readers to empathise or even sympathise with the characters 37 The following aspects are (even though on different levels and in different ways) relevant for the direction of readers’ sympathies (1) The ‘perceived realism’ of a text is related to the degree of readers’ immersion 38 and thus to the evocation of affective responses to the characters The concept ‘perceived realism’ refers to the impression of readers who ascribe life-likeness and plausibility to the events and to the feelings, intentions and actions of the protagonists If a story is perceived to be plausible and the characters are held to be life-like, readers tend to become more absorbed into a text Depending on the genre, a wide range of characters can be perceived as life-like - in fantasy, for instance, characters like Harry Potter appear to be plausible and ‘realistic’ and engage the emotions of the audience (2) Psychologists have also linked the degree of immersion to the degree to which narrative events seem “like personal experience” 39 or, in narratological terms, the degree of experientiality of a text As Werner Wolf stresses, analogies to experiences in real life create an aesthetic illusion If readers can make inferences by using scripts and schemata that they employ in their daily lives, the text will evoke the impression that the world of the story is real 40 This illusion of the life-likeness of the characters and the story also corresponds to the use of vivid mental images, which generate the readers’ interests and contribute to a high degree of immersion into the story 41 (3) The internal coherence of the story world and the lack of foregrounding or distancing devices are two other factors related to readers’ immersion in the fictional world. Whether the events closely correspond to the real world is not of paramount importance; instead, the text-internal consistency of the events and thoughts and feelings of the characters have a large impact on readers’ interest in, and sympathy for, the characters In a high fantasy novel, the use of a magic sword might be plausible, while the use of a revolver might 37 Kujpers et al , “Towards a New Understanding,” also stress that different storyworlds evoke different kinds of narrative absorption and, by implication, different feelings on the part of readers 38 See Melanie C Green/ Karen E Dill, “Engaging with Stories and Characters: Learning, Persuasion, and Transportation into Narrative Worlds,” The Oxford Handbook of Media Psychology, ed Karen E Dill (New York: OUP, 2013), 454 39 Melanie C Green/ Jennifer Garst/ Timothy C Brock, “The Power of Fiction: Determinants and Boundaries,” The Psychology of Entertainment Media: Blurring the Lines Between Entertainment and Persuasion, ed L J Shrum (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004), 169 40 See Werner Wolf, “Illusion (Aesthetic),” Handbook of Narratology, eds Peter Hühn et al (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 144-159 41 See, e g , Kuijpers et al , “Towards a New Understanding,” 34; Melanie C Green, “Transportation into Narrative Worlds,” 247, 250f The Value of Literature for the ‘Extension of our Sympathies’ 85 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 not 42 Disruptions of the internal coherence are in so far related to foregrounding and defamiliarisation as both increase the readers’ distance to the storyworld Foregrounding and defamiliarising devices may therefore, at least momentarily, disturb readers’ immersion 43 (4) The degree of suspense influences both immersion and readers’ affective engagement with the characters Suspense is thus related to the readers’ willingness to feel empathy and sympathy According to Richard Gerrig and Fritz Breithaupt, the expectations of readers with regard to desired or feared outcomes are of major importance for their emotional responses As Gerrig concludes: “To a large extent, a theory of suspense must include within it a theory of empathy: Under what circumstances do we care sufficiently about other people to engage in active thought about their fates? ” 44 One might add that the same holds true for engaging in feelings for the characters’ fates There is a close link between sympathy and suspense: Feelings of suspense go along with an intensification of attention, interest and affect. (5) Narrative conventions that induce readers to vicariously experience thoughts and feelings of others are perhaps even more important for the direction of readers’ sympathies According to Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon, the use of gaps and ambivalences that invite narrative implicatures enhance the reader’s affective engagement 45 The very lack of concrete information can induce readers to make inferences in order to fill in gaps and understand what is being alluded to By means of such inferences, which often draw on readers’ personal memories, readers construct a mental image of the characters Since this image conforms to their own experiences, it is more concrete and life-like than the information explicitly given in the text This in turn makes readers feel that they comprehend the characters on more 42 See, e g , Oatley, “Fiction May Be Twice,” 109 As Rick Busselle and Helena Bilandzic, “Fictionality and Perceived Realism in Experiencing Stories: A Model of Narrative Comprehension and Engagement,” Communication Theory 18 2 (2008), 255-280, have pointed out, the absence of either external or internal consistencies is of crucial importance for ‘perceived realism’ and the degree of transportation; moreover, genre plays a major role as well in determining which kind of props, action, or causality appear to be realistic within the given story world 43 However, it is important to acknowledge that the foregrounding of stylistic devices can foster a specific form of immersion that Kuijpers and her colleagues have called ‘artifact absorption’ (cf Kuijpers et al , “Towards a New Understanding”, 38-42) Readers may be captivated by a skillful use of language that draws their attention to the style rather than the content and does not increase their affective engagement with the characters 44 Richard J Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1993), 80 45 Marisa Bortolussi/ Peter Dixon, Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), 91-94 86 V era N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 than just a superficial basis. Bortolussi and Dixon conclude that readers tend to affectively relate to characters when they are given enough room to “use their own knowledge and experience to construct narratorial implicatures” 46 Whether there are any basic sociological similarities between a character and a reader does not matter, what counts is “the ability to construct an analogy between the experiences of the reader and those of the narrative character” 47 Readers are thus encouraged to feel that they share some features with a character on a deeper level, which may be “more potent and compelling” 48 than the recognition of superficial similarities with regard to social group, age, or ethnicity Conventions that induce readers to make inferences and draw their own conclusions can therefore counter the similarity and the familiarity bias, since these narrative means allow readers to detect what they have in common with the characters In a similar vein, Mary-Catherine Harrison claims that “the ethical potential of narrative empathy can in some ways surpass that of interpersonal empathy because of its ability to overcome what Martin Hoffman (2000) calls ‘similarity bias,’ that is, our unwillingness or inability to empathize with people who are not like ourselves” 49 Despite contrasts in outward appearance, gender, social class, and life style, characters may turn out to be, for instance, just as concerned about helping others or conquering their fears in order to act in pro-social ways as readers are After all, it is ‘perceived similarity’ that determines the similarity bias, 50 and reading fiction can serve to expand the range of characters that readers come to know well enough in order to perceive similarities with and extend their sympathies to them There are thus several major factors which influence the degree of sympathy that readers extend to the characters: • ‘perceived realism’ and the life-likeness of the characters and the story world; • the degree of experientiality and the vividness of the mental images the text evokes; 46 Ibid , 94 47 Marisa Bortolussi/ Peter Dixon/ Paul Sopčák, “Gender and Reading,” Poetics 38 3 (2010), 314 48 Ibid 49 Harrison, “How Narrative Relationships,” 257 50 See Marilynn B Brewer/ Samuel L Gaertner, “Toward Reduction of Prejudice: Intergroup Contact and Social Categorization,” Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Intergroup Processes, eds Rupert Brown/ Samuel Gaertner (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 451-472 The Value of Literature for the ‘Extension of our Sympathies’ 87 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 • the lack of internal contradictions and defamiliarising and foregrounding devices; • the degree of suspense; • the use of gaps and ambivalences that allow readers to attribute traits and feelings to the character which they perceive as plausible and life-like While the lack of contradictions and of defamiliarising devices form preconditions for readers’ immersion into the story world, the other factors evoke readers’ sympathies in the broad sense of the term ‘sympathy’: They are conducive in making readers wish for the well-being of the characters and rejoice when they succeed In addition, they may also incite compassion for the characters (6) The sixth narrative convention that fosters the affective engagement of readers on the level of narrative mediation is often relevant for, but does not necessarily appeal to, their sympathies It concerns the relatively ‘immediate’ and vivid rendering of the characters’ mental processes, which invites readers to share the characters’ thoughts and feelings Psychologists have devoted a lot of effort to the study of ‘simulation’ (i e the imaginative sharing of others’ thoughts and feelings), and narrative theorists have extensively studied the process of ‘focalisation’ and the modes of presenting characters’ consciousness In the present context, two aspects deserve to be singled out First, the presentation of characters’ thoughts and feelings allows readers to simulate and share these cognitive processes However, the degree to which readers empathise with characters can vary Depending on the particular context, this process shifts between a more emotional and a more cognitive simulation of the character’s thoughts and feelings Readers can, for instance, cognitively follow the egotistic, cruel thoughts of anti-heroes or villains without affectively sharing them In some cases, the presentation of a villain’s thoughts is more likely to result in abhorrence rather than empathy or sympathy Only the cognitive and affective sharing or appreciation of the characters’ mental processes are relevant for the direction of readers’ sympathies Having to follow gruesome thoughts of, for instance, serial killers (a device that is rather popular in contemporary thrillers) is a means of raising antipathy rather than sympathy 51 Second, the process of simulating the characters’ affective and cognitive experiences is linked to the readers’ own appraisal of the situation in question 51 That the sharing of misguided and naïve beliefs of some characters (for instance concerning the worth of the partner or adversary) may induce not only understanding but also pity, demonstrates once again that feelings of empathy cannot simply be mapped onto feelings of sympathy 88 V era N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 This is influenced by their knowledge about the whole text that they have read so far and can include information about events that is not available to the focaliser This second process is connected to an overall assessment of the situation and to the moral positioning of readers; it is closely related to the development of sympathy and questions of ethics As James Phelan has pointed out, “[o]ur emotions and desires about both fictional and nonfictional characters are intimately tied to our judgments of them” 52 3.2 Narrative Strategies for the Direction of Sympathy on the Diegetic Level of Story and Characters The first six narrative conventions concerned the level of narrative transmission, the presentation of thought processes and stylistic features of the text The following six groups of conventions relate to plot patterns and the conception of those characters who are the object of readers’ sympathy Even more so than stylistic features, the personality traits and physical attributes of a character that are likely to raise the reader’s sympathy vary according to cultures and genres In eighteenth-century Britain, for instance, stylistic devices such as free indirect thought, which vividly render characters’ mental processes, were next to non-existent, while paragons of virtue who are considered insufferable bores today were once regarded as admirable heroes Genres also play a role in the conception of protagonists: The kind of character that readers affectively relate to in a bildungsroman differs from that in an adventure novel A contemporary Western audience seems to react positively to mixed characters with many positive traits and some minor flaws. 53 In order to be likeable, characters should neither be complete villains nor “godlike” 54 On the one hand, characters who are meant to induce the readers’ pity and sympathy should not violate important cultural values, norms, and feeling rules in major ways. On the other hand, minor flaws are likely to make them appear as more human and life-like, and thus enhance their appeal The direction of sympathy towards such characters can, on the level of the story world, consist of several means The following principles can be manifested in several ways and are based on research in literary studies and psychology as well as on an analysis of the direction of sympathy in British 52 James Phelan, Living to Tell About It (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2005), 160; see also Sklar, The Art of Sympathy, 43-55 53 See Ed S Tan, “Film-Induced Affect as a Witness Emotion,” Poetics 23 7 (1994), 23 54 Ibid The Value of Literature for the ‘Extension of our Sympathies’ 89 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 novels of the eighteenth century, 55 which have been adapted for the purposes of a Western contemporary audience (1) The characters should show their basic benevolence and good-will, for instance by performing one or two remarkable actions According to cross-cultural studies by the psychologist Shalom Schwartz and his colleagues, caring for others and the motivation to help others in one’s own community and beyond are highly esteemed in most cultures 56 Interestingly, Hollywood screenwriter and author Blake Snyder confirms this crucial role of benevolent actions for the creation of sympathy, since such behaviour can turn even seemingly unlikeable characters into beings that readers affectively relate to According to this writer, even characters with many negative traits can be accepted as heroes if they are shown to do something humane and likeable in the beginning, such as risking some discomfort or ridicule in order to help a blind woman or save a cat This strategy is used, for instance, in Hilary Mantel’s prize-winning novel Wolf Hall (2009), in which the protagonist Cromwell saves a cat twice - and helps dogs, too 57 (2) Generating ‘situational empathy’, i e placing a character in a precarious position, is one of the most important means of directing the audience’s sympathy It reinforces readers’ interest in the fate of the characters by creating a situation of potential harm Situational empathy “involves an openness to putting oneself in the place of the other person” 58 When characters are in situations that can go any number of ways, the resulting uncertainty will engage not only the cognitive, but also the affective responses of readers Situational empathy can also evoke pity for the plight of the character, but is usually understood as a forward-oriented feeling, as a kind of hopeful anticipation of a good outcome, and dread of a bad one, which includes symhedonia Situational empathy can be manifested in several ways, two of which deserve to be singled out in this context: 55 See Vera Nünning, “Gender, Authority and Female Experience in Novels from the Eighteenth to the Nineteenth Century: A Narratological Perspective,” Narrations Genrées: Écrivaines dans L’Histoire Européenne Jusqu’au Début du XXe Siècle, eds Lieselotte Steinbrügge and Suzan van Dijk (Louvain/ Paris: Édition Peeters, 2014), 19-42; and Vera Nünning, “Voicing Criticism in Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women: Narrative Attempts at Claiming Authority,” English Past and Present: Selected Papers from the IAUPE Malta Conference in 2010, ed Wolfgang Viereck (Frankfurt a M : Peter Lang, 2012), 81-108 56 See Lilach Sagiv et al , “Personal Values in Human Life,” Nature Human Behaviour 1 (2017), 634 57 See Blake Snyder, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need (San Francisco, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 2005) For the saving of cats in a novel, see Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (London: HarperCollins 2009), 188, 303; for that of dogs 221, 223 58 Hogan, The Mind, 140 90 V era N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 First, turning the character into a victim can be understood as a heightened form of situational empathy. This strategy is often used in British fiction from the eighteenth century onwards Charles Dickens, in particular, was a master at engaging his readers’ feelings by putting innocent children at the mercy of villains who exploit them pitilessly, for instance in Oliver Twist (1837-39) or The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) The brilliant opening scene of Mantel’s Wolf Hall also uses situational empathy by prompting readers to take the protagonist’s perspective while he is still a boy and nearly beaten to death by his father Pity and compassion are likely to follow, especially when the young and injured boy leaves his country, without any means, in order to save his sister from the retributions of his father Second, Ed Tan and others stress that, in order to engage the audience’s affections, the heroes should be pursuing a difficult but righteous task; sometimes this task is imposed upon them, sometimes they volunteer to risk their well-being for a higher goal or the welfare of the community, which turns them into even more worthy objects of sympathy and admiration 59 The difficulties the heroes have in overcoming dangerous situations prompt the reader to firmly root for the cause of the heroes and against their foes. In Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (2008-10), for instance, quite a number of morally highly ambivalent actions of the protagonist may be overlooked by readers because of her initial aim of saving her sister and for fighting for the common good 60 (3) Though the characters should have at least some minor flaws in order to engage the affections of a contemporary Western audience, harming others or acting in selfish ways potentially impairs the audience’s sympathy. This risk of diminishing the readers’ sympathies is frequently ameliorated by the use of several conventions: When characters act in ways that breach cultural norms and values, the reasons for this deviant behaviour are given, for instance by stressing that the characters were not properly taken care of as children and never learned the rules or by emphasising that, in the present situation, other ways of acting would have been even more harmful These are, again, time-honoured devices that can be found in a large number of British novels particularly from the eighteenth and nineteenth century Charlotte Lennox’ Arabella (1752) and Francis Burney’s Evelina (1778), for instance, feature heroines who (as many others) do not have a mother who might have helped them, and the actions 59 See Tan, “Film-Induced Affect,” 23 60 For Fritz Breithaupt, Kulturen der Empathie (Frankfurt a M : Suhrkamp, 2009), 76-77, this act of deciding to take the character’s part, against someone else, is a crucial component of the evocation of empathy The Value of Literature for the ‘Extension of our Sympathies’ 91 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 of the protagonist of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1894-95) are bound to lead to suffering Another means of perpetuating the reader’s good-will towards a character consists of concentrating on their good intentions or on their feelings of regret after they realise the damaging consequences of their actions The emphasis on the difficulties the characters have to overcome, on their good intentions and misgivings, makes it easier for the audience to affectively engage with them In such cases the focus is kept on the character; the negative consequences of the character’s actions on others - for instance the sadness or mourning of those who were ‘incidentally’ killed or harmed by the hero - are played down or deleted; otherwise the readers’ sympathies might waver and give way to ethical reflections concerning the characters and their deeds. A prime example of this mode of writing can be found in the second part of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which concentrates on Dorian’s regret and unhappiness, while the reader is not even told exactly how many young men he has ruined or driven to commit suicide (4) Character constellations also play a role in the direction of sympathy In an eighteenth-century sentimental drama, with the typical cast of supremely moral protagonists, even characters with small faults appear as nasty villains The aristocratic rake in Richard Steele’s sentimental comedy The Conscious Lovers (1722) is cast as a villain, while the same character type can be the hero of Restoration Comedies Conversely, the act of hunting an extremely cruel serial killer turns the detectives looking for them into good men - no matter how many minor or even major faults they may have The notion of James Bond as a superhero depends partly on the degree and scope of his adversary’s evil intentions (5) One of the most important implicit devices of fostering sympathy for a specific protagonist is to have him or her either praised or criticised by certain other (groups of) characters Thus, positively depicted characters who embody the norms and values of the text and who think well of the (unfamiliar) protagonists incite the readers’ sympathies for them Mr Knightley in Jane Austen’s Emma (1816) is a famous example of one of those perfect, “knightly” characters who continues to appreciate the good nature of the heroine despite her many faults and who serves as a model for the response of the audience 61 The counterpart to this strategy consists of having unattractive, unworthy characters (often stock figures) acidly criticise the protagonist in question Sometimes, such characters play a more important role, such as Mrs 61 See also Wayne C Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961; Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1983), 253; and Sklar, The Art of Sympathy, 56 92 V era N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 Tulliver in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), who cannot understand her daughter Maggie and constantly criticises her conduct and appearance Rather than aligning themselves with the negatively portrayed characters who (often unfairly, self-servingly, or exaggeratedly) censure the protagonists, readers are induced to stick to their own appraisal of the situation or feel even more sympathy with those characters who continue to behave well even though they are constantly and unjustly criticised for their actions (6) The last narrative convention to be considered here concerns the appeal to the reader’s pity and sense of justice by punishing the characters to an unwarranted degree Cruel and unjust punishments, which have already been declared illegitimate in the British and American Bills of Rights, can prompt readers to have compassion even with wayward characters The punishments of Jane Eyre (just think of the red room) and the beatings of David Copperfield, for instance, by far exceed their wrong-doings, and even exceptionally good characters such as the protagonist of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) can find themselves in prison for minor faults. In Gothic novels such as Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk (1796) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), such punishments are more extreme, but even in Marguerite Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), the lesbian heroine renounces the love of her life because the harm done by society to same-sex couples and thus to her beloved is too damaging Related means of directing readers’ sympathies comprise the staging of conflicts that the character is bound to lose, no matter how hard they try, and emphasising the powerlessness of those who are worthy of the readers’ affections The young Jane Eyre, for instance, never stands a chance in her fight against the older and bigger Master George, nor is she able to marry Mr Rochester while Bertha is still living: She has to run away - and can thus continue to be the object of readers’ sympathy 4 Conclusion: Benefits and Dangers of the Potential of Fiction to Extend our Sympathies There are several reasons why fictional stories can be a particularly powerful means of extending our sympathies. Vicarious experiences of and with fictional characters allow readers to develop affections that are more or less impossible in daily life, where many impediments hamper a deep understanding of others In addition to the similarity and familiarity bias, which are not easy to overcome in real-life situations, one has to reckon with, for instance, the lack of time, the necessity of dealing with the requirements of the situation rather than the mental state of others, and the problem that appreciating the The Value of Literature for the ‘Extension of our Sympathies’ 93 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 feelings of others might oblige one to perform actions that one would rather refrain from However, these impediments that block perspective taking in real-life situations are negligible as far as literature is concerned Reading fiction provides a perfect opportunity for practicing the kind of affectionate concern for others that is, due to the manifold difficulties, precarious in interactive situations A second cluster of reasons for the affective potential of fiction comprises the use of narrative conventions By several means - for instance situational empathy, gaps, and narrative implicatures - fictional stories allow readers to perceive similarities between themselves and others Instead of relying on outward appearances and easily recognisable markers of identity or social inand out-groups, readers can feel that the character in question is similar to them on a deeper level Fiction can thus induce readers to overcome their similarity and familiarity bias. Since in most fictional stories the appearance of characters belies their nature, and in genres as different as romances and crime fiction, it usually remains open till the end who ‘Mr. Right’ or the villain behind the murders is, readers are denied cognitive closure for several hours per book The repetition of this experience may help them develop a practice of staying open-minded and to look for deeper similarities rather than judging on the basis of appearances At the same time, it is necessary to stress that not all works of fiction have the potential to extend readers’ sympathies in the way meant by George Eliot and the Dalai Lama On the contrary, the potential of literature to raise readers’ empathy and sympathy can prove to be dangerous As Martha Nussbaum recognises: “Literature has great seductive power: it can get us to sympathize with class privilege, the oppression of women, war and pillage, and […] hideous racism” 62 The same holds true for the (new) media As Martin Hoffman noted, the media often render it difficult for us to focus our feelings on the victims of conflicts. 63 There are always many perspectives involved in ethically challenging situations, and spectacular stories may well expend more space and interest on perpetrators rather than their victims. The fictional stories circulating in contemporary societies often show heroes and heroines who may be in distress and thus invite readers’ compassion, but who may be anything but worthy of the extension of our sympathies Though readers (or viewers) are highly unlikely to be swayed by reading a few stories or watching a few films, they tend to prefer a specific genre that matches their desires and beliefs People may thus spend quite a lot of time with a particular type 62 Nussbaum, “Exactly and Responsibly,” 355 63 Hoffman, Empathy, 212f 94 V era N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 of story inviting their sympathies for characters embodying or favouring class privilege, or the exclusion and oppression of out-groups Such indiscriminate feelings of sympathy for those whose plight is offered to us most insistently is obviously not related to the kind of moral development that George Eliot had in mind. If we want to benefit from the potential of fiction to extend our sympathies in a pro-social way, we need to be aware of possible problems in order to resist, if necessary, the persuasive power of fiction. While it seems questionable to assign the ability of enhancing and expanding our sympathies towards an altruistic goal only to ‘great artists’, as George Eliot did, we have to acknowledge that many, perhaps even the majority of fictional works, do not induce readers to feel with and for unfamiliar others who are worthy of their sympathy Many stories cement the borders between inand outgroups, painting the latter as villains, while assigning superior value to conventional heroes and heroines. Today one still finds fictions that focus on heroes bent on destroying and killing as many ‘enemies’ as possible, while firmly blending out the thoughts and feelings of the victims. Many examples could be cited, and even publishing houses and reviewers are usually not aware of the drift and persuasive power of such works The protagonist of Aidan Truhen’s The Price You Pay (2018), for instance, whose long killing spree determines the plot of the novel, is described as a “brilliantly entertaining psychopath” 64 In such works, basic strategies for the direction of sympathy are oriented to anything but ethical ends; the conventions used to show the protagonist solving his problems by hyperbolic killings invite empathy or laughter rather than reflection. Given the power of fiction to make us sympathise with and appreciate even unfamiliar characters, we have every reason to rethink our attitude towards stories featuring ‘oddly charming’ egotists and killers, and to choose our books carefully After all, immersive narratives are persuasive; they are likely to change readers’ attitudes and can alter their evaluation of whole social groups 65 In order to profit from the potential of literature to extend our sympathies and cultivate our moral abilities, we have to be careful in what we read As Martha Nussbaum recognises, we need an “[e]thical assessment of the novels themselves” 66 This assessment should be based on an interpretation of the 64 Carl Hiaasen “The Price You Pay: Praise” Penguin Random House, n d , www penguinrandomhouse com/ books/ 557648/ the-price-you-pay-by-aidan-truhen/ 65 See Green et al , “Engaging with Stories”; and Daniel C Batson et al , “Empathy, Attitudes, and Action: Can Feeling for a Member of a Stigmatized Group Motivate One to Help the Group? ” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28 12 (2002), 1666 66 Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996), 10 See also ibid , “Exactly and Responsibly,” 4, 355 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 The Value of Literature for the ‘Extension of our Sympathies’ 95 conventions for directing readers’ sympathies, since this is a precondition for differentiating between works that foster proand anti-social characters and modes of thinking Such an analysis also has to consider what Martin Hoffman called “moral principles” 67 In order to extend our empathy and compassion in a responsible way, we need a framework of norms and values which enables us to decide where to expand and where to block feelings of sympathy Works of literature usually feature networks of norms and values that frame our ethical judgements of the characters’ deeds - but these networks are not always geared towards pro-social ends or are even stable 68 In the works of George Eliot and many other eighteenthand nineteenth century novels, one can find hierarchies of values that provide a consensus for evaluating the ethics of actions and characters Particularly in works featuring unreliable narrators, however, the framework of norms and values often remains ambivalent Such works are ethically challenging, and they can induce us to reflect on the underlying norms and values as well as on the question of when to foster and when to block feelings of empathy and sympathy Nonetheless, a broad range of fictional works, some of which are discussed in this volume, demonstrate the value of fiction for extending readers’ sympathies in a pro-social way Fictional stories can induce a feeling for the other, “an other-oriented emotional response congruent with the perceived plight of the person in need” 69 They thus evoke a feeling which is associated with altruistic behaviour. It does not come as a surprise, therefore, that fiction can lower barriers against sociologically and ethnically dissimilar others and change readers’ attitudes with regard to ethnic or social out-groups The psychologist Dan Johnson has even suggested that there is “a direct link between reading narrative fiction, affective empathy, and helping behavior”. 70 In a time in which the divisions between social groups are growing and anger or even hatred have become common responses to alleged misdeeds of people one does not even know, the value of fiction for the extension of our sympathies is even more important than it was in the nineteenth century 67 Hoffman, Empathy, 15, et passim 68 See, e g , Vera Nünning, “Experiments with Ethics in Contemporary British Fiction: The Lack of a Stable Framework,” The Ethical Component in Experimental British Fiction since the 1960’s, eds Susana Onega/ Jean-Michel Ganteau (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 210-231 69 Daniel C Batson, “Two Forms of Perspective Taking: Imagining How Another Feels and Imagining How You Would Feel,” Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation, eds Keith D Markmann/ William M P Klein/ Julia A Suhr (New York: Psychology Press, 2009), 267 70 Johnson, “Reading Narrative Fiction,” 154 96 V era N üNNiNg 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0003 Works Cited Batson, Daniel C “Two Forms of Perspective Taking: Imagining How Another Feels and Imagining How You Would Feel ” Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation Eds Keith D Markmann/ William M P Klein/ Julia A Suhr New York: Psychology Press, 2009, 267-279 Batson, Daniel C / Nadia Ahmad/ David A Lishner “Empathy and Altruism ” Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology Eds Shane J Lopez/ C R Snyder Oxford: OUP, 2009, 417-426 Batson, Daniel C / Johee Chang/ Ryan Orr/ Jennifer Rowland “Empathy, Attitudes, and Action: Can Feeling for a Member of a Stigmatized Group Motivate One to Help the Group? ” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28 12 (2002), 1656-1666 Batson, Daniel C / Marina P Polycarpou/ Eddie Harmon-Jones/ Heidi J Imhoff/ Erin C Mitchener/ Lori L Bednar/ Tricia R Klein/ Lori Highberger “Empathy and Attitudes: Can Feeling for a Member of a Stigmatized Group Improve Feelings Toward the Group? ” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 72 1 (1997), 105-118 Booth, Wayne C The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1983 Bortolussi, Marisa/ Peter Dixon Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response. 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London: Serpent’s Tail, 2018 Willems, Roel M / Arthur M Jacobs “Caring About Dostoyevsky: The Untapped Potential of Studying Literature ” Trends in Cognitive Science 20 4 (2016), 243-245 Wolf, Werner “Illusion (Aesthetic) ” Handbook of Narratology Eds Peter Hühn/ John Pier/ Wolf Schmid/ Jörg Schönert Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009, 144-159 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 a lexaNdra s trohmaier On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy William James’s Pluralism and the Knowledge of Literary Narratives 1 Introduction: William James and the Knowledge of Literary Narratives William James has frequently been characterised as a “literary philosopher,” 1 especially with regard to the pervasive and profound impact he has had on modernist and postmodernist literary texts and genres 2 As the US-American literary scholar Richard Lewis has claimed, “William James had arguably a greater literary influence than Henry James,” 3 his novelist brother 4 It is above all James’s famous conception of the stream of thought with which he left an enduring mark on literature and literary studies Furthermore, James’s literary influence can be attributed to the specific literary quality of his writings, which are marked by polyphony, metaphoricity, and dialogism 5 1 David C Lamberth, William James and the Metaphysics of Experience (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), 204; Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed James Conant (Cambridge, MA/ London: Harvard UP, 1992), 232 2 See also David E Leary, “‘Authentic Tidings’: What Wordsworth gave to William James,” William James Studies 13 1 (2017), 1 3 Richard W B Lewis, The Jameses: A Family Narrative (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 442 4 See also Leary, “‘Authentic Tidings,’” 2 5 On the “heteroglossia” of James’s psychological and philosophical discourse see e g Frederick J Ruf, The Creation of Chaos: William James and the Stylistic Making of a Disorderly World (Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1991), 100 On the “metaphorical proliferation” characteristic of James’s writings see Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992), 131 On the metaphoricity of James’s style see also Jill M Kress, “Contesting Metaphors and the Discourse of Consciousness in William James,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61 2 (2000), 263-283; Charlene Haddock Seigfried, William James’s Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy (Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1990), 210-235 On James’s dialogism see e g Miriam Strube, “In the End 100 a lexaNdra s trohmaier 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 Whereas James’s enormous influence on literature and literary studies has been widely recognised in recent research, much less attention has been given to the reverse question of literature’s influence upon William James. 6 This research question, however, deserves further exploration, since James was an ardent reader of literature, a fact, which is substantially documented in his work as well as in his correspondence, and stressed by his biographers According to Robert D Richardson, for example, James developed an enthusiasm for literature in his early youth and, throughout his life, “never stopped reading literature, no matter how busy he was ” 7 So far, the scholarship that has inquired into the significance of literature for William James has concentrated on the impact of British Romanticism and American Transcendentalism, especially of such authors as William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Walt Whitman on James’s work 8 But James’s writings also give ample evidence of his intensive reception of the German literary tradition of the late 18th and early 19th centuries James’s published writings are marked by implicit and explicit intertextual relations to some of the most important autobiographical, literary, and theoretical works of the two protagonists of Weimar Classicism, Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller Furthermore, James’s unpublished diary notes, especially those that date from his study period in Germany (from April 1867 to November 1868), record his close reading of some of the major aesthetic treatises that affected German literary culture around 1800 9 was … ‘A Dialogue’: William James’s Performing Pragmatism,” Imaginary Dialogues in American Literature and Philosophy: Beyond the Mainstream, eds Till Kinzel/ Jarmila Mildorf (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), 211-225 On the polyphony, performativity, and metaphoricity of James’s philosophical discourse as textual realisation of his pluralistic ontology see Alexandra Strohmaier, Poetischer Pragmatismus: Goethe und William James (Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter, 2019), 175-198 6 See also Leary, “‘Authentic Tidings,’” 1-2 7 Robert D Richardson, In the Maelstrom of American Modernism: A Biography (Boston/ New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 52. For this argument see also Todd Barosky/ Justin Rogers-Cooper, “Introduction to ‘New Directions in William James and Literary Studies’,” William James Studies 13 1 (2017), ii 8 On the importance of William Wordsworth for William James see e g Leary, “‘Authentic Tidings,’” 1-26 On Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James see e g Sean Ross Meehan, “Metonymies of Mind: Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and the Rhetoric of Liberal Education,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 49 3 (2016), 277-299 On James’s engagement with Walt Whitman see e g John Tessitore, “The ‘Sky-Blue’ Variety: William James, Walt Whitman, and the Limits of Healthy-Mindedness,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 62 4 (2008), 493-526 9 For a list of the texts by Goethe and Schiller which James read during his study period in Germany see Strohmaier, Poetischer Pragmatismus, 68-69 On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy 101 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 Against the background of James’s intensive engagement with literature, and especially with literary narratives, this article intends to sketch the epistemic value of literature for James’s philosophy of pluralism James’s ontological and epistemological or noetic pluralism, i.e. his specific conception of the world and of knowledge, seems to be informed by what could be characterised as a narrative ‘episteme’: a specific kind of knowledge mediated through narrative discourse as a set of forms and structures through which narratives are constituted and mediated James’s commitment to plurality as one of the reigning features of his ontology and epistemology entails an appreciation of particularity, of temporality, change, contingency, processuality, and multiperspectivity - aspects that, as will be argued, are closely tied to genuine structures of literary narratives and their epistemic implications, especially as they emerged and were reflected upon around 1800. The phrase “knowledge of literary narratives” as it is used in the subtitle of this article is thus to be understood in a double sense: as a genitivus obiectivus that refers to James’s knowledge of narrative literature, as well as a genitivus subiectivus that relates to the assumption, especially advanced by literary cognitivism, that literature itself is a ‘knowing agency ’ 10 With this focus, the article will also target a relatively understudied domain concerning the relation between literature and philosophy 11 In the history of research on this relation, preference has been given to the question of philosophical content in literature 12 Thus, the function of literature has been tentatively reduced to the mere representation or at best modification of philosophical theories On the other hand, those approaches that have considered the presence of literature in philosophy have so far tended to concentrate on the importance of literary style for philosophical writing, perceiving the relevance of literature for philosophy merely in terms of rhetoric 13 In contrast to these approaches, the intention of this article is to show the impact of literary or rather narrative form on philosophical content, thus outlining the epistemic potential of narrative structures and their performative function in the con- 10 For a concise recapitulation of current positions on and approaches to “the knowledge of literature” in this second sense (as a genitivus subiectivus) see Michael Basseler, An Organon of Life Knowledge: Genres and Functions of the Short Story in North America (Bielefeld: transcript, 2019), 51-64 11 For an introductory account of the complex relation between literature and philosophy see e g Anthony J Cascardi, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge UP, 2014) 12 See for instance the volume by Christiane Schildknecht/ Dieter Teichert, eds , Philosophie in Literatur (Frankfurt a M : Suhrkamp, 1996) 13 See for instance the volume by Gottfried Gabriel/ Christiane Schildknecht, eds , Literarische Formen der Philosophie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990) 102 a lexaNdra s trohmaier 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 stitution of philosophical theories Moreover, while there has been a certain predilection for ethics in the research on the relation between literature and philosophy, 14 limiting the philosophical issues raised by literature to moral questions, this article, by dealing with ontology and epistemology, attends to two rather neglected philosophical branches in this respect 2 William James’s Ontological and Epistemological Pluralism The term “pluralism” entered American philosophical discourse in the early 1880s, and it is William James who has been credited with the advancement of “pluralism” as a new philosophical concept 15 In fact, as Russell Goodman has claimed, James can be considered as “the point of origin” 16 for “the proliferation of the term in English language metaphysics and epistemology at the turn of the nineteenth century ” 17 The advancement of pluralism by James appears in general to be closely related to his suspension of logic as the main principle of philosophical inquiry and to his turn towards life and lived experience as the primary subject matter of philosophy As James indicates in his famous lecture “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” published in 1898, his philosophy has to do “with life rather than with logic ” 18 In his works James habitually criticises traditional philosophy, or what he calls monism, absolute idealism, or rationalism, for its obsession with “the quest or the vision of the world’s unity” 19 and for its distance from real life James’s criticism is that “philosophy is out of touch with real life ” 20 He demands that “philosophy must pass from words […] to life itself,” 21 and suggests that literature, or rather ‘experimental’ literature, can serve as an epistemological model for a philosophical orientation towards life With special reference to ethics, he demands from the 14 For a review article on current publications in the field of literature and ethics see e.g. Alexander Nebrig, “Neue Studien zu Moral und Ethik der Literatur und ihrer Kritik,” Orbis Litterarum 71 6 (2016), 549-560 15 For a very short overview of the history of the term in European and US-American philosophy see for instance Russell B Goodman, “William James’s Pluralisms,” Revue internationale philosophie 2 (2012), 155-156 16 Ibid , 156 17 Ibid 18 William James, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” University Chronicle 1 4 (1898), 287 19 William James, The Works of William James, eds Frederick H Burkhardt/ Fredson Bowers/ Ignas K Skrupskelis, Vol 1: Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA/ London: Harvard UP, 1975), 64 Hereafter, references to The Works of William James will be by volume and page 20 James, Works, Vol 7, 19 21 James, Works, Vol 5, 190 On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy 103 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 philosopher that “his books […], so far as they truly touch […] life, must more and more ally themselves with a literature which is confessedly tentative and suggestive rather than dogmatic, - […] with novels and dramas of the deeper sort ” 22 Along with this he envisions that philosophy will gradually draw closer to reality until it will finally entertain a relationship with reality that approximates the worldliness of literary narratives: “In the end philosophers may get into as close contact as realistic novelists with the facts of life ” 23 For James, philosophy has to turn towards life in its diversity, and it is narrative literature that provides a sense of direction in this respect In A Pluralistic Universe, published in 1908, James reinforces his plea for a shift of focus in philosophy with a quotation from Goethe’s Faust, a work that in its incommensurability is characterised by an epic rather than a dramatic quality As Goethe notes in his correspondence with Friedrich Schiller, which James examined closely during his study period in Germany, 24 Faust appears as a “barbaric composition,” 25 as a “whole, which will always remain a fragment,” 26 and for which only “the new theory of the epic poem” 27 may provide some orientation Resisting the urge of “getting a consistent ‘philosophy’ out of it,” 28 James read Goethe’s Faust, as he wrote in a letter to his family from Dresden in 1867, “with enjoyment,” 29 and he complemented his reading of Faust with a study of Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s lengthy article on the scholarly reception of this drama 30 In A Pluralistic Universe James draws 22 James, Works, Vol 6, 159 23 James, Works, Vol 7, 19 24 For James’s reading of the Correspondence Between Schiller and Goethe (in the German original) see e g James’s letter to his brother Henry: “I have been reading up Goethe a little lately […] I had read previously his and Schiller’s correspondence, the perusal of wh I strongly urge upon you […] The spectacle of two such earnestly living & working men is refreshing to the soul of any one ” William James, “To Henry James Dresden June 4 68,” The Correspondence of William James, eds Ignas K Skrupskelis/ Elizabeth M Berkeley, Vol 1: William and Henry, 1861-1884 (Charlottesville/ London: U of Virginia P, 1992), 49-50 25 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “To Schiller Weimar, 27 th June, 1797,” Correspondence Between Schiller and Goethe, From 1794 to 1805, trans George H Calvert (New York/ London: Putnam, 1845), 270 26 Ibid 27 Ibid 28 William James, “To the James Family July 24 ‘67, Dresden,” The Correspondence of William James, eds Ignas K Skrupskelis/ Elizabeth M Berkeley, Vol 4: 1856-1877 (Charlottesville/ London: U of Virginia P, 1995), 185, original emphasis 29 Ibid 30 James’s study of this article is documented in an unpublished manuscript on Goethe that contains extensive excerpts from Vischer’s article on Goethe’s Faust On this see in more detail Strohmaier, Poetischer Pragmatismus, 87-88 104 a lexaNdra s trohmaier 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 upon Goethe’s “masterpiece of philosophical literature” 31 in order to redirect the philosopher’s perspective from heavenly metaphysics to earthly matters: What boots it to tell me that the absolute way is the true way, and to exhort me, as Emerson says, to lift mine eye up to its style, and manners of the sky […]? I am finite once for all, and all the categories of my sympathy are knit up with the finite world as such, and with things that have a history ‘Aus dieser erde quellen meine freuden, und diese sonne scheinet meinen leiden ’ I have neither eyes nor ears nor heart nor mind for anything of an opposite description […] 32 The turn James takes towards life goes hand in hand with his development of a pluralistic philosophy In his publications, the term “pluralism” makes its first appearance in an article from 1884 entitled “The Dilemma of Determinism ” 33 It is already in this article that James’s pluralistic conception of the world is interrelated with a pluralistic conception of knowledge The world according to James can be termed a “pluriverse,” 34 it is marked by an irreducible fullness and a variety of facts that cannot be grasped by a single point of view, but that require multiple perspectives The conception of the world he suggests is that of “a pluralistic, restless universe, in which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene ” 35 One central implication of James’s pluralistic conception of the world concerns “the existence of possibilities ” 36 In contrast to monism, which posits that the world is a unity determined by necessity, pluralism acknowledges the reality of contingency The world that his philosophy deals with is, as James writes in “The Dilemma of Determinism,” “a world with a chance in it ” 37 Another important feature of the Jamesian pluriverse is its temporal structure Further contrasting his pluriverse with what he calls the “block-uni- 31 This characterisation of Goethe’s Faust is suggested by Thomas L Cooksey, who, in his monograph Masterpieces of Philosophical Literature, devotes a chapter to Goethe’s Faust See Thomas L Cooksey, Masterpieces of Philosophical Literature (Westport, CT/ London: Greenwood Press, 2006), 115-135 32 James, Works, Vol 4, 27, original emphasis For the quotation in the quotation see Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, ed Albrecht Schöne (Frankfurt a M : Dt Klassiker-Verlag, 1994), 75 33 See also Goodman, “William James’s Pluralisms,” 160 34 In A Pluralistic Universe, James uses the term “multiverse” (James, Works, Vol 4, 36) However, the term “pluriverse” has become more common in recent scholarship See e g Kennan Ferguson, William James: Politics in the Pluriverse (Lanham, MD et al : Rowman & Littlefield), 2007. 35 James, Works, Vol 6, 136 36 Ibid , 118 37 Ibid , 137, original emphasis On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy 105 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 verse” 38 of the absolute, James states in A Pluralistic Universe: “The doctrine on which the absolutists lay most stress is the absolute’s ‘timeless’ character For pluralists, on the other hand, time remains as real as anything, and nothing in the universe is great or static or eternal enough not to have some history ” 39 Rejecting or rather inverting the classical metaphysical dichotomy, dominant since Greek antiquity, between timelessness and temporality, a dichotomy which implies that only eternity or stasis is worthy of philosophical inquiry, James accentuates the reality of time and history Against the absolutist conception of reality as an unchanging entity, as a stable and timeless state, James argues for the reality of change: “Of our world, change seems an essential ingredient There is history There are novelties, struggles, losses, pain But the world of the Absolute is represented as unchanging, eternal ‘out of time ’” 40 Its radical intrication with time involves that the pluriverse is dynamic and open James’s pluriverse is in progress, and exposed to the future In his classic Pragmatism from 1907, where James associates pluralism with pragmatism and monism with rationalism, the processuality and hence openness of his pluralistic ontology serves as one of the key differences between pragmatism and rationalism: “The essential contrast is that for rationalism reality is readymade and complete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from the future On the one side the universe is absolutely secure, on the other it is still pursuing its adventures ” 41 Consequently, James characterises the world as it presents itself to the pragmatist or pluralist as “a tramp and vagrant world ” 42 It is, as he declares, using an apt metaphor, “a dog without a collar ” 43 3 Epistemic Implications of Narrative Structures and their Impact on Philosophical Pluralism The core features of James’s conception of the world - plurality, contingency, temporality as well as processuality and openness - also constitute some of the defining characteristics of narrative discourse, also and especially as discussed in German aesthetic theories of the late 18th and early 19th centuries These theories explicitly reflect on those structures as defining characteristics 38 James, Works, Vol 4, 140 39 Ibid , 28 40 James, Works, Vol 7, 72 41 James, Works, Vol 1, 123, original emphasis 42 Ibid , 125 43 Ibid 106 a lexaNdra s trohmaier 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 of narrative form that seem to serve as implicit epistemological catalysts for James’s ontological and noetic or epistemological pluralism Thus the concept of “chance,” which gains increasing prominence with the erosion of a deistic world order in the second half of the 18th century, becomes an essential ingredient of narrative worlds 44 According to Lessing or Goethe among others, chance even constitutes one of the generic features that distinguish the novel from drama In Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, for example, the narrator, after presenting a discussion among the novel’s characters about the differences between narrative and drama, concludes that, in contrast to drama, “in the novel something might be left to the operation of chance ” 45 With regard to the impact of Faust upon James, it is important to note that this drama, in accordance with the somewhat epic character that Goethe has ascribed to it, not only refuses to reduce contingency, but rather accentuates it. Goethe’s play is marked by a significant modification of the traditional Faust tale through which, as Michael Holquist has argued, the fictional world is transformed into a “universe of contingency.” 46 The substitution of the traditional pact between Faust and the devil through a wager that characterises Goethe’s creative adoption of the classic Faust plot implies that the parties “agree to accept the intervention of chance ” 47 Analogous to the narrative world of the novel around 1800, the universe modelled in Faust centres indeterminacy and contingency as constitutive and irreducible factors of the (pluralistic) universe Furthermore, in the theoretical debates that take place around 1800, processuality becomes a constitutive principle of narrative worlds This can be attributed to a shift of focus with regard to the subject of representation As novelists and theorists, such as Alexander Baumgarten, Christian Friedrich Blanckenburg, Karl Philipp Moritz, Goethe, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and August Wilhelm Schlegel, among others, postulate, literature has to pass from static representation of the so called ‘natura naturata,’ of created 44 See e g Arnd Biese, “Spielers Erzählungen, oder: Zufall herstellen,” Literatur und Spiel: Zur Poetologie literarischer Spielszenen, eds Bernhard Jahn/ Michael Schilling (Stuttgart: Hirzel, 2010), 151-152 45 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, trans R Dillon Boylan (London: Bohn, 1855), 285 For Goethe’s generic differentiation between drama and narrative with reference to the existence of “chance” see also Peter Gendolla, “Erdbeben und Feuer: Der Zufall in Novellen von Goethe, Kleist, Frank und Camus,” Die Künste des Zufalls, eds Peter Gendolla/ Thomas Kamphusmann (Frankfurt a M : Suhrkamp, 1999), 201 46 Michael Holquist, “Gambling with Kant: Faustian Wagers,” New Literary History 40 (2009), 65 47 Ibid On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy 107 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 nature, to the dynamic representation or rather simulation of the creating principle of nature itself The active principle of nature, the so called ‘natura naturans,’ becomes the dominant organising principle of narratives Thus, representation is no longer concerned primarily with the product but with the process of creation, and with this new orientation, representation itself becomes a dynamic operation 48 As Nicolas Pethes has argued, in the poetic simulation of the productivity of nature, the techniques of representation are modified in such a way that representation itself acquires the nature of a process 49 Generally, the orientation towards new principles, such as processuality, in literary narration around 1800 can be related to the rise of “life” as a new anthropological and aesthetic paradigm As Dirk Oschmann has shown with special reference to Lessing, Schiller, and Kleist, aspects of movement and process, which are perceived as essential structural characteristics of life, pervade literary and aesthetic discourses around 1800 and bring about literary texts marked by performative and dynamic structures 50 Significantly, new genres emerge in the field of narrative, such as the dramatic novel or the dialogic novel - genres that present narrative worlds as infused with a processual logic 51 Apart from processuality, variability is stressed as one of the defining criteria of life in literary (and scientific) discourses around 1800. In literary narratives, variability is simulated through generic hybridity on the level of discourse and is also reflected upon at the propositional level. In Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, Goethe’s sequel to the Apprenticeship, for example, change is defined as intrinsic to life and lived experience: “Life belongs to the living, and those who live must be prepared for change ” 52 With respect to the novel’s eclectic mixture of narrative forms, this comment on the inevitability of change appears to be a reflection on the novel’s formal experiments and innovations But even for less experimental novels, and, in fact, for narratives 48 See Strohmaier, Poetischer Pragmatismus, 36-38; Lars-Thade Ulrichs, Die andere Vernunft: Philosophie und Literatur zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 348-351 49 Nicolas Pethes, “‘In jenem elastischen Medium’: Der Topos ‘Prozessualität’ in der Rhetorik der Wissenschaften seit 1800 (Novalis, Goethe, Bernard),” Rhetorik: Figuration und Performanz, ed Jürgen Fohrmann (Stuttgart/ Weimar: Metzler, 2004), 138 50 Dirk Oschmann, Bewegliche Dichtung: Sprachtheorie und Poetik bei Lessing, Schiller und Kleist (München: Fink, 2007) 51 See also Strohmaier, Poetischer Pragmatismus, 37 52 My translation Original quotation: “Das Leben gehört den Lebendigen an, und wer lebt, muß auf Wechsel gefaßt sein ” Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, ed Gerhard Neumann (Frankfurt a M : Dt Klassiker-Verl , 1989), 285 108 a lexaNdra s trohmaier 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 in general, change has to be considered as an essential feature Indeed, the fictional worlds modelled through narratives can be defined by alteration, as Vera Nünning has claimed: “A story presents a model of a world in which changes occur ” 53 The narrative’s tendency towards change in German literary texts of the late 18th and early 19th century culminates in the innovative genre of the “archival novel” 54 that Goethe established with Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years The “‘aggregate’ structure” 55 of the novel, which according to Goethe accounts for the “incommensurability” 56 and “incalculability of the production,” 57 presents a self-reflexive celebration of plurality and of variation as structural characteristics of life As can be argued with Martin Bez, Goethe’s “archival novel” constitutes a narrative genre that “reflects, acts out, stages and modifies plurality.” 58 Furthermore, the “logic of the archive,” 59 exploited in Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years as well as in Faust, 60 implies the abandonment of any aspiration towards completion Through its plurality, its suspension of closure and its orientation towards variation and transition, Goethe’s archival poetics attempts an approximation towards narrating the incommensurability of life 61 Another important aspect discussed in the aesthetic debates around 1800 is the potential of narrative literature to mediate between realism and idealism, which is also one of the main aims of modern German philosophy beginning with Kant 62 As could be argued with reference to Martin Wieland, for instance, novels of the late 18th century anticipate this philosophical project of mediating between realism and idealism by showing that reality is inevitably 53 Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: On the Cognitive Value of Fiction (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), 52 54 Ehrhard Bahr, The Novel as Archive: The Genesis, Reception, and Criticism of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998), 14 55 Ibid 56 Ibid 57 Ibid Goethe himself describes Wilhelm Meister as “one of the most incalculable productions,” to which he himself almost lacked “the key ” Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann and Soret, Vol 1, trans John Oxenford (London: Smith/ Elder, 1850), 200-201 58 My translation Martin Bez, Goethes Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre: Aggregat, Archiv, Archivroman (Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter, 2013), 112 59 Ibid , 232 60 See Steffen Schneider, Archivpoetik: Die Funktion des Wissens in Goethes Faust II (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005). Schneider identifies the “logic of the archive” (ibid., 57) as constitutive of Goethe’s Faust 61 See also Bez, Goethes Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, 272 62 See Strohmaier, Poetischer Pragmatismus, 31-36 On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy 109 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 bound to the partial perspective of the knowing subject On the propositional level this epistemological insight brought about through narrative structures of dialogism and multiperspectivity is expressed in Wieland’s famous dictum: “We cannot and should not all look at the world through the same keyhole ” 63 Accordingly, in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, omniscient narration becomes disintegrated through the “introduction of a personalized narrative perspective ” 64 In this respect, the philosophical position of perspectivity and relativity of all knowledge of the world can be regarded as an epistemological insight brought about by point-of-view-narration and multiperspectivity After all, as Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning have shown in various publications, the generation of multiple perspectives constitutes one of the cognitively most significant strategies of narrative worldmaking. 65 In view of all these epistemic implications of narratives it comes as no surprise that in the theories formulated around 1800 the novel is regarded as the privileged medium for modern philosophy For Friedrich Schlegel, for instance, the novel as a hybrid genre qualifies as “the best philosophical organ ” 66 The philosophical relevance of the modern or romantic novel as envisioned by Schlegel is essentially tied up with its pluralistic form This becomes especially evident when Schlegel, in one of the fragments that make up his collection Philosophical Apprenticeship, posits Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister as the paradigm of a pluralistic philosophy: “Ecl.[ectic] φ [philosophy] in W[ilhelm] Meister.- Eclectic φ [philosophy] = philosophy of life ” 67 Considering William James’s intensive engagement with the German literary tradition of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and with Goethe in 63 My translation Original quotation: “[W]ir können und sollen nicht alle durch ein und dasselbe Schlüsselloch in die Welt gucken ” Christoph Martin Wieland, “Geschichte des Weisen Danischmend,” Abderiten, Stilpon, Danischmend, ed Ludwig Pfannmüller (Berlin: Weidmann, 1913), 377 See also Ulrichs, Die andere Vernunft, 97 64 Bahr, The Novel as Archive, 18 65 See e g Ansgar Nünning/ Vera Nünning (eds ), Multiperspektivisches Erzählen: Studien zur Theorie und Geschichte der Perspektivenstruktur im englischen Roman des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts (Trier: WVT, 2000); Ansgar Nünning, “Lebensexperimente und Weisen literarischer Welterzeugung: Thesen zu den Aufgaben und Perspektiven einer lebenswissenschaftlich orientierten Literaturwissenschaft,” Literaturwissenschaft als Lebenswissenschaft. Programm - Projekte - Perspektiven, eds Wolfgang Asholt/ Ottmar Ette (Tübingen: Narr, 2010), 57; V Nünning, Reading Fictions, 39-40 66 My translation Original quotation: “Der Roman war von jeher das beste Organ d[er] besten Ekl.[ektischen] φ [Philosophen] d[er] Modernen.” Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophische Lehrjahre 1796-1806, ed Ernst Behler (München/ Paderborn/ Wien: Schöningh, 1963), 12, original emphasis 67 Ibid., 12, original emphasis, my translation. Original quotation: “Ekl.[ektische] φ [Philosophie] im W[ilhelm] Meister.- Die Eklektische φ [Philosophie] = Lebensphilosophie.” 110 a lexaNdra s trohmaier 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 particular, it seems that the eclectic form of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister as well as the hybridity of Goethe’s Faust, which Goethe had described as a heterogeneous composition closer to modern novels than to classical drama, served as an implicit paradigm for William James’s pluralistic conception of the world This view is substantiated not only by the various intertextual references to Goethe in James’s writings, 68 but also, on a more general level, by James’s generic characterisation of his pluralist philosophy In “The One and The Many,” the fourth chapter of Pragmatism, James draws upon a literary category to characterise his view of the world In contrast to the form of classical drama that James makes out as the privileged paradigm of monistic ontologies, his conception of the world is orientated towards another genre For James, the “world appears as something more epic than dramatic ” 69 He rejects the monistic dogma “that the whole world tells one story” 70 and explicates: “The world is full of partial stories that run parallel to one another, beginning and ending at odd times They mutually interlace and interfere at points, but we cannot unify them completely in our minds ” 71 Resisting unification, the pluriverse of stories as modelled by James resembles the narrative world created through the narrative genre of the “archival novel” that Goethe established with Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years. Indeed, the “‘aggregate’ structure” 72 constitutive of Goethe’s novel is also a fundamental characteristic of James’s conception of the world, which he describes as a “universe of simply collective or additive form ” 73 In the preface to his volume The Will to Believe James declares, with an implicit self-referential gesture that points to the genre of this very volume, that “the world is a pluralism; […] its unity seems to be that of any collection ” 74 In A Pluralistic Universe, this world as a “collection” of concrete particulars is further specified by its resistance to homogenisation and its irreducible openness: Whereas “absolutism thinks that the […] substance […] is not its real self in any form but the all-form, the pluralistic view […] is willing to believe that there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance of reality may never get totally collected ” 75 68 See Strohmaier, Poetischer Pragmatismus 69 James, Works, Vol 1, 71 70 Ibid 71 Ibid 72 Bahr, The Novel as Archive, 14 73 James, Works, Vol 4, 51 74 James, Works, Vol 6, 5-6 75 James, Works, Vol 4, 20, original emphasis On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy 111 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 From the perspective adopted in this article, this concept of a pluralist universe appears to be a translation of Goethe’s “archival poetics” into philosophical discourse After all, the features, central to the “logic of the archive” 76 exploited in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years as well as in Faust - plurality, contingency, change, openness, and multiperspectivity - constitute distinctive features of James’s conception of the world In fact, James even explicitly acknowledges his formal indebtedness to Goethe’s archival poetics In the preface to his opus magnum The Principles of Psychology, James justifies his over 1,400-pages-long composition of a “mass of descriptive details” 77 with explicit reference to the structure of Goethe’s Faust, quoting the words of the manager in Faust’s “Prologue for the Theatre,” who has tasked the poet with writing a “ragout” - a “piece […] in pieces” 78 : James calls himself a “sanguine man,” 79 hoping “in this crowded age, […] to have many readers for fourteen hundred continuous pages from his pen But wer Vieles bringt wird Manchem etwas bringen ” 80 Transferring Goethe’s “archival poetics” to his conceptualisation of pluralism, which he describes as a “mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of plural facts,” 81 James has obviously come to synthesise what he had at first kept apart when trying to come to terms with Goethe In a letter written from Germany to his brother Henry that reflects on his in-depth study of Goethe, James records his initial irritation about Goethe’s habit to “save[] up everything” 82 and “to put the important and the accessory in one sheaf,” 83 and he reports that he has “learned to distinguish between his [= Goethe’s] general philosophic tendency, and his constitutional habit of collecting He [= Goethe] was a born collector & cataloguer of facts ” 84 In the pluralist ontology that James develops later in his life, reality becomes a collection of facts, both essential and accidental, and each fact valuable in its particular reality: “The reality exists as a plenum […] each part is as real as any other, and each as essential for making the whole just what it is and nothing else ” 85 For James, the collection of facts and “stories” that make up the pluralistic universe requires the suspension of what he calls “the notion of the one 76 Bez, Goethes Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, 232; Schneider, Archivpoetik, 57 77 William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol 1 (New York: Holt, 1890), vii 78 My translation Goethe, Faust, 17 79 James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol 1, v 80 Ibid For the German quotation see Goethe, Faust, 17 81 James, Works, Vol 3, 22 82 James, “To Henry James,” 50 83 Ibid 84 Ibid , 51 85 James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol 2, 634, orginal emphasis 112 a lexaNdra s trohmaier 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 Knower ” 86 Criticising the monistic concept of an “All-Knower,” 87 James insists upon “the pluralist notion that there is no point of view, no focus of information extant, from which the entire content of the universe is visible at once ” 88 The plea James makes for what Russel Goodman has called James’s “point of view pluralism” 89 comes close to a description of narrative multiperspectivity and even unreliability In James’s pluralistic universe everything gets known by some knower along with something else; but the knowers may in the end be irreducibly many, and the greatest knower of them all may yet not know the whole of everything, or even know what he does know at one single stroke: - he may be liable to forget 90 In this quote, as in many other of James’s discussions of his doctrine, pluralism appears as a jointly ontological and epistemological conception, 91 one which holds that the world is made up of a plurality of facts and requires a plurality of perspectives, a fusion of ontology and epistemology that prior to the philosophy of James seems to have been exclusive to narrative literature 4 Conclusion: Towards a New Paradigm of Interdisciplinary Research: Literature in Philosophy The epistemological implications of narrative discourse and its performative function for ontological and noetic pluralism as captured above would appear to call for a modification of the dominant orientation in researching the relation between literature and philosophy So far, Christiane Schildknecht has distinguished essentially four paradigms in the tradition of interdisciplinary scholarship on the relation between literature and philosophy: 92 1) philosophy in literature, 2) philosophy as literature, 3) philosophy of literature, and 4) philosophy and literature. The significance of narrative worldmaking as an 86 James, Works, Vol 1, 71, original emphasis 87 Ibid , 72 88 Ibid 89 Goodman, “William James’s Pluralisms,” 157 90 James, Works, Vol 1, 72, original emphasis 91 On James’s pluralism as “a jointly metaphysical and epistemological view,” see also Michael R Slater, “William James’s Pluralism,” The Review of Metaphysics 65 (2011), 69 According to Goodman, James “blends the moral with the metaphysical and epistemological ” Goodman, “William James’s Pluralisms,” 161 92 Christiane Schildknecht, “Literatur und Philosophie: Perspektiven einer Überschneidung,” Wahrheit, Wissen und Erkenntnis in der Literatur: Philosophische Beiträge, eds Christoph Demmerling/ Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2014), 41- 56 On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy 113 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 epistemological model for philosophical conceptions of the world and for its perception and cognition as outlined in this article seems to call for yet another paradigm - one that does justice to the presence of literature in philosophy This presence of literature in philosophy, as has become visible, amounts to more than mere intertextual presence in the form of literary quotations or simple ornament in the form of literary style It even extends the scope of epistemic relevance attributed to literature in those approaches to the relation between literature and philosophy that can be subsumed under the paradigm of “philosophy as literature ” Although in these approaches it has almost become a commonplace that rhetorical devices, such as metaphors, allusions, or neologisms, play a significant role in philosophical discourse, their significance has been primarily seen in expressing concerns that escape or challenge traditional philosophical reasoning Strangely enough, by conceiving rhetorical devices as intentionally employed strategies in the service of a postmodernist critique of rationalism, these approaches tend to argue in line with a philosophical tradition that postmodernist philosophy has actually worked to overcome Claiming that the cognitive role of literature in philosophy consists in representing “the other of reason” 93 or in “presenting the unrepresentable,” 94 these approaches indirectly affirm the traditional Platonic conception of literature as ‘the other’ of philosophy By contrast, philosophy’s indebtedness to literature, and especially to narrative literature as sketched above, requires an approach that is able to capture the epistemic potential of literary or rather narrative form for philosophical reasoning and theory formation What theoretical positions and implications would such an approach have to involve? One central premise would consist in a conception of literature as a productive medium of generating knowledge 95 Rather than merely representing philosophical positions, literature actively participates in the constitution of philosophical knowledge; and it seems to do so not only through its content, but also, and possibly even more so, through its specific form. Thus, in contrast to analytic philosophy, which rejects the notion of literary knowledge altogether (since knowledge is restricted to propositional knowledge), such a paradigm of literature in philosophy would emphasise the epistemological 93 A T Nuyen, “The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 25 2 (1992), 186 94 Ibid , 188 95 For such a concept of literature with special reference to life knowledge see e g A Nünning, “Lebensexperimente und Weisen literarischer Welterzeugung,” 56 For such a concept with special reference to philosophical knowledge see Strohmaier, Poetischer Pragmatismus, 10-11 114 a lexaNdra s trohmaier 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 significance of literary forms as non-propositional knowledge. 96 In this respect, literary cognitivism, the field of research that investigates the cognitive or epistemic potential of literature and literary forms, can provide a productive interface for further research 97 However, in contrast to some of the approaches of literary cognitivism, the knowledge of literature would have to be conceived of as ‘fully-fledged,’ so to speak, as non-supplementary 98 As James’s pluralism seems to suggest, the knowledge transmitted through literary form cannot be reduced to a sort of alternative knowledge with simply complementary or compensatory functions After all, the notion of a pluralistic universe that is composed of unique particulars and marked by temporality, processuality, and contingency, and that depends on a multitude of perspectives for the perception and cognition of its plurality, is, as has been argued in this article, eminently prefigured through narrative worlds, which seem to serve as models for ontological and epistemological configurations. In a paradigm of “literature in philosophy,” as envisioned here, literature aspires to generate genuine ontological and epistemological insights that go beyond literature’s alleged function of merely supplementing philosophical discourse This does not involve, however, a dedifferentiation of literature and philosophy either In contrast to poststructuralist approaches, which tend to level out the differences between literature and philosophy, by arguing that both literary and philosophical discourses are rooted in language and “governed by the quasi-transcendental principle of différance,” 99 the approach suggested here insists on the uniqueness of literary or rather narrative form and investigates its epistemic potential In this respect, it shares common grounds with 96 For literary strategies as forms of non-propositional knowledge see e g Christiane Schildknecht, “‘Ein seltsam wunderbarer Anstrich’? Nichtpropositionale Erkenntnis und ihre Darstellungsformen,” Darstellung und Erkenntnis: Beiträge zur Rolle nichtpropositionaler Erkenntnisformen in der deutschen Philosophie und Literatur nach Kant, ed Brady Bowman (Paderborn: mentis, 2007), 31-43 On the importance of literary strategies (as non-propositional knowledge) for philosophy see Gottfried Gabriel, “Zwischen Wissenschaft und Dichtung: Nicht-propositionale Vergegenwärtigungen in der Philosophie,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 51 (2003), 415-425 97 For an overview of literary cognitivism and its relevance in the study of the relation between literature and philosophy see e g Íngrid Vendrell Ferran, “Das Wissen der Literatur und die epistemische Kraft der Imagination,” Wahrheit, Wissen und Erkenntnis in der Literatur: Philosophische Beiträge, eds Christoph Demmerling/ Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2014), 119-140 98 For the conception of literature as a form of alternative knowledge (“Alternativ-Wissen”) see e g Jochen Hörisch, Das Wissen der Literatur (München: Fink, 2007), 10 99 Herbert Grabes, “Introduction: Literature and Philosophy - A Relationship under Debate,” Literature and Philosophy, ed id (Tübingen: Narr, 1997), 6 115 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy narratologically informed research that has demonstrated that narrative literature, and especially narrative fiction, is marked by unique cognitive functions generated by specific forms and structures exclusive to (fictional) narratives (such as multiperspectivity, polyphony, or psycho-narration) Whereas this research has mainly inquired into the significance of particular narrative structures for cognitive abilities and social cognition, 100 the approach of “literature in philosophy” as suggested here elaborates the epistemic potential of genuine narrative structures for ontological and epistemological theory formation And, in accordance with research that could be integrated under the umbrella term “narrative cognitivism,” it does so through a narratologically trained eye. By exploring narrative worlds in their specific discursive formations as models for ontological and noetic pluralism, such an approach values the specific epistemic qualities of (narrative) literature. 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Nichtpropositionale Erkenntnis und ihre Darstellungsformen ” Darstellung und Erkenntnis: Beiträge zur Rolle nichtpropositionaler Erkenntnisformen in der deutschen Philosophie und Literatur nach Kant Ed Brady Bowman Paderborn: mentis, 2007, 31-43 --- “Literatur und Philosophie: Perspektiven einer Überschneidung ” Wahrheit, Wissen und Erkenntnis in der Literatur: Philosophische Beiträge Eds Christoph Demmerling/ Íngrid Vendrell Ferran Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2014, 41-56 Schildknecht, Christiane/ Dieter Teichert, eds Philosophie in Literatur Frankfurt a M : Suhrkamp, 1996 Schlegel, Friedrich Philosophische Lehrjahre 1796-1806 Ed Ernst Behler München/ Paderborn/ Wien: Schöningh, 1963 Schneider, Steffen Archivpoetik: Die Funktion des Wissens in Goethes Faust II Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005 117 On the Epistemic Value of Literature for Philosophy 118 a lexaNdra s trohmaier 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0004 Seigfried, Charlene Haddock William James’s Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy Albany, NY: State U of New York P, 1990 Slater, Michael R “William James’s Pluralism ” The Review of Metaphysics 65 (2011), 63-90 Strohmaier, Alexandra Poetischer Pragmatismus: Goethe und William James Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter 2019 Strube, Miriam “In the End was … ‘A Dialogue’: William James’s Performing Pragmatism ” Imaginary Dialogues in American Literature and Philosophy: Beyond the Mainstream Eds Till Kinzel/ Jarmila Mildorf Heidelberg: Winter, 2014, 211-225 Tessitore, John “The ‘Sky-Blue’ Variety: William James, Walt Whitman, and the Limits of Healthy-Mindedness ” Nineteenth-Century Literature 62 4 (2008), 493-526 Ulrichs, Lars-Thade Die andere Vernunft: Philosophie und Literatur zwischen Aufklärung und Romantik Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011 Vendrell Ferran, Íngrid “Das Wissen der Literatur und die epistemische Kraft der Imagination ” Wahrheit, Wissen und Erkenntnis in der Literatur: Philosophische Beiträge Eds Christoph Demmerling/ Íngrid Vendrell Ferran Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2014, 119-140 Wieland, Christoph Martin “Geschichte des Weisen Danischmend ” Abderiten, Stilpon, Danischmend Ed Ludwig Pfannmüller Berlin: Weidmann, 1913, 325-511 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0005 a Ngela l ocatelli Literature as an Ecological Space of Self- Awareness, and Perspective-Taking With a Reading of The Voyage Out 1 Literature: An Ecological Space of Multiple Perspectives. After the so called “Ethical Turn” 1 in literary theory, ethics and value remain major issues in literary studies As we address this ancient question, which runs through the history of philosophy and literature from Plato to Deleuze and beyond, we recognise that the realms of cognition, ethics, and representation have always been, and still are, mutually implicated and responsive to each other Several literary critics and writers, including novelists and poets, have proposed that the value of literature is linked to its power to provide emotional experiences and intellectual challenges, as well as to its ability to engage readers at the complex level of controversy and judgment In this sense literature can contribute to the development of a specific competence in the art of mediation in both literary and extra-literary cultural contexts Recently, several studies, mostly from narratology and the cognitive sciences, 2 have corroborated the appreciation of literature as a valuable cognitive tool As we come to understand the role of literature in contemporary culture in new terms, we discover that literature enhances our ability to read the mind 1 Todd F Davis/ Kenneth Womack, Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture and Literary Theory, (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2001); Robert Eaglestone, ed , European Journal of English Studies, “Ethics and Literature” 7 3 (2003); Andrew Gibson, Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas (London/ New York: Routledge, 1999) 2 Baumbach, Sibylle/ Ralf Haekel/ Felix Sprang, eds Cognitive Literary Studies, special issue of Journal of Literary Theory 11 2 (2017); Geert Brône/ Jeroen Vandaele, Cognitive Poetics: Goals, Gains and Gaps (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009); Michael Burke/ Emily T Troscianko, Cognitive Literary Science: Dialogues Between Literature and Cognition (Oxford: OUP, 2016); Terence Cave, Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: OUP, 2016); Lisa Zunshine, The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies (Oxford: OUP, 2016) 120 a Ngela l ocatelli 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0005 of others, 3 i e to understand their thoughts, desires, emotions, and values, and that reading literature allows us to entertain different perspectives on the world, ourselves, and others A cognitive approach to literature has further explained that the value of literature lies, as brilliantly proposed by Vera Nünning, in the potential that the reading of fiction has to “change minds.” 4 Moreover, Vera and Ansgar Nünning convincingly argue that literature is a valuable and unique contribution to “mindfulness, health and well being ” 5 There are several common concerns and convergences between recent cognitivist propositions and my arguments in literary theory, particularly as far as the knowledge and the salutary effects of literature are concerned Having devoted several essays 6 and ten collective volumes to the subject of “The Knowledge of Literature” 7 from both an epistemological and ethical perspective, I find that several of the points I have made on literary knowledge and its social relevance are confirmed on the grounds of methods and approaches that, while different from those of literary critics and philosophers, do come to highly compatible conclusions Let me now provide a few examples In 2002, in the first volume of the series on “The Knowledge of Literature,” I proposed that the imaginative, emotional, and empathetic dimensions of literature make it epistemologically unique and socially valuable 8 Empathy and 3 Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006) 4 Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014) 5 Ansgar Nünning/ Vera Nünning “How to Stay Healthy and Foster Well-Being with Narratives, or: Where Narratology and Salutogenesis Could Meet,” How to Do Things with Narrative: Cognitive and Diachronic Perspectives, eds Jan Alber/ Greta Olson (Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2017) 6 Angela Locatelli, “‘The Humble/ d’ in Literature and Philosophy: Precariousness, Vulnerability, and the Pragmatics of Social Visibility,” The Humble in 19thto 21st-Century British Literature and Arts, eds Isabelle Brasme/ Christine Reynier/ Jean-Michel Ganteau (Montpéllier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2017), 147-163; Angela Locatelli, “The Moral and the Fable: A Fluid Relationship in Artistic Literature,” Values of Literature, eds Hanna Meretoja et al (Leiden/ Boston: Brill/ Rodopi, 2015), 47-62; Angela Locatelli, “The Ethical Use(s) Of Literary Complexity,” Values in Literature and the Value of Literature: Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating and Constructing Norms and Values, eds Sibylle Baumbach/ Herbert Grabes/ Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2009), 67-76; Angela Locatelli, “Literature’s Versions of its own Transmission of Values,” Ethics in Culture: The Dissemination of Values Through Literature and Other Media, eds Astrid Erll/ Herbert Grabes/ Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 19-34 7 Angela Locatelli, ed , La Conoscenza della letteratura/ The Knowledge of Literature, Volumes I-X, Bergamo: Edizioni Sestante/ Bergamo UP, 2002-2011 8 Angela Locatelli, “Pensiero Poetico: forma, immaginazione ed empatia,” La Conoscenza della letteratura, Volume I (Bergamo: Edizioni Sestante/ Bergamo UP, 2002), 181-190 Literature as an Ecological Space of Self-Awareness, and Perspective-Taking 121 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0005 interest in the emotions have been a growing concern in the cognitive sciences and cognitive poetics for at least two decades In 2003, in an essay in Textus: The Italian Journal of English Studies, I suggested that: “Literature has a specific cultural role to play, a role which derives from its power to create both fictional identifications with, and critical distances from, historical subject positions and sociocultural situations ” 9 I also suggested that when literature becomes a mere ornament, or a means of evasion and political indoctrination, rather than a means of deepening human understanding, literature betrays its own epistemic reality and primary meta-ethical function In fact, complex literature promotes judgment, through the emotions and the intellect, because it is able to encourage both identifications with and dis-identifications from different subjects. A recent study by Marco Caracciolo, 10 The Experientiality of Narrative - An Enactivist Approach, looks at the mechanisms of the reader’s emotions, judgment, and identifications from a cognitive science perspective and suggests that in reading we ‘enact’ or ‘simulate’ characters feelings and mental states In my 2007 essay “The Ecology of Wonderland: Textual, Critical and Institutional Perspectives in Literature,” 11 I defined literature as a beneficial ecological space, i e a vital cultural element to be preserved because more than one subject position is articulated in any given poem, play or novel, more than a single point of view is illustrated, and controversial statements are normally provided to the sagacious reader We can come to metaphorically envisage literature not as a fixed view from a single room, but as a landscape which invites being inhabited with a sense of multiple perspectives. Literature is not a method, and not a systematic theory, but a kind of discourse which sets different points of view in play. In this sense it becomes a transformative and self-transformative discourse, rather than just a constative or directly perlocutory discourse, and it can be illuminating for other forms of discourse Interest in this multi-perspectival dimension of literature is central in recent cognitive approaches to the study of literature A few examples may serve to illustrate and corroborate this observation In 2007 Catherine Elgin, a wellknown Harvard cognitive scientist, suggested that: “Works of fiction enable 9 Angela Locatelli, “Literature: Teaching meets ‘Theory’,” Textus 16 1 (2003), 15 10 Marco Caracciolo, The Experiantiality of Narrative - an Enactivist approach (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014) 11 Angela Locatelli, “The Ecology of Wonderland: Textual, Critical and Institutional Perspectives in Literature,” Literary Landscapes, Landscapes in Literature, eds Michele Bottalico/ Maria T Chialant/ Eleonora Rao (Roma: Carocci Editore, 2007), 49-50, my emphasis 122 a Ngela l ocatelli 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0005 us to suspend our own perspective, temporarily take up another, and see how things look through other eyes ” 12 Daniel C Batson 13 has developed a stimulating theory of perspective-taking along two main lines As the title of his 2009 essay suggests, we can experience “Two Forms of Perspective Taking: Imagining How Another Feels and Imagining How You Would Feel” in a certain situation I wish to propose that his view also pertains to fictional (literary) worlds. Batson has dealt with several other aspects of the reading experience and has demonstrated that fiction has a potential for “sensitive understanding,” which has been shown to “reduce stereotyping and prejudice ” 14 In their 2013 article, devoted to the socio-cultural effects of reading fiction, and entitled “Reading narrative fiction reduces Arab-Muslim prejudice and offers a safe haven from intergroup anxiety,” Dan R Johnson et al have argued that: “Narrative fiction offers a route to spontaneous perspective-taking, where readers imagine the thoughts, feelings, and the entire world surrounding the protagonist without the need for explicit instruction ” 15 Let me now return to my metaphor of literature as a landscape What this means is that literature transports the reader into a variety of fictional worlds (sometimes to the point of making him/ her oblivious of the ‘real world’ of his/ her immediate material context). Some fictional landscapes are depicted by the narrator in very close detail, and others are, on the contrary, left to the reader’s active imagination working upon a few narrative clues In any case, novels or poems always create a vivid landscape, which readers can enter and enjoy, while accomplishing the act of reading as a sort of mental and sentimental journey While reading, the reader enters and travels through a fictional space, the nature of which is shaped by intrinsic factors, i.e. largely by its linguistic, formal, historical, aesthetic features and by the genre conventions of any particular work Such features are proper to all literary texts, and have a bearing on their position in a specific literary tradition or canon. If literature is, and I believe it is, a salutary landscape to be preserved, these features should not be ignored, but should be highlighted and valorised since, if we 12 Catherine Elgin, “The Laboratory of the Mind,” A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative and Knowledge, eds Wolfgang Huemer/ John Gibson/ Luca Pocci (London/ New York: Routledge, 2007), 52, my emphasis 13 Daniel Batson, “Two Forms of Perspective Taking: Imagining How Another Feels and Imagining How you Would Feel,” Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation, eds Keith D Markman/ William M P Klein/ Julie A Suhr (New York: Psychology Press, 2009), 267-279 14 Batson, “Two Forms of Perspective Taking,” 267; 276ff 15 Dan R Johnson et al “Reading Narrative Fiction Reduces Arab-Muslim Prejudice and Offers a Safe Haven From Intergroup Anxiety,” Social Cognition 31 (2013), 578-579 Literature as an Ecological Space of Self-Awareness, and Perspective-Taking 123 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0005 remain in my metaphor of the mutable landscape, these features correspond to the soil, the climate, the flora and fauna that make the landscape what it is, at any given moment Literature, in the restricted sense of artistic literature, with the great linguistic variety it displays, and in the context of the texts that are available historically and across cultures, finds a parallel in the varieties of the physical world, with its cities and oceans, glaciers and highways, deserts and fields. Both worlds must, of course, be saved. Given the sophisticated interpretative activity that it requires, literature increases our awareness of life’s complexities The survival of the imagination, of our mental and emotional sanity, is a needed priority in our world Not only does literary competence favour problem solving abilities, as demonstrated by recent studies in psychology and social psychology, but complex literature preserves our readiness to be surprised in an increasingly techno-bureaucratic culture This is the primary meaning of my phrase “the ecology of Wonderland,” with reference to literature’s beneficial psycho-social effects. Moreover, literature and the specific exercise of interpretation that it involves (which is not merely that of discourse analysis, but does include it) is a good antidote against both fundamentalisms and blind pragmatism, and because of this we should not subscribe to a widespread view of literature as a mere pastime, or as a purely content-based (more or less politically correct) discourse Is the literary landscape threatened, like oceans and forests, under the pressures of globalised capitalism? I believe that it is, but I also believe that there are growing reasons for hope, including the recent contribution of the neurosciences to the valorisation of literature Our task is to preserve and reinvent literature because the preservation and continuous reinvention of literature is a crucial issue for the preservation of our ‘soul ’ Alain Badiou has brilliantly and provocatively suggested that: “Art does not pertain to the theoretical, but to the ethical (in the widest possible sense of the term) It follows that the norm of art is to be found in its utility for the treatment of the affections of the soul ” 16 Badiou has also proposed that: Art itself is a truth procedure. Or again: The philosophical identification of art falls under the category of truth Art is a thought in which artworks are the Real (and not the effect) And this thought, or rather the truths that it activates, are irreducible to other truths - be they scientific, political or amorous. This also means that art, as a singular regime of thought, is irreducible to philosophy 17 16 Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005), 4 17 Ibid , 9 124 a Ngela l ocatelli 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0005 Literature, qua literature, is “irreducible” to anything else, and must therefore be taken on its own terms As I have said above, literature is a territory to be explored by paying close attention to its specific features and is not just a means of ‘“illustrating”’ or propounding the theories or propositional contents found in other disciplines Even if literature is acutely cognisant of the findings of other disciplines, it is important that it deal with them on its own terms For example: In Mrs Dalloway, Septimus Warren Smith’s trauma and psychic problems are clearly not dealt with in a clinical sense, but this means that his condition is explored in the novel ‘from within,’ in the character’s own conscience, and in the devastating effects it has on his wife’s psychic and daily life as well It is an existential, relational, and phenomenological view of his disturbance, rather than a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder However, it is important to appreciate how the literary and the clinical can be mutually responsive and enriching The hopeful future of the humanities seems to me to lie precisely in such interdisciplinary dialogues The frequent meta-linguistic and meta-critical observations provided by great novelists or poets on their own work and the work of others demonstrate that they are aware of the task, questions, and purposes of writing Likewise, as readers, we should ask certain questions about the meaning and the strategies of reading A sufficiently critical and dialogic reading (dialogic in the sense of shared and debated among different subjects, who come to the text with different assumptions and diverging interests, and who become aware of such interests and assumptions through the reading) makes the experience of literature meta-ethically significant. In fact, the meta-ethical role of literature both includes and transcends the means of empathetic identifications it provides, in the sense that it necessarily produces both a personal and a collective awareness of normative codes and systems of value Characters in a novel, a poem or a play illustrate, and impart to readers, notions of normative, desirable, acceptable behaviour, but they also question what is socially valued and what is taken for granted and suggest alternative ways of being in the world (as I will argue in the following pages with reference to The Voyage Out) The value of literature is that it sustains an interminable reflection and debate around the creation of value 18 The province of literature is, of course, constituted on the basis of political, social, institutional, and cultural investment (or dis-investment) in the literary, according to dominant cultural attitudes towards both values and 18 Angela Locatelli, “Reading Literature: An Ethical Gesture in the Postmodern Context? ,” Armenia Folia Anglistika, Vol 12, no 1 (2014), 121-130 Literature as an Ecological Space of Self-Awareness, and Perspective-Taking 125 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0005 fiction. For example, the global marketing of literature operates as a powerful canon, positioning certain landmarks in the textual landscape Some of these landmarks are ephemeral and in this sense the market canon is always bound to differ from the canon of the classics Our task as professors of literature and theory is to develop in our students the ability to read carefully, in depth, dialogically, and critically, both the classics and popular works of literature A dialogic and critical reading is, of course, a complex process; it is achieved slowly, and requires a specific expertise, an active imaginative effort, intelligence, and an open mind, while at the same time enriching these mental faculties In other words, a critical reading is rewarding in terms of a ‘sentimental education,’ and is also a factor in deeper understanding, as the cognitive sciences teach us today This intellectual result is achieved provided that we learn (and teach) reading against the grain of the ‘fast-forward’ myriad messages offered for our daily consumption Different texts do require different forms of attention and develop, in turn, different cognitive faculties. This is why a neglect of the study and the experience of literature would result in a reduction of certain emotional and mental faculties In a nutshell: We can see literature as a slow-food of the mind, as opposed, for example, to the junk food of hypertrophic, fast, merely utilitarian information and even fake news Let me now illustrate the dynamics of perspective-taking and the development of self-awareness and world-awareness discussed in the theoretical perspective above, with reference to a specific literary ‘case study’: Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out 2 The Voyage Out: Narrative Questioning, Perspective-Taking, and Itineraries of Self-Awareness This novel was published in 1915 with the title Melymbrosia, a title soon discarded in favour of the more suggestive The Voyage Out 19 The latter title is clearly to be understood both literally and metaphorically: it is the narrative of a sea voyage to an exotic place, Santa Marina (an imaginary locus created by the writer), but above all it is a voyage “out” of a familiar milieu and, for most of the characters, “out” of their British and Eurocentric context 20 19 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1915; London: Grafton Books/ Collins, 1989) 20 I have developed this aspect of the critique of the British colonial enterprise in The Voyage Out in the Italian academic Journal Simplegadi: Angela Locatelli, “Plurivocal Narration as an Empathetic Response of Resistance to Colonial Prejudice: Writing Alterity in The Voyage Out ” Le Simplegadi, Vol 19 (Winter 2019), 53-64 126 a Ngela l ocatelli 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0005 Furthermore, it is a voyage “out” of childhood, adolescence, and of the family of origin This is especially true for the heroine, Rachel Vinrace, who evolves from being a sheltered and naïve girl to a woman with a full sense of herself The protagonist’s self-awareness increases exponentially during the “voyage out” thanks to her encounters with men who stimulate her curiosity and satisfy her intelligence and thanks to the sensitive guidance of her aunt Mrs Helen Ambrose At the beginning of the novel, Rachel is a typical, motherless Victorian ‘girl’ (even if she is 24), educated by pious aunts in Richmond, and overpowered by a patriarchal father who cares more for his shipping business than his family; he is the owner of the cargo boat The Euphrosyne that will take an assorted group of English characters to Santa Marina The fictional world of the novel is double, because it includes both the exotic space of Santa Marina and Edwardian London at the beginning of Britain’s gradual loss of commercial and colonial supremacy The novel deals with several of the ongoing social changes: with the new urban context, the new professions, the London class spectrum from the homeless to the aristocracy, the issues of colonialism, of women’s underprivileged condition, including their lack of formal education Virginia Woolf’s first novel is already a radical literary innovation, both at the thematic and the formal level The traditional topic of marriage in classical and popular novels, i e of marriage as the (only) desirable and valuable ‘happy ending’ (in a social, moral, and financial sense), is abandoned without hesitation at the level of plot The existential priority of both the hero and the heroine, Terence Hewett and Rachel Vinrace, is no longer ‘marriage,’ but the lived experience of ‘being in love ’ For the reader, this unusual narrative choice becomes an exercise in perspective-taking, since it subtly challenges mainstream views on marriage in Edwardian times and questions masculine and feminine roles, while contradicting the canonical expectations of the love plot Among the narrative innovations that sustain the alternative (to the mainstream) perspective on values are the lengthy, candid, and fearless dialogues between the two protagonists, but also, at the formal level, the mixture of omniscent narration and character focalisation, which allows an unprecedented exploration of the heroine and of the hero’s consciousness, of their feelings and thoughts, against the contrasting backdrop of their conservative milieu This is undoubtedly a bildungsroman, and yet an ‘unusual’ and highly original bildungsroman, not only because one of the protagonists is a female character, but also because her growth is accomplished - and her social incorporation and maturity achieved - almost apart from the imperatives of her society and education. In fact, maturity is no longer defined simply as integration into the hero/ heroine’s society through the full endorsement of societal norms, 127 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0005 Literature as an Ecological Space of Self-Awareness, and Perspective-Taking but as the quiet, and yet determined, affirmation of one’s own beliefs and desires The only imperative for Rachel and Terence is being true to oneself and open to another This is to a certain extent also true for Arthur and Susan, the other couple who become engaged during their “voyage out” and whose happy future contemplates a traditional marriage The authenticity of the emotions, as they are felt, analysed, and shared spells the ‘coming of age’ of the protagonists, as a genuine coming to terms with their deepest selves The pleasures and fears of the erotic and of falling in love per se (and not as a means towards a ‘good marriage’) are indeed an innovative and subversive topic, compared to traditional and popular nineteenth-century novels The “voyage out” becomes for Rachel the occasion of new experiences, including the acquisition of a literary knowledge the likes of which women of her status and times were commonly deprived The acquaintance with highly educated and open-minded (rather than condescending) men, who suggest she read, and indeed provide her with books, proves crucial in her development In Rachel and Terence’s parable we clearly see the power that fiction has of questioning values. In this sense I share Vera Nünning’s views: fiction does not just confirm and popularise culturally dominant feeling and display rules. Fictional works frequently direct attention to individuals having difficulty with conforming to the prevailing feeling rules, and they explore situations in which it appears to be necessary or at least understandable to violate them 21 This is clearly the case in The Voyage Out Woolf’s feminist views avant la lettre are amply voiced in it, as they would later also be in A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) In fact, in The Voyage Out, the character of Terence Hewet expresses ideas on the condition of women that were radical in Edwardian times and that still have a clear emancipatory force He is the mouthpiece of Woolf’s opinions, and while this may ring scarcely plausible for a male character, Woolf provides a brilliant explanation: Terence has experienced a form of social scorn for being a writer (rather than choosing a more remunerative or prestigious profession) and this puts him in a position from which he can understand women’s experience of being socially humbled His ‘vindication of the rights of women’ is clearly emancipatory, since his conversations with Rachel lead her to an unprecedented assessment of her own qualities and aspirations, and to a fresh awareness of the ultraconventional, stifling family life she had lived before the “voyage out.” Sometimes, Terence’s words seem a form of straightforward moralising against the grain of mainstream values However, when the sermonising is abandoned, for 21 Nünning, Reading Fictions, Changing Minds, 117 128 a Ngela l ocatelli 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0005 example in Terence’s ekphrastic vignettes of hypocritical and unsatisfactory conventional married life (in Chapter 18), the novel is very effective in suggesting that the traditional values, together with the prescriptions of strictly defined male and female roles, have been the cause of a regrettable insincerity and distance between men and women. Women’s hypocritical flattery towards men, and the mainstream double-standard for men and women is part and parcel of a certain kind of education, one imparted for centuries, that had prescribed what Terence can’t help but notice, even in the behaviour of an intelligent married woman like Helen Ambrose He wonders: Even the Ambroses, whom he admired and respected profoundly - in spite of all the love between them, was not their marriage too a compromise? She gave way to him; she spoilt him; she arranged things for him; she who was all truth to others was not true to her husband, was not true to her friends if they came in conflict with her husband 22 The relationship between Terence and Rachel, grounded as it is on sincerity, trust, and honesty is therefore most unconventional, without being overtly transgressive Their frank dialogue dispels the risk of a stereotypical association As I have said, the novel’s main interest is not the happy ending of marriage, but the innovative topic of the growth of an authentic love relationship through honest communication The protagonists’ parable of emancipation and self-awareness invites an analogous trajectory of self-knowledge for the readers of the novel Whatever their cultural world may be, readers are also transformed, in terms of a deeper awareness of the values they uphold Since any culture has a belief system and is endowed with rules and attitudes that usually go undetected and unchallenged, characters who do not conform to dominant values provoke a meta-ethical questioning of values for the readers of similar or different persuasions In her “Introduction” to the volume Us and Others: Social Identities across Languages, Discourses and Cultures, Anna Duszak 23 valuably reminds us that human social identities are mutable and interactively constructed I wish to conclude by suggesting that this process happens through discursive negotiations that impact the socio-psychological level Such negotiations are grounded in a narrative competence and narrative understanding of the world that literature uniquely enhances for its attentive and engaged readers 22 Woolf, Voyage, 248 23 Anna Duszak, “Us and Others: An Introduction,” Us and Others: Social Identities across Languages, Discourses and Cultures, ed ead (Amsterdam: Benjamins 2002), 1-28 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0005 Works Cited Badiou, Alain Handbook of Inaesthetics Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005 Batson, C Daniel “Two Forms of Perspective Taking: Imagining How Another Feels and Imagining How You Would Feel ” Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation Eds Keith D Markman/ William M P Klein/ Julie A Suhr New York: Psychology Press, 2009, 267-279 Baumbach, Sibylle/ Ralf Haekel/ Felix Sprang, eds Cognitive Literary Studies, special issue of Journal of Literary Theory 11 2 (2017) Brône, Geert/ Jeroen Vandaele Cognitive Poetics: Goals, Gains and Gaps Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009 Burke, Michael/ Emily T Troscianko Cognitive Literary Science: Dialogues Between Literature and Cognition Oxford: OUP, 2016 Caracciolo, Marco The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014 Cave, Terence Thinking With Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism Oxford: OUP, 2016 Davis, Todd F / Kenneth Womack, eds Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture and Literary Theory Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2001 Duszak, Anna “Us and Others: An Introduction ” Us and Others: Social Identities across Languages, Discourses and Cultures Ed ead Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2002, 1-28 Eaglestone, Robert, ed Ethics and Literature, special issue of European Journal of English Studies 7 2 (2003) Elgin, Catherine “The Laboratory of the Mind ” A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative and Knowledge Eds Wolfgang Huemer/ John Gibson / Luca Pocci London/ New York: Routledge, 2007, 43-54 Gibson, Andrew Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas London/ New York: Routledge, 1999 Johnson, Dan R./ Daniel M. Jasper/ Sallie Griffin/ Brandie L. Huffman. “Reading Narrative Fiction Reduces Arab-Muslim Prejudice and Offers a Safe Haven From Intergroup Anxiety ” Social Cognition 31 (2013), 578-579 Locatelli, Angela, ed La conoscenza della letteratura/ The Knowledge of Literature, Volumes I-X, Bergamo: Edizioni Sestante/ Bergamo UP, 2002-2011 --- “Pensiero Poetico: forma, immaginazione ed empatia ” La Conoscenza della letteratura, Vol I Bergamo: Edizioni Sestante/ Bergamo University Press, 2002, 181-190 --- “Literature: Teaching Meets ‘Theory’ ” Textus 16 1 (2003), 17-26 --- “The Ecology of Wonderland: Textual, Critical and Institutional Perspectives in Literature ” Literary Landscapes, Landscapes in Literature Eds Michele Bottalico/ Maria T Chialant/ Eleonora Rao Roma: Carocci Editore, 2007, 26-54 --- “Literature’s Versions of its own Transmission of Values ” Ethics in Culture: The Dissemination of Values Through Literature and Other Media Eds Astrid Erll/ Herbert Grabes/ Ansgar Nünning Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008, 19-34 129 Literature as an Ecological Space of Self-Awareness, and Perspective-Taking 130 a Ngela l ocatelli 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0005 --- “The Ethical Use(s) Of Literary Complexity ” Values in Literature and the Value of Literature: Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating and Constructing Norms and Values Eds Sibylle Baumbach/ Herbert Grabes/ Ansgar Nünning Trier: WVT, 2009, 67-76 --- “Reading Literature: An Ethical Gesture in the Postmodern Context? ” Armenia Folia Anglistika 12 1 (2014), 121-130 --- “The Moral and the Fable: A Fluid Relationship in Artistic Literature ” Values of Literature. Eds Hanna Meretoja/ Saija Isomaa/ Pirjo Lyytikäinen/ Kristina Malmio Leiden/ Boston: Brill, 2015, 47-62 --- “‘The Humble/ d’ in Literature and Philosophy: Precariousness, Vulnerability, and the Pragmatics of Social Visibility ” The Humble in 19thto 21st-Century British Literature and Arts Eds Isabelle Brasme/ Christine Reynier/ Jean-Michel Ganteau Montpéllier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2017,147-163 --- “Plurivocal Narration as an Empathetic Response of Resistance to Colonial Prejudice: Writing Alterity in The Voyage Out ” Le Simplegadi 19 (Winter 2019), 53-64 Nünning, Vera Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014 Nünning, Ansgar/ Vera Nünning “How to Stay Healthy and Foster Well-Being with Narratives, or: Where Narratology and Salutogenesis Could Meet ” How to Do Things with Narrative: Cognitive and Diachronic Perspectives Eds Jan Alber/ Greta Olson Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2017, 157-186 Woof, Virginia The Voyage Out (1915) London: Grafton Books/ Collins, 1989 --- A Room of One’s Own London: Hogarth Press, 1929 --- Three Guineas London: Hogarth Press, 1938 Zunshine, Lisa Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006 ---, ed The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies Oxford: OUP, 2016 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0006 s usaNNe K Naller When Law Meets Literature The Emotional Value of Literary Texts 1 Introduction - The Question of Language Throughout history there has been a close relationship between law, emotion, and literature In pre-modern times, legal questions and related issues of religion, politics, morality, and affects were conveyed via poetic text formats, such as tragedy, epic poetry, and early forms of the novel During the modern era, from the 18th century and particularly from the 19th century onward, legal scenes and emotion scenarios have played an important role in literature; and as they are tied to a text, they are primarily negotiated in terms of language However, the challenge for literary approaches to law and emotion is not a merely linguistic one Legal acts and emotion scenarios are composed of different media constituents, are complex in spatio-temporal terms, and depend on all formats of knowledge Recognising these complex entanglements, more recent legal theories thus understand legal acts as determined by space, psycho-physical contexts, knowledge, and media constellations 1 Current theories of emotion also base their definitions of emotion and feeling on several components and their respective material and media-related constellations Christiane Voss, for instance, proposes an approach that as- 1 Sabine Müller-Mall, Performative Rechtserzeugung: Eine theoretische Annäherung (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2012), Thomas Vesting, Die Medien des Rechts: Sprache (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2011), Cornelia Vismann, Medien der Rechtsprechung (Frankfurt a M : Fischer, 2011), Kent D Lerch, ed , Die Sprache des Rechts. Bd. 1. Recht verstehen. Verständlichkeit, Missverständlichkeit und Unverständlichkeit von Recht (Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2004), Karl-Heinz Ladeur, “‘Finding our text…’ Der Aufstieg des Abwägungsdenkens als ein Phänomen der ‘sekundären Oralität’ und die Wiedergewinnung der Textualität des Rechts in der Postmoderne,” Die Innenwelt der Außenwelt der Innenwelt des Rechts: Annäherungen zwischen Rechts- und Literaturwissenschaft, ed Ino Augsberg (Paderborn: Fink, 2012), 173-206, Friedrich Müller/ Ralph Christensen/ Michael Sokolowski, Rechtstext und Textarbeit (Berlin: Duncker Humblot, 1997), Thomas-Michael Seibert, Zeichen, Prozesse. Grenzgänge zur Semiotik des Rechts (Berlin: Duncker Humblot, 1996) 132 s usaNNe K Naller 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0006 sumes that emotions per se are not already semantically charged In her understanding, they are an interaction of pre-verbal, physical experiences and a narrative frame 2 This interaction needs to be gradually developed and takes form as a constellation that concerns temporary perspectives and particular circumstances Therefore, issues of emotion, law, and literature must be based on a notion of language that does justice to the complexity of the topic at hands and that discards the idea of language as a rational sign bearer or as a simple tool for coding and decoding 3 Such an approach to language is seconded and made fruitful not only in literary studies, but also by advanced and critical theories of law Dietrich Busse, for instance, summarises the complexity of linguistic legal acts with the observation that the sovereignty of legal decisions and interpretations of the law cannot be delegated to the linguistic form of normative texts alone Rather, they are the result of a socially bound interpretation and application of texts realised by both applicants and recipients 4 Such a contextual and social understanding of the notion of law allows to consider emotions, or even to stress their impact on legislation and the application of the law Andreas Fischer-Lescano fully recognises the emotional dimension, the non-linguistic within the force of law and the field of social forces, in which the legal subjects are always involved 5 In order to demonstrate the validity of this alternative force of law, which does not put into question the normative side of the law, Fischer-Lescano reaches back to critical aesthetic theory and literature in the form of tragedy (Sophocles) and poetry (Heiner Müller) In his opinion, literature with its performative power of language and visualisation can deconstruct the violence within the logos of the law 6 As 2 Christiane Voss, Narrative Emotionen: Eine Untersuchung über Möglichkeiten und Grenzen philosophischer Emotionstheorien (Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2004) 3 Kent D Lerch, ed , Die Sprache des Rechts. Bd. 3. Recht vermitteln. Strukturen, Formen und Medien der Kommunikation im Recht (Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2005), Monika Schwarz-Friesel, Sprache und Emotion (Tübingen/ Stuttgart: Francke, 2013), Gesine Schiewer, Studienbuch Emotionsforschung. Theorie, Anwendungsfelder, Perspektiven (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2014) 4 Dietrich Busse, “Verstehen und Auslegung von Rechtstexten - institutionelle Bedingungen,” Die Sprache des Rechts Bd. 2., ed Lerch (Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2004), 17 5 Andreas Fischer-Lescano, “Radikale Rechtskritik,” Kritische Justiz 2 (2014), 171-183; Christoph Menke, Law and Violence: Christoph Menke in Dialogue (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2018) 6 Fischer-Lescano, “Radikale Rechtskritik,” 176 When Law Meets Literature 133 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0006 a consequence, law and literary studies are challenged by affect theories and non-linguistic perspectives on law 7 Nevertheless, it must be noted that language plays a central role in literature as well as in law and for emotions Essential juridical acts are based on oral and written texts The indispensable normative element for modern legal systems - i e legal texts - is embedded in language and speech acts Emotions, in turn, heavily depend upon terminological definitions and linguistic descriptions It can even be said that emotions gained a place in pre-modern and modern forms of knowledge mostly through their terminological classifications (Aristotle would be an early example) 8 Emotions are linguistically determined But at the same time the linguistic component has to be seen as part of multi-constituted complexes where psychophysical (or physio-neuro-cognitive) elements interact with formal and media-related as well as linguistic modes and practices, which in turn trigger social actions and communication Emotions are basic conditions which allow us to function as communicating, social, political, biological, psychological, and ethical beings Emotions are thus always also about knowledge, rules, norms, and traditions as well as about individual memories and experiences 9 Against this backdrop, the relationship between law, emotion, and literature can be described as follows: As a modern, functionally indispensable social system, modern law is based on strategies of rationalising and standardising speech acts, on how institutions are organised, and on specific com- 7 Greta Olson, “The Turn to Passion: Has Law and Literature become Law and Affect? ,” Law & Literature 28 3 (2016), 335-353 8 Ute Frevert et al , eds , Gefühlswissen: Eine lexikalische Spurensuche in der Moderne (Frankfurt a M / New York: Campus, 2011) 9 Cf possible approaches to the ternisopic in Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014); Vera Nünning, “The Affective Value of Fiction Presenting and Evoking Emotions,” Writing Emotions: Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature, eds Ingeborg Jandl et al (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017), 29-54, Thomas Anz, “Emotional Turn? Beobachtungen zur Gefühlsforschung,” literaturkritik.de 12 (2006); Thomas Anz, “Kulturtechniken der Emotionalisierung: Beobachtungen, Reflexionen und Vorschläge zur literaturwissenschaftlichen Gefühlsforschung,” Im Rücken der Kulturen, eds Karl Eibl/ Katja Mellmann/ Rüdiger Zymner (Paderborn: Mentis, 2007), 207-239, Martin von Koppenfels,/ Cornelia Zumbusch, eds , Handbuch Literatur Emotionen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), Simone Winko, Kodierte Gefühle: Zu einer Poetik der Emotionen in lyrischen und poetologischen Texten um 1900 (Berlin: Schmidt, 2003), Susanne Knaller, Die Realität der Kunst: Programme und Theorien zu Literatur, Kunst und Fotografie seit 1700 (Paderborn: Fink, 2015), 226-235, Susanne Knaller/ Rita Rieger, eds , Ästhetische Emotion: Formen und Figurationen zur Zeit des Umbruchs der Medien und Gattungen (1880-1939) (Heidelberg: Winter, 2016), Susanne Knaller, “Emotions and the Process of Writing,” Writing Emotions, eds Ingeborg Jandl et al (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017), 17-28 134 s usaNNe K Naller 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0006 munications and practices. This relationship is situated in a field of tension between the systemic necessity of norms, on the one hand, and individual legal and non-legal actions and situations, on the other This concurrence between the law’s mandatory normativity and the contingent processuality of single legal actions constitutes a highly productive aspect for modernt literature It reflects the tensions within a modern society grounded in generally approved norms, on the one hand, and the right of freedom for the individual, on the other Since the 18th century and particularly the 19th century, literature has dealt with this area of conflict and the contingencies of modern reality and society The recourse to legal discourses and legal motives makes it possible for literature to demonstrate the cultural and social characteristics and antinomies of institutions, individuals, and practices In this context emotions are of particular importance for literature They count among the essential, never entirely calculable constants of human action and communication and, at the same time, they are both a part and a determinant of social practices 10 Thus, by representing how emotions and feelings may penetrate and even constitute legal norms and contexts, literature can demonstrate the unavoidability of emotions as well as the fact that law is located in norms as well as in the lifeworld Questions of emotion imply the necessity of considering how the law and its practices are conditioned 11 by a society’s norms, rules, values, and conventions 12 However, issues of emotion not only relate to legal, social, political, and cultural conflicts and practices, but also describe an aesthetic question that literature has always been concerned with: emotions and feelings have been constants of literature (and the arts in general) They are used and become effective on levels of production, text formation, and in reception It can thus be concluded that it is this very set of epistemological, aesthetic, and lifewordly issues that explains the potential of law and emotions for literature At the same time, this confrontation displays the emotional value of literature itself In the following steps these theoretical reflections will be elaborated and supplemented with a brief look at the long turn of the century The second half of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century constitute a defining and important period up to now for both law and literature. A short methodological proposal of how to deal with the triad of law, literature, and 10 Andreas Reckwitz, “Praktiken und ihre Affekte Zur Affektivität des Sozialen,” Kreativität und soziale Praxis: Studien zur Sozial- und Gesellschaftstheorie (Bielefeld: transcript, 2016), 97-114 11 Christoph Möllers, Die Möglichkeit der Normen: Über eine Praxis jenseits von Moralität und Kausalität (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015) 12 Vesting, Die Medien des Rechts: Sprache When Law Meets Literature 135 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0006 emotion, followed by an example of legal practice demonstrating the value of literature, will complete the picture of a complex and highly productive relationship 2 Law, Literature, and Emotion - A Productive Relationship Generally, literature can address the relationship between law and emotion in a discursively productive way while at the same time applying aesthetic concepts of emotion within poetically formed emotion scenarios This becomes apparent when looking at key concepts of the legal discourse considered by literature. One can find the application and discussion of terms like law, rule, norm, proof, evidence, certainty, dispute, justice, fact, truth, decision, case, confession, guilt/ innocence, ruling, conscience - general and not only legally relevant notions that literature ties to concepts of emotion as well as to concrete emotion scenarios An example: The term “justice” describes a condition imperative for the law, if it is to function However, justice can never be fully defined or expressed in words without using language to explain one’s reasoning Drawing on Pascal and Montaigne, Derrida thus speaks of a mystical authority of the law 13 This does not imply a transcendent dimension, but means that, strictly speaking, there is no ultimate meta-level to legitimise justice, [there are] only fictions, rhetorical procedures, or performative speech acts that can legitimise justice Literature takes this circumstance into consideration and demonstrates how and in which forms this authority can take effect Thus, literature also reveals what remains unmentioned, unvoiced, or banned from language: the speechlessness of those who do not understand the language of the law; the silent agreements; the unmentioned pre-texts of a ruling or decision; the covert aporias of all decision making A literary strategy for dealing with this complex status of language within law is the construction of emotion scenarios and the unfolding of their linguistic triggers and outcome Language here does not possess a conclusive or rational power It triggers emotions followed by new emotions At no point are facts, actions, and linguistic signs in full congruence. The participants never find themselves on one common level of knowledge and understanding What literature discloses with its aesthetic procedures is the fact that the law cannot be analysed as a whole; it needs to be broken down into the individual parts of its texts, into the phases in which it operates, into its interstices, 13 Jacques Derrida, “The Force of Law: ‘The Mystical Foundation of Authority’,” Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, eds Drucilla Cornell/ Michael Rosenfeld/ David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 11-12 136 s usaNNe K Naller 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0006 into its narrative elements 14 In the language of law, speech acts therefore always contain traces of citations, other texts, media, and systems 15 Literature engages in the latter aspects by considering, for instance, that linguistic as well as non-linguistic juridical processes are always embedded within a respective time structure, thus constituting themselves within a narrative framework in the broader sense 16 This holds true for the verdict, the decision, and the grounds for a judgement A case constitutes itself through a reciprocal and nearly unstoppable process of references to the past, to the present of expressions, of stipulation, and to future events Therefore, a legal decision 17 always means a caesura, such as interrupting the chains of evidence or conducting interpretations in support of a judgment The resulting relationship between perpetrators (which parts of their biography can be told? ), crime (what counts as evidence? ), and case (a complex process) with all the ensuing confrontations strongly appeals to literature, also because these legal procedures (accompanied by acts of interrupting and concluding) give rise to manifold potentials for emotion This can be demonstrated with the example of literary case narratives and explains why they are so often multi-perspectival, full of narrative gaps and unexpected turns, and rarely seem to offer closure and a full story Truth in these texts is subjective and contingent Another literary strategy is the montage and combination of factual as well as fictive texts (narration, letters, interviews, judgements, journal articles, psychological estimates, etc ) with commentaries of a narrator acting as a personally involved investigator Literary case studies tend to be reflexive and narrated from a self-observing point of view 18 They are not classifiable (“inclassable”) and disrupt expectations, as Roland Barthes points out, speaking of the genre “fait divers” - the French name for all sorts of exceptional and at the same time bizarre cases reported in popular tabloids 19 Literary case studies combine aleatoric causality and ever-changing coincidences with strong emotional reactions and reflections 14 Ibid , 14 15 Ladeur, “‘Finding our text…’,” 187; Möllers, Die Möglichkeit der Normen, 283 16 Cf Greta Olson, “Narration and Narrative in Legal Discourse,” Living Handbook of Narratology, eds Peter Hühn et al (Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2014) 17 Michael Niehaus, “Die Entscheidung vorbereiten,” Urteilen, Entscheiden, eds Cornelia Vismann/ Thomas Weitin (München: Fink, 2006), 22 18 Nicolas Pethes, Literarische Fallgeschichten: Zur Poetik einer epistemischen Schreibweise (Konstanz: UP, 2016), 15; Émile Brière, “Faits divers, faits littéraires: Le romancier contemporain devant les faits accomplis,” Études littéraires 40 (2009), 157-70, Dominique Viart, “Les ‘Fictions critiques’ dans la littérature contemporaine,” Le goût du roman, ed Matteo Majorano (Bari: Graphis, 2002), 30-46 19 Roland Barthes, “Structure du fait divers,” Essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964), 188-197 When Law Meets Literature 137 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0006 of the narrator as well as the readers A famous example is Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) Not only from a formal but also a historical point of view, case narratives represent an important example of the productive relationship between law and literature and its innovative impulses in modernity After a period of relatively close convergence between legal theories and literature during the 18th century, in Germany, Austria, and France, law and legal scholarship ceased to draw directly on literature 20 One of the reasons for this development is the academic professionalisation of legal scholarship and its stronger institutionalisation 21 , which had already begun in the 18th century However, in the 20th century, literature itself renewed its interest in the law in a way that is different from that of the 18th and early 19th centuries 22 Because of reform movements in criminal law, the new attention to feeling (“Rechtsgefühl”) in the juridical process 23 , the development of criminology as a science, and general interest in public trials reported on by burgeoning mass media, authors, writers, and journalists started to take part in discussions about legal relationships, legal reforms, and legal practices A salient historical event to be mentioned in this context is the legal crisis of the Weimar Republic 24 Karl Kraus’s contribution to Die Fackel can be cited as an example, as can Blaise Cendrars’ concern with legal cases (e g , in L’Or (1925)) or work 20 Rückert, Joachim, “Das ‘gesunde Volksempfinden’ - eine Erbschaft Savignys? ,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Germanistische Abteilung 103 (1986), 199-247 21 Monika Frommel, “Internationale Reformbewegungen zwischen 1880 und 1920,” Erzählte Kriminalität: Zur Typologie und Funktion von narrativen Darstellungen in Strafrechtspflege, Publizistik und Literatur zwischen 1770 und 1920, eds Jörg Schönert/ Konstantin Imm/ Joachim Linder (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991), 470-472; Uwe Wilhelm, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich und seine Justiz: Justizkritik, politische Strafrechtsprechung, Justizpolitik (Berlin: Duncker Humblot, 2010) 22 Cf Susanne Knaller, “Die Lust am Recht Emotion, Recht und Literatur um 1900,” Ästhetische Emotion: Formen und Figurationen zur Zeit des Umbruchs der Medien und Gattungen (1880-1939), eds Susanne Knaller/ Rita Rieger (Heidelberg: Winter, 2016), 179-197, 183-185 Also Andreas von Arnauld, “Was war, was ist - und was sein soll: Erzählen im juristischen Diskurs,” Wirklichkeitserzählungen: Formen und Funktionen nicht-literarischen Erzählens, eds Christian Klein/ Matías Martínez (Stuttgart/ Weimar: Metzler 2008), 47 23 Cf Sandra Schnädelbach, “The Jurist as Manager of Emotions: German Debates on ‘Rechtsgefühl’ in the Late 19th and early 20th Century as Sites of Negotiating the Juristic Treatment of Emotions,” InterDisciplines Journal of History and Sociology 6 2 (2015), 47-73 24 Daniel Siemens, “Die Vertrauenskrise der Justiz in der Weimarer Republik,” Die Krise der Weimarer Republik: Zur Kritik eines Deutungsmusters, ed Moritz Föllmer (Frankfurt a M : Campus, 2005), 139-163 Cf the topic in general in Ansgar Nünning, “Making Crises and Catastrophes: Metaphors and Narratives Shaping the Cultural Life of Crises and Catastrophes,” The Cultural Life of Catastrophes and Crises: Facts, Forms, Fantasies, eds Carsten Meiner/ Kristin Veel (Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2012), 59-88 138 s usaNNe K Naller 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0006 by André Gide (Souvenirs de la cour d’assises [1913]) on how he participated in and documented court cases Texts critical of the justice system appear in novels and magazines, and the role of perpetrator is used productively as writers stylise themselves as perpetrators or let the latter have their say (see Linder 1991: 565) This happens against the historical backdrop of the so-called Pitaval stories which were popular in French and German-speaking countries and served as case studies for lawyers However, some of the new texts also transcended mere case studies and presented themselves as critical, open, linguistically hybrid, and experimental case histories 25 When it comes to where and how crime originates, writers applied concepts from jurisprudence, recognising the relevance of psychological determinants and social circumstances It can be said that there was a radical change in the representation of crime starting around the second half of the 19th century, and that after 1900 paradigms of emotion became an important issue for explaining social issues and legal circumstances In Expressionism, crime is no longer portrayed as deviation but as resulting from society and existential inevitability - being an outsider is stylised This can be illustrated with the series Die Außenseiter der Gesellschaft: Verbrechen der Gegenwart (edited by Rudolf Leonhard (1924/ 25), featuring texts, e g , by Egon Erwin Kisch and Alfred Döblin) and also becomes apparent in the newly emerging French robber novels and novels about youth gangs Beyond a wide array of entertainment novels, Alain-Fournier’s Le grand Meaulnes (1913) may be quoted as a witty literary example What must also be pointed out is the literary deconstruction of highly emotional typologies which were corroborated in legal, scientific, and criminological literature and which portrayed women as predestined criminals - an image against which literature took a stand The criminologists Cesare Lombroso and Erich Wulffen, as well as the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft- Ebing, with his pivotal work Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), are but some of the most influential examples of authors whose writings condemn women as affective, instinctual, and criminal beings Emancipatory and oppositional 25 Harald Neumeyer, “‘Schwarze Seelen’: Rechts-Fall-Geschichten bei Pitaval, Schiller, Niethammer und Feuerbach,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 31 1 (2006), 101-132; Michael Niehaus, “Schicksal sein: Giftmischerinnen in Falldarstellungen vom Pitaval bis zum Neuen Pitaval,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 31 1 (2006), 133-149; Susanne Düwell/ Nicolas Pethes, eds , Fall - Fallgeschichte - Fallstudie: Theorie und Geschichte einer Wissensform (Frankfurt a M / New York: Campus, 2014); Susanne Knaller, “Mediale Herausforderungen von Literatur und Recht: Der literarische Rechtsfall als Beispiel (Döblin, Capote, Carrère),” Recht im medialen Feld: Aktuelle und historische Konstellationen, eds Susanne Knaller/ Doris Pichler (PhiN, Special Issue 12) (2017), 119-141 When Law Meets Literature 139 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0006 types of women, legal discrimination, and social hurdles are often put up for discussion in circumstances such as legal cases and associated emotional and psychological behaviour and consequences Based on the common emotional questions in psychology and medicine (which either topologise or are critical of prejudice), literature is interested in highly expressive models of emotion and emotion scenarios This interest is often demonstrated through formally merging narratives, case records, legal texts, newspaper clippings, and scientific texts. Alfred Döblin’s documentary-oriented sketch Die beiden Freundinnen und ihr Giftmord (1924) is a case in point Plotlines addressing the legal discrimination of women and their professional and sexual choices also appear in the works of Mela Hartwig (Das Verbrechen [1927]), Julien Green (Adrienne Mesurat [1927]), and François Mauriac (Thérèse Desqueyroux [1927]) To this day, these interplays between law, literature, and emotion are highly influential and productive as explicit or implicit models for contemporary writers - especially in France, where, in the wake of Émile Zola’s J’accuse (1898) and later Michel Foucault’s Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur et mon frère… Un cas de parricide au XIXe siècle (1973), the tradition of case narratives and documentaries is popular and highly innovative Prominent examples include Emmanuel Carrère’s L’Adversaire (2000) and Pierre Lemaitre’s documentary novel Trois jours et une vie (2016) 3 Methodological Suggestions Let me conclude the formal and historical observations made above with a short methodological outlook From a theoretical and methodological point of view, the philosopher Ronald de Sousa’s concept of ‘paradigm scenarios’ has proved advantageous in investigating the relationship between literature and emotion 26 Paradigm scenarios store, manage, and activate the vocabulary and practices necessary for attributing emotions They enable reactions, associations, and evaluations, and make it possible to define the functions of emotions and feelings as well as to perceive and understand the latter They also bring together what Andreas Reckwitz calls “affective habitus” (schemata) and “affective style” (perceptible patterns of behaviour) 27 26 Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, MA/ London: MIT Press, 1987); Knaller, “Emotions and the Process of Writing ” 27 Andreas Reckwitz, “Affective Spaces: a Praxeological Outlook,” Rethinking History 16 (2012), 241-258, 255 140 s usaNNe K Naller 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0006 To properly observe the law-emotion-literature constellation, one needs: 1) to raise the question of which emotion scenarios may generally occur in law and how they are used in literature In the context of the law, emotions and feelings can encompass the following characteristics: They can have a normative and corrective value in the legal context, and they determine judicial reasoning and judgment; they authorise legitimacy and convey legal experience 28 They query the worth and utility - and thus also the justification - of normativity and value systems. Emotions thus operate at the level of legal doctrines, legal norms, institutions, procedures, and the public, as well as in the context of their own environmental systems, which include the arts 29 2) The vocabulary relating to emotions used in legal discourse and practices is important for a closer analysis of literary emotion scenarios in the legal context Literature observes these scenarios, their vocabulary, and their practices - legitimising discourses and the resulting widely relevant, knowledge-steering cultural, economic, and political conditions as well as how those are dealt with 3) Finally, it is relevant that literature’s observations are subject to specific conditions and that literature is also subject to poetological paradigms In literary texts we not only find emotions from legal paradigm scenarios, but also aesthetic models of emotions Literature relates to existing and possible aesthetic (emotion) paradigms The point is thus to develop a “poetics of emotion” 30 which, as is the case with emotional patterns in general, cannot be realised on an individual or specific level alone. Emotions are temporally limited, multi-perspective constellations that concern specific facts. The value of literature consists in its ability to portray these constellations, to put them up for negotiation and to describe them by combining discursive and poetological aspects Applying the above mentioned legal and general terms such as law, rule, and norm as well as respective related terms like proof, evidence, certainty, dispute, jus- 28 Hilge Landweer/ Dirk Koppelberg, “Der Verkannte Zusammenhang von Recht und Emotion,” Recht und Emotion I: Verkannte Zusammenhänge, eds eid (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2016), 16 29 Dagmar Ellerbrock/ Sylvia Kesper-Biermann, eds , “Between Passion and Senses? Emotional Dimensions of Legal Cultures in Historical Perspective,” InterDisciplines: Journal of History and Sociology 6 2 (2015), 5; Julia J A Shaw/ Hillary J Shaw, “From Fact to Feeling: An Explication of the Mimetic Relation between Law and Emotion,” Liverpool Law Review 35 (2014), 43-64 30 Els Andringa, “Poetics of Emotion in Times of Agony: Letters from Exile, 1933-1940,” Poetics Today 32 1 (2011), 152 When Law Meets Literature 141 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0006 tice, case, fact, truth, decision, confession, guilt/ innocence, remorse, ruling, and conscience makes it possible to identify legal, scientific, discursive, and emotional paradigm scenarios and to classify them according to the interfaces and frictions revealed through the literary treatment The results can form the starting point for analysing emotion and law scenarios as well as their constitutive practices and discourses Of particular interest are the linguistic, genre-related, and conceptual particularities which occur when terminology and text formations are implicitly or explicitly transferred from legal to literary texts - i e , from non-poetologically-oriented to poetic texts. This refiguring process of discursively and materially charged application might also lay bare the aesthetic potential and as such the non-rational, contingent, and unruly part of law and its practices 4 Conclusion In the context of law and literature considering the question of emotions provides new insights and impulses on several levels On the one hand, taking into account the social, cultural and political impact of emotions displays the psycho-physical, cognitive, and practical foundations of human acting With this, literature relates notions of law, normative texts, and legal acts to their practical procedures and life-worldly consequences On the other hand, the question of emotions functions as a productive interface for theoretical, methodological, and practical confrontations and reciprocal impulses of law and literary studies 31 Historical-systematically current topics and ever controversial notions like justice or complex procedures like decision making can be fruitfully analysed with the help of an emotion-centered scholarly perspective Such a perspective presupposes and at the same time lays bare an open idea of law and language as well as a notion of law beyond strict objectivity and textual norms. Recent examples for a reciprocal influence between law and literature are Pierre Lemaitre’s already mentioned documentary novel Trois jours et une vie (2016), Ian McEwan’s novel The Children’s Act (2014) or Petra Morsbach’s Justizpalast (2017) which are equally interesting for literary and legal scholars alike 31 Susanne Knaller, “Die emotionalen Gründe des Rechts und umgekehrt: Vorschläge für einen interdisziplinären Austausch von Rechts- und Literaturwissenschaft,” Law and Literature In-Between: Contemporary Interand Transdisciplinary Approaches, eds Christian Hiebaum/ Susanne Knaller/ Doris Pichler (Bielefeld: transcript, 2015), 119-132, Carla Faralli et al., eds., “The Harmonies and Conflicts of Law, Reason and Emotion: A Literary-Legal Approach,” Law and Literature. ISLL papers 9 (2015) 142 s usaNNe K Naller 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0006 I would like to illustrate and conclude these suggestions with an example that combines law, literature, and emotion as a way of legal practice The legal scholar and judge Denis Salas shows how a legal analysis of a constellation of law, language, and emotion can be addressed through aesthetic and literary strategies His examination of linguistic practices, vocabulary, and terminology transcends the idea of a rationally determined competence and control within law and language This approach allows the inclusion of what is not being said, the silences, the unspoken emotion, and the particularity of the language of emotions Salas addresses this openly in his lexicon Les 100 mots de la justice, where the entry for emotion (surprising for a law encyclopaedia) consists not of a definition, but of a story that sums up how law, language, and emotion correlate on all levels and in all their facets - including the non-linguistic, the sensual, physical, and spatial: Let’s observe an audience of penal order. […] It is an audience in the office of the prosecutor in the presence of the lawyer At the end of the interrogation, the prosecutor makes a proposal regarding the degree of punishment All of a sudden, because of a movement, a silent embarrassment, a barely noted vibration in the room, one understands that there is something going on It is the defendant, who, under shock, is incapable of answering Is it the stress, the paralysing effect of the sentencing? He murmurs something confused No articulated sound comes from his mouth The prosecutor is perturbed The lawyer asks for a break and retires with his client A short and important moment. After having returned to the office, the attorney explains the emotion of this man: The probation offers him a chance he did not expect at all, being previously convicted By translating these emotions, the lawyer brings the human being back into the scene, erases the image of the recidivist from the dossier The ‘contextualised’ man (his emotions, his family, his social image) can escape the institutional stigma […] 32 32 My translation “Observons une audience de comparutions sur reconnaissance préalable de culpabilité […] C’est une audience de cabinet dans le bureau du procureur de la République en présence de l’avocat Au terme de l’interrogatoire, le procureur fait une proposition de peine au prévenu. Soudain, à un mouvement, un étonnement muet, une vibration imperceptible dans l’espace, on devine qu’il passe quelque chose C’est le prévenu qui ne peut répondre sous l’effet d’un choc Est-ce le stress, l’effet paralysant de la comparution? Il marmonne quelque chose confusément Aucun son articulé ne sort de sa bouche Le procureur est troublé L’avocat demande une suspension d’audience et se retire avec son client Moment bref, décisif Au retour dans le bureau, l’avocat explique l’émotion de cet homme: ce sursis lui offre une chance qu’il n’espérait plus alors qu’il a un casier judiciaire chargé Traduisant cette émotion, l’avocat remet en scène l’homme, efface l’image du récidiviste qui est dans le dossier. L’homme ‘contextuel’ (ses émotions, sa famille, son image sociale…) peut échapper au stigmate institutionnel.” Denis Salas, Les 100 mots de la justice (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2011), 48-49 When Law Meets Literature 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0006 143 The example displays that the value of literature can be found in multiple practices. It is visible in fictional as well as in non-fictional texts. Together with fictionalising strategies, literary styles and genres help to form and reflect issues of aesthetic, moral, ethical, epistemological, political, and social relevance Therefore, it is the strategy of a pointed and aesthetically charged multi-perspective narrative that allows the legal scholar Salas to depict the defendant in the context of his emotions and to show that only as such and by being translated into a story can he be reinstalled as an individual and as a subject of language and the community Works Cited Andringa, Els “Poetics of Emotion in Times of Agony: Letters from Exile, 1933-1940 ” Poetics Today 32 1 (2011), 129-169 Anz, Thomas “Emotional Turn? Beobachtungen zur Gefühlsforschung ” literaturkritik.de 12 (2006), n p ---. “Kulturtechniken der Emotionalisierung. Beobachtungen, Reflexionen und Vorschläge zur literaturwissenschaftlichen Gefühlsforschung ” Im Rücken der Kulturen Eds Karl Eibl/ Katja Mellmann/ Rüdiger Zymner Paderborn: Mentis, 2007, 207-239 Barthes, Roland “Structure du fait divers ” Essais critiques Paris: Seuil, 1964, 188-197 Brière, Émile. “Faits divers, faits littéraires: Le romancier contemporain devant les faits accomplis ” Études littéraires 40 (2009), 157-170 Busse, Dietrich “Verstehen und Auslegung von Rechtstexten - institutionelle Bedingungen ” Die Sprache des Rechts Bd. 2. Recht verstehen. Verständlichkeit, Missverständlichkeit und Unverständlichkeit von Recht Ed Kent D Lerch Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2004, 7-20 de Sousa, Ronald The Rationality of Emotion Cambridge, MA/ London: MIT Press, 1987 Derrida, Jacques “The Force of Law: ‘The Mystical Foundation of Authority’ ” Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice Eds Drucilla Cornell/ Michael Rosenfeld/ David Gray Carlson New York: Routledge, 1992, 3-67 Düwell, Susanne/ Nicolas Pethes, eds Fall - Fallgeschichte - Fallstudie. Theorie und Geschichte einer Wissensform Frankfurt a M / New York: Campus, 2014 Ellerbrock, Dagmar/ Sylvia Kesper-Biermann “Between Passion and Senses? Emotional Dimensions of Legal Cultures in Historical Perspective ” Between Passion and Senses? Perspectives on Emtions and Law Special issue of InterDisciplines. Journal of History and Sociology 6 2 (2015), 1-15 Faralli, Carla/ Jeanne Gaakeer/ Marcelo Campos Galuppo/ M Paola Mittica/ Ana Carolina de Faria Silvestre Rodrigues. “The Harmonies and Conflicts of Law, Reason and Emotion: A Literary-Legal Approach ” Law and Literature. ISLL papers 9 (2015): s p Fischer-Lescano, Andreas “Radikale Rechtskritik ” Kritische Justiz 2 (2014), 171-183 Frevert, Ute et al , eds Gefühlswissen: Eine lexikalische Spurensuche in der Moderne Frankfurt a M / New York: Campus, 2011 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0006 144 s usaNNe K Naller Frommel, Monika “Internationale Reformbewegungen zwischen 1880 und 1920 ” Erzählte Kriminalität: Zur Typologie und Funktion von narrativen Darstellungen in Strafrechtspflege, Publizistik und Literatur zwischen 1770 und 1920 Eds Jörg Schönert/ Konstantin Imm/ Joachim Linder Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991, 467-496 Knaller, Susanne “Die emotionalen Gründe des Rechts und umgekehrt: Vorschläge für einen interdisziplinären Austausch von Rechts- und Literaturwissenschaft ” Recht und Literatur im Zwischenraum/ Law and Literature In-Between: Aktuelle inter- und transdisziplinäre Zugänge/ Contemporary Interand Transdisciplinary Approaches Eds Christian Hiebaum/ Susanne Knaller/ Doris Pichler Bielefeld: transcript, 2015, 119-132 --- Die Realität der Kunst: Programme und Theorien zu Literatur, Kunst und Fotografie seit 1700 Paderborn: Fink, 2015 --- “Die Lust am Recht: Emotion, Recht und Literatur um 1900 ” Ästhetische Emotion: Formen und Figurationen zur Zeit des Umbruchs der Medien und Gattungen (1880-1939) Eds Susanne Knaller/ Rita Rieger Heidelberg: Winter, 2016, 179-197 --- “Emotions and the Process of Writing ” Writing Emotions: Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature Eds Ingeborg Jandl et al Bielefeld: transcript, 2017, 17-28 --- “Mediale Herausforderungen von Literatur und Recht: Der literarische Rechtsfall als Beispiel (Döblin, Capote, Carrère).” Recht im medialen Feld: Aktuelle und historische Konstellationen Eds Susanne Knaller/ Doris Pichler Special issue of PhiN 12 (2017): 119-141 Knaller, Susanne/ Rita Rieger, eds Ästhetische Emotion. Formen und Figurationen zur Zeit des Umbruchs der Medien und Gattungen (1880-1939) Heidelberg: Winter, 2016 Ladeur, Karl-Heinz “‘Finding our text…’ Der Aufstieg des Abwägungsdenkens als ein Phänomen der ‘sekundären Oralität’ und die Wiedergewinnung der Textualität des Rechts in der Postmoderne ” Die Innenwelt der Außenwelt der Innenwelt des Rechts: Annäherungen zwischen Rechts- und Literaturwissenschaft Ed Ino Augsberg Paderborn: Fink, 2012, 173-206 Landweer, Hilge/ Dirk Koppelberg “Der verkannte Zusammenhang von Recht und Emotion ” Recht und Emotion I: Verkannte Zusammenhänge Eds eid Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2016, 13-47 Lerch, Kent D , ed Die Sprache des Rechts. Bd. 1. Recht verstehen. Verständlichkeit, Missverständlichkeit und Unverständlichkeit von Recht Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2004 ---, ed Die Sprache des Rechts. Bd. 3. Recht vermitteln. Strukturen, Formen und Medien der Kommunikation im Recht Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2005 Menke, Christoph Law and Violence: Christoph Menke in Dialogue Manchester: Manchester UP, 2018 Möllers, Christoph Die Möglichkeit der Normen: Über eine Praxis jenseits von Moralität und Kausalität Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015 Müller, Friedrich/ Ralph Christensen/ Michael Sokolowski Rechtstext und Textarbeit Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997 Müller-Mall, Sabine Performative Rechtserzeugung: Eine theoretische Annäherung Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2012 Neumeyer, Harald “‘Schwarze Seelen’: Rechts-Fall-Geschichten bei Pitaval, Schiller, Niethammer und Feuerbach ” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 31 1 (2006), 101-132 Niehaus, Michael “Die Entscheidung vorbereiten ” Urteilen, Entscheiden Eds Cornelia Vismann/ Thomas Weitin München: Fink, 2006, 17-36 --- “Schicksal sein Giftmischerinnen in Falldarstellungen vom Pitaval bis zum Neuen Pitaval ” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 31 1 (2006), 133- 149 Nünning, Ansgar “Making Crises and Catastrophes: Metaphors and Narratives Shaping the Cultural Life of Crises and Catastrophes ”The Cultural Life of Catastrophes and Crises: Facts, Forms, Fantasies Eds Carsten Meiner/ Kristin Veel Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter 2012, 59-88 Nünning, Vera Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction Heidelberg: Winter, 2014 ―. “The Affective Value of Fiction Presenting and Evoking Emotions.” Writing Emotions: Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature Eds Ingeborg Jandl et al Bielefeld: transcript, 2017, 29-54 Olson, Greta “Narration and Narrative in Legal Discourse ” Living Handbook of Narratology Eds Peter Hühn et al Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2014 --- “The Turn to Passion: Has Law and Literature become Law and Affect? ” Law & Literature 28 3 (2016), 335-353 Pethes, Nicolas Literarische Fallgeschichten: Zur Poetik einer epistemischen Schreibweise Konstanz: UP, 2016 Reckwitz, Andreas “Affective Spaces: A Praxeological Outlook ” Rethinking History 16 (2012), 241-258 --- “Praktiken und ihre Affekte: Zur Affektivität des Sozialen ” Kreativität und soziale Praxis. Studien zur Sozial- und Gesellschaftstheorie Ed id Bielefeld: transcript, 2016, 97-114 Rückert, Joachim. “Das ‘gesunde Volksempfinden’ - eine Erbschaft Savignys? .” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Germanistische Abteilung 103 (1986), 199-247 Salas, Denis Les 100 mots de la justice Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2011 Schiewer, Gesine Studienbuch Emotionsforschung: Theorie, Anwendungsfelder, Perspektiven Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2014 Schnädelbach, Sandra “The Jurist as Manager of Emotions: German Debates on ‘Rechtsgefühl’ in the Late 19th and early 20th Century as Sites of Negotiating the Juristic Treatment of Emotions ” InterDisciplines Journal of History and Sociology 6 2 (2015), 47-73 Schwarz-Friesel, Monika Sprache und Emotion Tübingen/ Stuttgart: Francke, 2013 Seibert, Thomas-Michael Zeichen, Prozesse. Grenzgänge zur Semiotik des Rechts Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996 Shaw, Julia J A / Shaw, Hillary J “From Fact to Feeling: An Explication of the Mimetic Relation between Law and Emotion ” Liverpool Law Review 35 (2014), 43-64 Siemens, Daniel “Die Vertrauenskrise der Justiz in der Weimarer Republik ” Die Krise der Weimarer Republik: Zur Kritik eines Deutungsmusters Ed Moritz Föllmer Frankfurt a M : Campus, 2005, 139-163 When Law Meets Literature 145 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0006 Vesting, Thomas Die Medien des Rechts: Sprache Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2011 Viart, Dominique “Les ‘Fictions critiques’ dans la littérature contemporaine ” Le goût du roman Ed Matteo Majorano Bari: Graphis, 2002, 30-46 Vismann, Cornelia Medien der Rechtsprechung Frankfurt a M : Fischer, 2011 von Arnauld, Andreas “Was war, was ist - und was sein soll: Erzählen im juristischen Diskurs ” Wirklichkeitserzählungen. Formen und Funktionen nicht-literarischen Erzählens Eds Christian Klein/ Matías Martínez Stuttgart/ Weimar: Metzler 2008, 14-50 von Koppenfels, Martin/ Cornelia Zumbusch, eds Handbuch Literatur & Emotionen Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016 Voss, Christiane Narrative Emotionen: Eine Untersuchung über Möglichkeiten und Grenzen philosophischer Emotionstheorien Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2004 Wilhelm, Uwe Das Deutsche Kaiserreich und seine Justiz: Justizkritik, politische Strafrechtsprechung, Justizpolitik Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2010 Winko, Simone Kodierte Gefühle: Zu einer Poetik der Emotionen in lyrischen und poetologischen Texten um 1900 Berlin: Schmidt, 2003 146 s usaNNe K Naller 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0006 t he s ocial , c ultural , e thical , aNd e cological V alue oF l iterature iN the t weNty -F irst c eNtury 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 F rederiK t ygstrup Literature and Democracy 1 The Experience of Literature Literary fiction is probably the medium that most radically extends and expands human experience When reading literature, you can visit every region of the world, and every world that can be imagined in any region, without leaving the armchair You can get to see and feel it in all conceivable scales, from minute sensation to full-horizon overlook; you can see it with the eyes of any living being and learn what it does to their minds and their bodies You discover the multiplicity of ways in which things, people, and situations can be apprehended, how emotions are formed, and how ideas coalesce This is the mundane magic of literature: It not only makes your world indefinitely big, it also, importantly, provides access to it through the other You enter into the consciousness, the eyes and ears, the sensibility of someone who is not you, all while opening up this world by means of your own imagination The experience of reading literature is one of blending into the other, of thinking the thoughts of others in your own head, and eventually of continuously becoming yourself by merging into the lives of others Moreover, literature is an experience of making this crucial leap, the leap into intimacy with the other, in language The encounter with the other in literature is twofold mediated: first an experience mediated into language, and secondly a language mediated into living imagination. The first mediation takes the craft of a writer; she will need to modify and transform, even deform, the language she has learnt in order to give a sufficiently precise rendition of any singular experience, belabouring the inherited forms and idioms she possesses and tweaking them into a language of that particular event And the second mediation is when a reader confronts this estranged idiom, straining her imagination to accommodate the experience engraved in language, and recognises the peculiar way it makes sense Thus, between the two universes that meet and blend in the literary experience, there is language, a very particular language, in which a singular figuration takes place, one which not only designates something in the world, but creates a novel way of making sense of it, thereby adding still one more figure to the repertoire of forms at our disposal to understand how this world can be inhabited 150 F rederiK t ygstrup 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 So literature is about sharing a world, and about sharing an artfully crafted language to make sense of this world This crucial and essential role of literature is probably as ancient as any known civilisation (or rather, our knowledge of any civilisation is essentially premised on its ability to perform this task, and on remnants of its production being preserved), instantiated every time a legend is transmitted, a story is told, or a song is sung But singing and telling are also practices that are framed in distinct ways in different historical situations and geographical locations In addition to thriving on what would appear to be a deep-seated anthropological propensity for telling and sharing stories in all their diverse forms, literature, as we know it and understand it today, also refers to a particular organisation of this propensity Telling tales and singing songs become literature when they are considered and produced according to a set of societal protocols that make them recognisable as such This idea of framing is pinpointed in this way by Jacques Derrida, in an interview with Derek Attridge from 1989: [T]here is no text which is literary in itself. Literarity is not a natural essence, an intrinsic property of the text It is the correlative of an intentional relation to the text, an intentional relation which integrates in itself, as a component or an intentional layer, the more or less implicit consciousness of rules which are conventional or institutional - social, in any case 1 In other words, the properties of singing and telling as a means of sharing a common world have been particularly associated with that institution which we know today as “literature ” Hence, to gauge the value of literature, we need to understand the conventions through which literature has become the predominant medium for encountering a world through the other, by way of a particularly crafted language The institution of literature, however, is a notoriously difficult kind of object to pin down; the framing of a piece of text that transforms it into literature has many layers and complex interactions to it There is a technological layer of materialising the text, with the Gutenberg revolution and the eventual industrialisation of printing that made it an object that can be circulated, and the concurrent social infrastructure of publishing houses, booksellers, and libraries, and around them again medial platforms for discourses of criticism, discussion, and judgments of value All of these are part of a huge infrastructure, with its own economy and an immanent logic of distinction and stratification, gradually putting into place a commonly acknowledged recognition of the existence of this particular thing called “literature ” 1 Derek Attridge, ed , Acts of Literature (London: Routledge, 1992), 44 Literature and Democracy 151 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 Once it has been established that this infrastructure is not only an environment that surrounds literary works, but more profoundly makes these into works of literature in the first place, literary scholars are invited to approach the phenomenon of literature from two angles at the same time: on the one hand by engaging with the world-making qualities of individual literary works when read through that particular “intentional relation” Derrida talks about, that is, by having a literary experience proper and by reflecting on the advent of this experience And, on the other hand, by trying to understand how the social and infrastructural mode of existence of literature provides formats for this experience and affords it with coherence and consistency In this essay, I will follow this second path and discuss how the experience of accessing the world through the other and doing it by way of attentiveness to the idiomatic deformation of language installs literature as a resource for democratic citizenship 2 The Literary Public Let’s revert to the primitive definition of the literary experience: to merge into the world of another, mediated by a text Literature hinges on this relation, that of different human minds meeting through an event that takes place outside the realms of their proper interiorities. Hence, a first specification of the mode of existence of literature will be to understand the way in which this relationship is organised Here, however, an interesting dissymmetry stands out: On the one hand, we have the somehow intimate relationship that is enacted when a reader picks up a text, as if it were a missive addressed directly from the writer to the reader But on the other hand, this relation is mediated in a way that is anything but intimate - it is an address, not to the reader, but to a public The advent of the modern institution of literature is crucially linked to the way in which the literary text, as an address, is directed to individuals in so far as they are potential members of a public, which consequently makes the public itself the genuine addressee of literature One of the best accounts of how this structure came into being remains Jürgen Habermas’ 1962 dissertation, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere In his enquiry into the genesis of the idea of a “public sphere” in European modernity, Habermas identifies the literary public sphere as an inaugural inception of this phenomenon, the ‘blueprint’ of what would eventually become a full-fledged political public sphere Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the literary public sphere gradually morphed from the nobility’s salons and the mostly aristocratic and courtly framework for cultural and artistic events, 152 F rederiK t ygstrup 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 readings, exhibitions, theatre and music performances, and so on For this to happen, however, two prerequisites needed to be in place. The first thing required was a social space, an arena where this new public sphere could circumvent the constricted spaces of the court and the nobility; this was provided by the expanding marketplace of capitalist exchange that burgeoned in the age of mercantilism throughout Europe The second was the consolidation of the third estate and the advent of the new bourgeois, a man of independent means in possession of a private household, who could enter this space as a propertied citizen with no other office than that of representing himself, comfortably lodged in the intimacy of his private sphere The nascent public sphere needed a space, and a model character for the agents to populate it These were gradually put in place in Europe - in different rhythms and different guises, to be sure - in the wake of the expansion of a capitalist market for commodities, labour, and services, and with the growing numbers of entrepreneurs for whom this market was their primary arena of social interaction The public sphere, thus, as an arena for public deliberation independent of and in opposition to the absolutist state, takes hold in the infrastructure provided by the capitalist market economy But the marketplace and the agents that came to populate it did not form a public in the first place; in the first place, the marketplace is just a marketplace And the crucial step from being a marketplace to becoming a public sphere where opinion is articulated and negotiated was, according to Habermas, precisely the intermediary form of the literary public sphere. Two features stand out here. The first is the change that took place in the production of literature - and of art at large - at the same time, where artists were no longer constricted to producing their works solely by commission of the nobility, court, and clergy, but now also had access to the newly expanding market where moneyed merchants, craftsmen, and capitalists that consolidated themselves constituted a new market for print culture and art objects. Secondly, as a result of this first change, the aesthetic criteria of the ancien régime hitherto upheld through normative poetics and academic conventions proved to be increasingly inadequate and incompatible with the preferences of taste that were cultivated in the bourgeois households In this situation, the literary public sphere comes into being as a particular way of using the market place, namely as an arena where the members of the third estate could meet as private citizens only answerable to themselves and their households, to negotiate the value of art and literature, just like they negotiated the value of the goods otherwise exchanged in the market The marketplace, as the locus of free entrepreneurs in need of interaction, became a model for how to negotiate the somehow ineffable value of a new commodity, that of art and literature: Literature and Democracy 153 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 Released from its functions in the service of social representation, art became an object of free choice and of changing preference The “taste” to which art was oriented from then on became manifest in the assessments of lay people who claimed no prerogative, since within a public everyone was entitled to judge 2 In the end, Habermas is not particularly interested in the literary public sphere as such; to him, its crucial function resided in the way it provided a transitional form in a process towards the constitution of the idea - and the ideal - of a political public sphere proper, where lay citizens can deliberate on their interests in a common space without any interference from the state apparatus and the powers that be Nonetheless, as a contribution to the social history of art and literature, Habermas’ brief remarks on the advent of the literary public sphere are interesting in several ways First of all, they shed light on the profound changes that art, and the very notion of art, underwent in the late eighteenth century. Jacques Rancière has provided a useful distinction between a classical ‘representative’ notion of art and a modern ‘aesthetic’ notion, the first based on a normative poetics, the second on the aesthetic relation between the artwork and the beholder 3 Habermas’ analysis here crucially emphasises that this shift in the discourse on art - away from the aesthetic object and how it is made, and towards the aesthetic experience and how it is evaluated - is intimately linked to the way in which artistic production is becoming exposed to the market and hence increasingly assessed in terms of consumer use-value rather than prevailing standards of the trade When art becomes a commodity, not only can it be circulated in a new manner, being offered to buyers in the market rather than being commissioned by the crown and the church, but it also becomes a different kind of object altogether, no longer an ornament with a representational value, but a commodity whose use-value is assessed in terms of its exchange-value This novel constitution of the art object in turn had a profound impact on the social mode of existence of art The demise of traditional hierarchies of taste in favour of the actual propensities of buyers effectively paves the way for the modern aesthetic discourse as we know it, hypostasising the individual encounter with the artwork and eventually defining art as that which elicits a particular kind of sensation in the recipient - a sensation that has indeed been conjugated in a variety of guises throughout the history of aesthetics from Baumgarten to Adorno, from Kant to Lyotard, from Schiller to Dewey: as a potentiation of sensation, as a transformation of representations, as an equipment for life… 2 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (London: Polity Press, 1989), 43 3 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum Press, 2004) 154 F rederiK t ygstrup 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 The fecundity of this new discourse on art, and the tradition of thinking about art it has fuelled throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cannot be overestimated Developed in tandem with the rich experimentation that has characterised the buoying scenes of art and literature in the same period, it has delivered a language for assessing and probing the horizon of aesthetic experiences proffered by the obdurate rationalities of art-making In its guise as a commodity, as something whose value is corroborated in the act of consumption, the work of art has become a unique institutional form in western modernity, an experimental language to challenge and enhance the sensibility of individuals, accompanied by a critical discourse that constantly gauges and expands on the transformative power of this experience Going back to Habermas’ analysis of the constitution of the literary public sphere, however, we are reminded that the artwork in its new guise of a commodity, when it goes to the marketplace to find its readers and beholders, not only mounts its stand, as it were, to meet individual buyers: It addresses a public in charge of negotiating the peculiar value of this new thing on offer This value, the value of aesthetic experience, is thus being submitted to two kinds of assessment: to the assessment of the actual customer who wants to delectate the work in his private sphere, the bourgeois in his incarnation of homme, and to the assessment of free men probing this value in a conversation ideally aimed at common understanding, the bourgeois in his second incarnation as citoyen The important point here is, of course, that the marketplace, historically speaking, is not just this ghostly relational mechanism where supply and demand are weighed out against each other, but also a societal arena where such a thing as a ‘public’ could take on its specific features at a certain point in time Habermas again: The privatised individuals coming together to form a public also reflected critically and in public on what they had read, thus contributing to the process of enlightenment which they together promoted […] They formed the public sphere of a rational-critical debate in the world of letters within which the subjectivity originating in the interiority of the conjugal family, by communicating with itself, attained clarity of itself 4 Habermas’s aim is to single out this particular structural arrangement, that of individuals coming to terms with themselves and what they desire by dialoguing with others on equal terms, as a historically contingent confluence of different economic, political, and cultural circumstances and agencies, which eventually came to spell out a vision of democratic organisation A vision, 4 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 51 Literature and Democracy 155 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 however, systematically betrayed and debased ever after, as he demonstrates, taking his readers through the historical stages of fusion of state and society, ‘re-feudalisation’ of the public sphere and a concomitant ‘re-privatisation’ of the homme, depriving him of his alter ego le citoyen, and the enclosure of art and literature as a segregated culture of experts accompanied by the streamlining of culture to the capitalist marketplace as culture industry Nothing that has happened in the almost sixty years since Habermas published his dissertation seems to contradict this bleak outlook, and the ideal of an enlightened and enlightening public discussion as a core piece of modern democracy does indeed appear still more remote As for art and literature, it can hardly be claimed that they now stand at the centre of a public discussion among private individuals aimed at ‘attaining clarity’ for themselves; on the contrary, the re-feudalisation of the public sphere entails a repulsion of the literary public discussion and a privatisation of the aesthetic experience as another item of reproductive consumption (and eventually also as a good business) In so many words: the commercial marketplace has defeated the public sphere, even though they spring from the same arena, the civic space of interaction that emerged in the transformation from a feudal to a capitalist mode of production Hence, it can come as no surprise that the discourse of individual aesthetic experience has prevailed throughout an era in which the aesthetic has been expulsed from the public sphere and privatised as a matter of individual consumer choice Even though, as claimed above, the merits of this discourse (and the merit of what has been achieved artistically within the aesthetic regime) cannot be overestimated, we can at this stage also add that this success seems to have somehow occulted one of the two main characteristics of the mode of existence of the artwork of our modernity. The first characteristic, that of art becoming a commodity for sale on the market, has been (however indirectly) hypostasised and celebrated by the discourse on aesthetics, exploiting the particular relation between commodity and end-user in the aesthetic realm to a maximum of refinement. But the other characteristic of the modern mode of existence of art, its address to a civic public, inviting private individuals to collectively reflect on themselves, has been concurrently attenuated. What is needed, then, is an understanding of the particular aisthesis of art objects within the aesthetic regime that considers both characteristics: its address to the individual consumer (as Baudelaire had it in his dedication of Les fleurs du Mal to the “hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère”) and its address to a special and strange entity called ‘the public ’ 156 F rederiK t ygstrup 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 3 Literary Infrastructure If at this point we go back to my initial postulation of two essential values of literature, that it makes a world appear to us through the other, and that this appearance is a textual construct that produces a potential common language of sense-making, I will argue that these values are much better understood if we look at literature - in the sense, again, of the mode of being of literature - as a twofold address: to its reader and to its ‘public ’ What does it mean, actually, when literature becomes literature in its modern guise, to address not only any number of readers, but to address this new phenomenon which is the public? And what kind of thing is this ‘public’ in the first place? We get a sense of the actual intricacies of the notion of a literary public in this remark from 1959 by Maurice Blanchot: The “public” is not made up of a great or small number of readers, each one reading for himself The writer likes to say that he writes his book for the special friend Mistaken wish In the public, the friend has no place There is no place for any chosen individual, nor is there one for chosen social structures - family, group, class, nation No one is part of it, and the whole world belongs to it, not just the human world but all worlds, all things, and nothing: the others Hence, however rigorous the censors are and however faithfully the laws are obeyed, there is always, for authority, something suspicious and badly timed in the very act of publishing That is because this act makes the public exist, which, always undetermined, escapes the sternest political determinations 5 To the writer of literature, the public is a mirage, something that cannot be pinned down to empirical existence, but which retains nonetheless a vivid reality and presence The public exists as a vanishing point, a destination that can never be properly reached and underwritten, all while remaining a destination, the other out there who is always another one still For Blanchot, moreover, this mirage-public is not only a perennial condition for anyone who writes for the market, it is a defining feature of what makes the literary work into a “work” proper: “I think the writer desires nothing, either for himself or for his work But the need to be published - that is to say, to attain outer existence, this opening onto the outside […] - belongs to the work ” 6 The essential relation to the public as the work’s other - that which makes the work into a work in the first place - becomes a defining part of the mode of existence of literature, as an outside-in relation with which it defines its own interiority. With Blanchot, then, we get a first indication of how to 5 Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come (Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2003), 246 6 Ibid , 247 Literature and Democracy 157 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 understand the modern idea of a literary public It is not only a provisionally undetermined set of anonymous buyers and readers; it is also, and more substantially, a construct whose anonymity is itself the very essence of its being Literature is engaging in a conversation with this anonymous body, this endlessly deferred other, where the intimacy between a finite interiority and an infinite exteriority becomes a core quality of the work of literature. This idea of the public as a public forever-to-come, an addressee with no fixed coordinates, is an idea that of course goes back to the logic of the marketplace and to the inscrutability of who might actually be out there to take an interest in the thing and perhaps then buy it But once the arena of the marketplace is considered not only as a space for the exchange of commodities, but also as a potential public to which art now turns to find its customers, the inscrutability itself becomes the essential, that is, not a detour or delay that we can wait out to see how the merchandise reaches its end point, but a predicative, even prerogative, quality of the ideal addressee: an anonymous nobody-in-particular, always another other Habermas hypothesises that the public - historically in the guise of a literary public - has the marketplace as its condition of possibility and, furthermore, that the public inserts itself as a second arena in the marketplace where a public body of citizens can assemble With Blanchot, then, we can add that this superimposition of the structure of the public onto the structure of the market has a specific impact when it comes to literature, because it turns the empirical anonymity of the market into an ontological anonymity of the public, which eventually becomes the ideal addressee of literature Speculations on the rhetoric of fiction often invoke an ‘implied reader’ to be detected in the structure of the literary work Such implied readers of course can take on a panoply of different forms, and following Blanchot one could say that it is precisely this legion of incarnations which is important: literature is an assault on the empirical reader, an insistent contestation of the reader’s empirical individuality, forcing the reader into a zone of neutrality To be a reader of literature, one must acquiesce to being bequeathed the anonymous mask of nobody in particular Understanding the historical mode of existence of literature in the context of literature’s new role as a commodity and in the context of the public sphere that co-emerged with the capitalist marketplace, we can observe two related but different qualifications emerge. In the context of the marketplace, we can see the rise of an aesthetic discourse that hypostasises the encounter between work and reader, an experience that forms the prominent nucleus of modern aesthetics In the context of the public sphere, on the other hand, the aesthetic relation is somehow opened up again, refusing to find the final 158 F rederiK t ygstrup 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 corroboration of aesthetic value in the taste of the end-user by dis-identifying the end-user with herself, shoving her back into the anonymity of a spectral collective public Here, a different avenue of aesthetic experience becomes palpable, one of collective experience rather than of individual delectation I will explore this second aesthetics in more detail at the end of this essay, but before that I will delve into another aspect of Blanchot’s examination of the notion of ‘the public ’ At the end of the quotation above, Blanchot claims that publishing is an “act [that] makes the public exist ” The sentence has a counterintuitive ring to it, as we tend to think about a public as an entity that can be addressed rather than an entity that comes to existence by way of the address So what is a public? Michael Warner, in his influential Publics and Counterpublics from 2005, calls it a “practical fiction” and a “virtual object.” 7 Like so many other social institutions we rely on, the public is a highly volatile and elusive phenomenon that resists empirical identification; even if it implies the idea of a congregation of people, it rarely designates a concrete one, and again, any concrete one can morph considerably, all while remaining a public Hence Warner’s two qualifications, that we should understand the public as something fictional and as something virtual The public is imaginary For it to exist, somebody needs to believe in its existence, either to understand oneself as a member of it, or venture to address it, and somebody else needs to share this belief because it rests on a social relation between members of a public, and between the public and the one who addresses it The public in this sense is a prime example of what Cornelius Castoriadis called an ‘imaginary institution of society,’ in both meanings of the phrase, as an imaginary that is socially shared, and as the coming into being of society by way of this shared belief Publics are, in Warner’s words, “a kind of fiction that has taken on life, and a very potent life at that ” 8 There is no public if no one believes in its existence and shares this belief with others; and secondly, there is no public if there is no one who addresses it The reality of the public, in other words, is performative, it is brought into existence once it is addressed - the point Blanchot makes in his characteristic convoluted style Warner puts it this way: A public is a space of discourse organised by nothing other than discourse itself It is autotelic; it exists only as the end for which books are published, shows broadcast, Web sites posted, speeches delivered, opinions produced It exists by virtue of being addressed 9 7 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 8, 56 8 Ibid , 8 9 Ibid , 67 Literature and Democracy 159 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 Imaginary, performative, and effective, publics institute a space of discourse that has the capability of upholding the social life of a society by producing meaning and creating legitimacy of choices and decisions Given, however, the ephemeral nature of the instantiation of a public, the space of discourse it creates needs to be continuously reproduced, the ‘practical fiction’ of a public must be reaffirmed by the public itself as well as by others for whom this particular public is of import The institution of a public demands both: iteration of address invoking the public on the one hand, reflexive self-determination of the public on the other In this way, a ‘public,’ this elusive thing, could be described - neither as an object in any restrictive sense, nor as a mere contingent gathering - as a societal infrastructure And like all infrastructures - whether the mostly material infrastructures of distribution, transportation, or communication, or the more complex infrastructures of, say, decision-making, value-assessment, or education - the infrastructure of publics needs to be described in two registers at the same time. The first register concerns the blueprint of an infrastructure, the map of relations and interactions that are facilitated by an infrastructural arrangement, whereas the second concerns the actual flows and processes that take place on the infrastructural grid, in Keller Easteling’s words, the “unfolding relationship between potentials ” 10 The public does not exist if there is no address and no reflexivity: this is the infrastructural process, the public in actu But this agency cannot take place if there is no space where it can actually work, an institutional framework for the infrastructural order When Derrida talks about the ‘strange institution’ of literature, he is referring to this kind of duplicity, on the one hand the ‘blueprint’ of libraries, editors, journals, and so on, and on the other a particular relation between a mode of address and a complementary reflexively attentive public that underpins the existence of literature 4 Being Public The infrastructural relation to a public is written into the work of art The artwork is not just a thing that is eventually dispatched and addressed to somebody; the address to a public is an integral part of the thing itself If we follow this analysis, we are tasked with resisting the temptation to consider the work of art as an isolated thing and to see instead how the individual work comes with an institutional wrapping, defined by the infrastructural 10 Keller Easteling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructural Space (London: Verso, 2014), 52 160 F rederiK t ygstrup 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 networks that allow it to exist In an attempt to attenuate the strict distinction between objects and their environments, and to pay attention instead to the relational webs that undergird the appearance of an object, Bruno Latour has suggested considering art and literature, or as he puts it, “beings of fiction,” as such networked creatures. 11 To properly analyse artworks, therefore, according to Latour, we should still look at the thing, but we should also follow the relations back to their production and forward towards their reception, the movements upstream and downstream from where we encounter them, to properly understand their power “In following these networks, it is impossible to separate out what belongs to the work ‘properly speaking’ from its reception, the material conditions of its production, or its ‘social context’ ” 12 Even if Latour’s analytical mode is strictly empirical - he is interested in the concrete conditions of production, in every individual case, as well as in the actual reception situations and their ongoing historical modification of the being of the work (in this, by the way, close to Wolfgang Iser’s phenomenological approach to the history of reception) - he also emphasises some of the general ways in which artworks are networked in an institutionally specific way. First of all, he suggests specifying the mode of existence of the work of art as one that requires solicitation: 13 It demands something from its reader or beholder, it demands its public to actually complete and thereby affirm the work as such. To be a work of art, it needs to take part in a networked process of “veridiction” and of “imagination ” Veridiction is about acknowledging the thing as a work of art in the first place, a kind of judgment, in other words, accepting that there is a dimension of meaning in the work which it is worthwhile to relate to And imagination, on the other hand, is about realising this potential, thus not only to imagine something, but to be enabled to imagine something by way of interacting with the work The particular network-like character of this process is due to the reciprocity of these interactions; it is not only the artwork that gives me something by affording my imagination, I also give something to it, namely the conferral of the status as a work of art which is actually able to perform this task And this collaborative work, again, is framed precisely by the institutional scaffolding that provides the infrastructural order within which this work can take place Veridiction and imagination are the particular mechanisms that assure the upstream and downstream coordination that conditions any ‘being of 11 Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2013), 233 12 Ibid , 243 13 Ibid , 242 Literature and Democracy 161 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 fiction’: upstream toward a meaning which is not harboured in the thing and communicated through its form, but which is made possible by it; and downstream toward the actualisation of this potential when somebody takes on the designated position of reader, beholder, recipient Again: The work becomes a function of its recipient, and the recipient, no less importantly, fulfils the function of being a reader to become someone a bit different from her former self by submitting herself to the process of imagination elicited by the work With characteristic bluntness, Latour thus translates the idealist vision of an inspired artist who transmits her vision to a fascinated beholder into an infrastructural arrangement where, notably, that which in the former understanding was achieved through the volition and agency of intentional individuals is now seen as processes of subjectivation that are conditioned and empowered by institutional infrastructures The infrastructural metabolism that assures the upstream and the downstream movements that eventually coincide in the work of art harks back to the twin properties of literature evoked at the beginning of this essay: the appearance of a world through the medium of language and the peculiar way we are invited to experience this world through and by way of the other The merit of translating these insights into the technical language of network anthropology might not be obvious, but it does serve, I contend, to emphasise how the relation to a public, written into the very mode of existence of modern literature, is rehearsed and asserted on an operational level in mundane everyday uses of literature And secondly, by highlighting the particular mechanism of sense-making at work in the field of art and literature, shuttling back and forth between a dimension of potential meaning emerging from the material organisation of the work and a dimension where the receiver attempts to realise this potential, it points toward the significance of the public as collective aesthetic addressee 5 Making Sense of Sense When an artwork addresses a public, the address itself combines two different modalities of reaching out. The first mode is one of affect: It affects the senses of its recipients, it presents a material, ranging from the confected textual surface of a literary work to all kinds of visual, aural, and spatial stimuli organised and composed into the form of an artwork It impinges on us, stirs us up, calls for our attention by exerting, the best it can, a violence on our senses, sometimes by yelling, sometimes by whispering But this affective modality is followed closely by a call for solicitation, as Latour suggested The artwork not only affects us, it immediately also demands that we care for that 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 162 F rederiK t ygstrup affect - that we dwell on it and do whatever we can to make sense of it and eventually make use of it - again: veridiction and imagination, respectively This logic is well described in the traditional discourse of aesthetics as a relationship between artwork and beholder: how that which affects us in turn produces an affective reaction - an image, a feeling, a rumination, an insight, or again, an aesthetic experience This becomes a bit more complicated, however, once we realise and take seriously the collective nature of the address For one thing, going back to Blanchot, the collectivity of the address comes to take the form of a wilful effacement of the individuality of the reader or beholder, an insistance on her neutrality, to an extent where the solicitation of the affect produced by the work distances her from herself She becomes other, but also, and more importantly, another among still others, where ‘you’ singular merges with and becomes indistinguishable from ‘you’ plural In this sense, we end up, eventually, with the question how the ‘you,’ plural, of the aesthetic address might translate into a ‘we’ of aesthetic experience, a plural subject of validation and of imagination? Habermas did answer this question by imagining a “public sphere of a rational-critical debate in the world of letters within which the subjectivity originating in the interiority of the conjugal family, by communicating with itself, attained clarity of itself ” The republican fervour of Habermas’ argument comprises a set of different presuppositions One of them is to assume a kind of neutrality not very distant from the one articulated by Blanchot, basically that we are subjects in the same way (originating in the conjugal family), neutral in an egalitarian sense of the word, and that collective deliberation will therefore indeed entail “clarity of ourselves ” And secondly, of course, there is the idea of rational-critical debate itself, the perennial difficulty in Habermas, which is endlessly sympathetic, but somewhat difficult to vouch for in its somehow too good faith in the way politicised publics work What Habermas devises here is thus a logic of the political public sphere that would spring, in ideal terms, from the literary public sphere, rather than that modern sphere of the aesthetic public for which it in fact paved the way In addition to Habermas’ idea of an egalitarian and self-correcting rational social conversation, we should therefore factor in the particular logic of the aesthetic address through which artistic publics are by now brought into being One attempt in this direction can be found in Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflection, itself originating in an exchange with Maurice Blanchot, on the collective negotiation of aesthetic affect: 163 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 Literature and Democracy Making sense of sensation, starting out from the senses, and in every other sense, is: taking interest in an affect from an outside, being affected by an outside, and also to affect an outside Sense resides in the sharing of an ‘in common ’ 14 In this dense quotation, Nancy actually identifies a point of convergence between the two strands of thought I have tried to develop in this essay On the one hand, there is the question of the nature of the public, where the performative act of address convokes a communality of those who accept the address and consider themselves reflexively as addressees; and on the other, there is the question of the aesthetic ‘object’ that embraces, as part of this object, the (upstream) extension towards its possible meaning as well as the (downstream) extension toward the imaginary instantiation of this meaning My intention has been to argue that when these two questions do actually converge, it is not a matter of a chance encounter, but an important historical contingency What Nancy shows is that the two questions fit perfectly together. His twin points of departure are a reflection on the nature of community, based on a reading of Heidegger’s Mitsein, and, secondly, an analysis of the nature of aesthetic experience as it unfolds from a negotiation of sensation and sense-making. In the first place, he wants to show how ‘being-with’ (être-avec, Mitsein) is a fundamental modality of being which is not premised on a primordially given ‘identity,’ but to the contrary on taking part in a community To demonstrate this, however, he turns to the realm of aesthetics, because here, paradigmatically, identity (the meaning of being affected) is suspended at the outset, or, as Blanchot has it, “neutralised,” awaiting the (downstream) advent of a meaning that does not reside in the individual, but in what a sensuous being might become In other words, a non-identitarian ontology that points towards an aesthetic and the heteronomous being it implies What’s more, Nancy takes the inverse trajectory and starts out from the aesthetic experience of being affected, hence potentially transformed, to then consider this exposedness to an appearance that demands the twofold investment of solicitation and imagination as an exposedness also to a condition of communality, where we are invited, or extolled, to corroborate the sensation and the sense of the sensation in common; or, an aesthetics that here invokes an ontology This convergence between a literary or aesthetic address and an exposition to a condition of communality is not arbitrary: It is inscribed in the advent of 14 Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désoeuvrée (1986; Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1999), 211, my translation French original: “Le sens du sens, depuis le sens sensible, et dans tous les autres sens, c’est: s’affecter d’un dehors, être affecté d’un dehors, et aussi affecter un dehors Le sens est dans le partage d’un ‘en commun’ ” the modern aesthetic regime as it instantiated the public forum on the ground of the marketplace arena in early modernity The encounter that Nancy felicitously points to is an integral part of the mode of being of the work of art in its modern guise, immanent in the institutional infrastructure that was laid out in the nascent literary public sphere and eventually consolidated in the modern scaffolding of the institution of art I have tried to bring this genealogy to light in order to widen our understanding of the role and function of aesthetic experience to embrace not only the importance of the individual encounter with art, but also the experience of being publicly and collectively interpellated to answer the question how a common sensation can make sense, through common deliberation on how we can recognise ourselves - our collective selves - in the artistic images we process Having started out from those basic determinations of the value of literature - that it opens worlds to us, that it does it through the other, and that it does this, finally, in the medium of the crafted textual object - we can now specify the value of the literary aesthetic experience in a two-pronged perspective. In the first instance, considering aesthetic experience in its traditional understanding as an individual encounter with the artwork, the value of literature is one of widening horizons in the actual encounter with other worlds and others’ worldmaking, of emphatic assimilation with other ways of being in the world, under different circumstances, with different privileges and different sensibilities, and of seeing the worlds that emerge from the instantiation of different idioms and different formal constraints All this obviously goes into an ever-topical insistence on literature as first-rate medium to foster individual knowledge, sensitivity, and capacity; Bildung, in short In a second instance, then, as has been argued here, literature also submits such processes of Bildung to a negotiation where experience is produced - is consigned to be produced - in a communal process of questioning that cannot in any meaningful way be excluded from the realm of literary experience Literary experience in this sense encapsulates an originary sense for democracy, not only in that its early institutional form became a visionary pre-figuration of a model of democratic civil life, but also in its present mode of existence, where the self-images it presents us with invariably return to the challenge of accounting for ourselves - not just every individual one of us, but even as just ‘us ’ 164 F rederiK t ygstrup 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0007 Works Cited Attridge, Derek, ed Acts of Literature London: Routledge, 1992 Blanchot, Maurice The Book to Come Trans Charlotte Mandell. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2003 Easteling, Keller Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructural Space London: Verso, 2014 Habermas, Jürgen The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Trans Thomas Burger London: Polity Press, 1989 Latour Bruno An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns Trans Catherine Porter Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2013 Nancy, Jean-Luc La communauté désoeuvrée Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1999 Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics Trans Gabriel Rockhill London: Continuum Press, 2004 Warner, Michael Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2005 165 Literature and Democracy 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 i sabel c apeloa g il The Risky NPV of Literature in Dos Passos and Pessoa The properties of the text are the product of certain forms of paying attention Stanley Fish, “Is there a text in this class? ” 1 Value(s) Arguably, the value, or rather values, of literature are markedly a result of ‘forms of paying attention ’ 1 And these forms may be organised around aesthetic norms, moral codes and ethical concerns, political ideals, ideology, or even a fiduciary nexus. They are less the outcome of essential properties and normative settings than of a contextual exchange between writers and their multiple readers, notably editors, critics, followers, friends, bloggers, tweeters, publicists, marketers, and a wide panoply of text (re)producers In the opening reflections of his seminal reading of Balzac’s Sarrasine, in S/ Z, Roland Barthes strives to underpin where the value of a text lies The specific difference that substantiates the singularity of the literary text, he concludes “is not, obviously, some complete, irreducible quality (according to a mythic view of literary creation); it is not what designates the individuality of each text […]; on the contrary, it is a difference which does not stop and which is articulated upon the infinity of texts, of languages, of systems: a difference of which each text is the return ” 2 The literary is then neither articulated as a set of normative properties, nor as their subversion Literature occurs in the space of ‘estrangement’ or of the ‘making strange,’ as the Russian Formalists upheld The difference of the text is presented as an exchange that never stops, articulated “upon the infinity of languages, texts, and systems.” And he asks “How then, posit the value of a text? ” For Barthes, value does not come from what he names the ideological value (moral, aesthetic, political) 1 Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretative Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982), 36 2 Roland Barthes, S/ Z: An Essay (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 3 168 i sabel c apeloa g il 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 The value of the text is ultimately its value of exchange, that is, it arises out of the potentiality of the written to be re-written and not simply read The value of the text is then the writerly, or what can be rewritten. He adds: “Why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text ” 3 In this exchange between production/ consumption and re-production, the literary is produced as a flow, an exchange of creative capital inflows and outflows, without loss. In managerial terms, a creative cash flow of sorts defines literature’s NPV (Net Present Value) 4 This financial metaphor is representative of a wider question, the nature of the relation between literature and the economy, which I am less interested in discussing from the fiduciary point of view, what Marc Shell has named the real role and the real value of literary work in economic affairs, 5 but rather from the representational perspective of a certain discourse that uses the language and the tropes of the economy to articulate the shape of our common forms of living together Literature as a system and a structure of exchange aggregates the vocabulary and the images of money culture to understand the rhetoric and interpret the narratives of neo-liberalism or socialism, welfare, crisis, austerity, growth, and risk My reflections seek to articulate a representational NPV, the result of the creative flow between literature and the economy, by looking at the specific problem of financial risk in John Dos Passos’ The Big Money (1936) and Fernando Pessoa’s The Anarchist Banker (1922) 2 Risk From the standpoint of cultural anthropology, risk is conceived as a cultural enabler based on a discourse of uncertainty that mediates between the subject’s own beliefs and the uncertain odds of the natural and social worlds It is then stitched into the social fabric by practices of choice, acceptability, selection, and management In this process, the untamed irrationality of risk, that which cannot be controlled and is unacceptable for the community, is transformed into a game of rationally-based probability Thus, while risks are in theory uncontrollable, 6 culture seeks to take control of them by creating 3 Ibid , 4 4 Net Present Value is the difference from cash inflows and cash outflows, which may be positive, negative, or 0 5 Marc Shell, Money, Language and Thought (Baltimore/ London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), 150 6 And yet Jerome Ravetz postulates that, as for the Greeks, the odds are always uncontrollable: “[…] risks are conceptually uncontrollable: one can never know whether one The Risky NPV of Literature in Dos Passos and Pessoa 169 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 insurance narratives formed out of a selection of hazards managed by probabilistic approaches This spawns the question, how does the aesthetic articulate the risky pull of the social? And, in sum, what are we talking about when we discuss risk and literature? What is now required is a deeper scrutiny of art’s relation with one of its practices most deeply engaged with risk discourse In economic discourse risk resonates both as a symbol and as a tool of the trade, and more often than not, the system’s trust lies in the metaphor Albeit addressed to different interpretative communities, the idea of risk both in literary and in economic speech connotes symbolisation Strikingly, as far as the understanding of risk is concerned, the economy and literature share a foundation They do so because both deal with risk as representation and as conceptual tool The literary adds to these usages of risk two more strategic actions, namely the understanding of literature as a risky undertaking in our cataclysmic world and finally a consideration of literature’s institutional role as an aesthetic risk manager in a hazardous modernity The literary, as the following discussion of John Dos Passos and Fernando Pessoa will suggest, has then built on the energies of the discursive patterns of risk arising out of economic thinking whilst constructing a counter-narrative to the classical, almost destiny-driven theory of the inevitable economic cycles of boom and bust In economics, risk management is permeated, on the one hand, by an overwhelming desire to overcome the innate hazard determined by nature or economic and social threats and to bet against them in order to achieve high returns, and, on the other hand, by a strange level of risk aversion The paradox that pervades both society and its by-product, the economy, is that, as economists Samuelson and Nordhaus argue in their economic risk theory: “People are generally risk-adverse, preferring a sure thing to uncertain levels of consumption: people prefer outcomes with less uncertainty and the same average values For this reason, activities that reduce the uncertainties of consumption lead to improvements in economic welfare ” 7 What economics tries to discern, then, is how to live with uncertainty and is doing enough to prevent a hazard from occurring Even after a hazard has occurred, one is still left with the question of how much more action would have been necessary to have prevented it, and whether such action would have been within the bounds of ‘reasonable’ behaviour ” Ravetz, “Public Perceptions of Acceptable Risks as Evidence for their Cognitive, Technical and Social Structure,” Technological Risk: Its Perception and Handling in the European Community, eds Meinholf Dierkes/ Sam F Edwards/ Rob Coppock (Cambridge, MA: Oelgeschlager, Gunn Hain, 1980), 47 7 Paul Samuelson/ William D Nordhaus, Economics (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2010), 215 170 i sabel c apeloa g il 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 profit in risky markets without giving up security and stability. The challenge is to decide what is an acceptable risk in a world that has been consistently constructed as perilous Addressing a different constituency, the question for literature is how to create narratives that will manage the sense of uncertainty and allow the subject to be productive in a framework endangered by the threat of probability going wrong The challenge for literature thus becomes turning risk into art and art into a stimulant for the task of living Two striking texts about the uncontrollable odds of a daunting bear market and the risky psychology of modern money culture are Fernando Pessoa’s conte philosophique The Anarchist Banker (1922) and John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, most particularly The Big Money (1936) In the heyday of high capitalism, modernist prose became particularly relevant not only in drawing attention to the paradoxes of society and the aporias of the financial world, but also as a means of communicating and articulating the somewhat impenetrable risk-driven market-relations By means of what Jerome Bruner calls ‘hermeneutic composability,’ 8 modernist prose gives meaning to otherwise thick social dynamics, and helps to select and manage the shared values supporting the spreading of risk in the modern world Moreover, as Pessoa’s dialectical satire 9 remarkably shows, literature has the ability to denaturalise risk and reflect upon its contingent discursive practices. Hence, literature poses another kind of risk management, one that does not depend on the high price of risk to sell, but rather one that instructs the reader in the caveats of the risk doctrine 3 Acceptable Risks: Pessoa and Dos Passos on Money and Culture In a modern world increasingly pervaded by economic narratives, literature has engagingly sought to address this particular form of ‘telling’ and the challenge it poses to the general organisation of culture and society The discourse of risk is just another instance of what Doreen Massey and the signatories of the Kilburn Manifesto (2012) describe as the colonisation of the imagination by fiduciary rhetoric. 10 And yet, there is a counter-narrative to this ‘coloni- 8 Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991), 7 9 This is how the poet described this story in a letter to fellow artist José Pacheco Fernando Pessoa, Prosa publicada em vida, ed Richard Zenith (Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 2006), 469 10 The Kilburn Manifesto was launched by Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey, and Michael Rustin in 2013, denouncing neoliberal advances in all sectors of society Special attention was taken to address its effects on the structure of the imagination in the first instalment of the project, titled ‘The Vocabularies of the Economy ’ Hall/ Massey/ Rustin, The Risky NPV of Literature in Dos Passos and Pessoa 171 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 sation’ that goes precisely against the grain by the literary forms of paying attention Literature’s very own mode of worldmaking inevitably forces it to take risks This is based on the writer’s ability to choose between versions of the world in a selection that, as Nelson Goodman compellingly argues, is never casual or random 11 Art, albeit creating a world with rules of its own, also takes the risk of choosing a path that enables creativity within a specific ‘sociological contingency,’ which is forever at risk Due to its creative non-conformity or social-political critique, literature more often than not runs risks In fact, running risks suggests the engagement with hazard cannot be controlled by the subject, but s/ he will nonetheless try to outwit chance Taking a risk instead implies trying something despite bad fortune being likely Arguably, just as the uncertain world we live in requires the institution of literature to ‘run risks’ in its critical engagement, on a micro-scale literature has also compellingly represented the trials faced by modern societies and the dire modes in which individuals ‘take risks ’ Faced with both the tyranny and the opportunity of rational choice, the modern individual is doomed to take risks in capitalist societies Witnessing the heyday of high capitalism in the first half of the twentieth century, modernist writers diagnosed the symbolical contamination of cultural practices by the discourse of money By making use of literature’s ‘economy of abundance,’ 12 that is, the immense power of words to produce meaning, modernist prose fiction sought to manage the failed promises of capitalism. This is precisely what the following discussion shall seek to engage with, by looking at Pessoa and Dos Passos, two instances of economic risk narratives in modern prose fiction, as modes of literary risk-management. In differing forms, they look at risk as a strategic metaphorical device underpinning the work of capitalism The risk narrative is deployed in the literary space through sub-plots organised around capitalism’s logic of opportunity, the disgrace of failure, and the hollow rhetoric of freedom The novels also work as counternarratives to this appropriation of the imagination by the fiduciary narrative, hence presenting the literary as a stimulant for critical reasoning about the modern money economy “On Vocabularies of Neoliberal Economy: The Kilburn Manifesto,” openDemocracy, 16 July 2013, https: / / www opendemocracy net/ en/ opendemocracyuk/ on-vocabularies-of-neoliberal-economy-kilburn-manifesto/ 11 Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978), 10 12 I borrow the concept from Lewis Mumford, who referred to the ‘linguistic economy of abundance’ to address language’s symbolical productivity The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (New York: Mariner Books, 1967), 94 172 i sabel c apeloa g il 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 Let us begin with Pessoa In a letter to his friend Jo-o Gaspar Simões, Fernando Pessoa confessed that only “[…] shortage of money […] and thunder storm [were] capable of depressing [him] ” 13 A professional accountant, the prolific Pessoa was plagued by money shortages, but this did not lead him into writing harsh diatribes about capitalist culture Due to professional expertise, he was well read in the complexity of economics, and in 1926 published four short essays dedicated to commercial life in which he put across his economic liberal views and expressed a critique of the doctrines of both trust-based capitalism and socialism 14 A few years earlier, in 1922, he had written a rather obscure dialogue strongly attacking the unwarranted rationality of accumulative capitalism In the guise of the conte philosophique, The Anarchist Banker is a dialogue between a banker and his guest in the frame of an after-dinner philosophical conversation This dialectical satire is constructed against the grain of the socratic dialogue model, leading not to any enlightenment for the disciple, i e the guest, or even the reader, the ultimate addressee of the story, but rather presenting the ‘logical contradiction’ 15 of the money system The banker, who declares himself a true anarchist, instructs the disciple/ narrator in the “psychological way to anarchism ” 16 Described as a great merchant and notorious hoarder (50), the banker explains that his route to anarchism grew out of dissatisfaction with social conditions and the limits they imposed on human existence He had been drawn to anarchism because it sought to provide leverage to birth inequalities and destroy ‘social fictions,’ ultimately leading to the conquest of freedom by the disenfranchised individual The banker’s social fictions are discursive practices that imprison individuals and lead them to believe in the naturalisation of such discourses However, he soon realises that, despite its good intentions, what anarchy actually managed 13 Fernando Pessoa, Cartas de Fernando Pessoa a Jo-o Gaspar Simões (1932; Lisbon: Europa-América, 1957), 99, my translation 14 The four essays entitled “A Essência do Comércio” (“The Essence of Commerce”), “As Algemas” (“The Shackles”), “Régie, monopólio, liberdade” (“Régie, monopoly, liberty”), and “A evoluç-o do comércio” (“The Evolution of Commerce”) were published in the Revista de Comércio e Contabilidade (Journal of Commerce and Accounting), in 1926 Pessoa was the editor and co-founder of the journal with his brother in law 15 Ellen Sapega, “A Logical Contradiction and Contradictory Logic: Fernando Pessoa’s O Banqueiro Anarquista,” Luso-Brazilian Review 26 (1989), 111 16 Pessoa, The Anarchist Banker [O banqueiro anarquista] Subsequent quotations from The Anarchist Banker are referenced in parentheses in the text See on Pessoa’s engagement with anarchist theory, particularly with Max Stirner and Paul Eltzbacher, Burghard Balrusch, “O banqueiro anarquista e a construç-o heteronímica de Fernando Pessoa,” Lusorama 81-82 (2010), 39-65 On the critique of socialism via Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism see Suzete Macedo, “Fernando Pessoa’s The Anarquist Banker and The Soul of Man under Socialism,” Portuguese Studies 7 (1991), 106-132 The Risky NPV of Literature in Dos Passos and Pessoa 173 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 to do was replace one social fiction, bourgeois capitalism, with another, and hence one form of domination for another This leads him to question the doctrine’s collective mode of action and to engage in a self-critical reflection on the best way to implement true anarchism and attain freedom In a skilful logical exercise, the story constructs a rational argument that ends by legitimating the banker’s status quo To achieve this, Pessoa deploys the tools of modern critical discourse arguing against the political conquests of modernity - the natural equality of citizens and their equality before the law, the promise of individual freedom and happiness, social contractualism, and Lockean liberalism The argument’s structure confronts the pitfalls of modernity’s pledge of empowerment and freedom with the argumentative skill of philosophical reasoning It thus becomes a sort of tale of modernity against the grain, one that uses the rhetoric of modern philosophical discourse to subvert its promises In a certain way, the story makes a rational argument against the logos, to reveal irrational manic hoarding at the heart of the enlightened modern money culture Quite symptomatically, the banker strikes the reader as a precocious post-modern philosopher revealing the modern master narratives, from liberalism to socialism and communism, as fictions. This is no unique phenomenon in Pessoa’s work, as The Book of Disquiet [Livro do Desassossego], by his heteronym Bernardo Soares, already includes traces of modern self-criticism blended with a deep awareness of the social-political systems as discursive practices imposed upon docile agents 17 As Pessoa criticism has demonstrated at length, Pessoa’s oeuvre 18 cannot be subsumed under strict typologies If anything, contradiction is the most stable trait marking the fictional interaction between the production of Pessoa himself and his many heteronyms, particularly the fabulous three, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis Nevertheless, within the complex web of Pessoan poetics, mutual illuminations 19 among its many strands and disparate world pictures help to provide a structural cogency The contradictory logic of the banker not only displays a certain anticipation of post-modern questioning of the self-critical 17 The Book of Disquiet [O Livre do Desassossego] was published post-mortem in 1982 and is dated back to two production periods ranging from 1913-1920 and 1929-35 18 If anything, the term is ironic, as Fernando Pessoa’s work cannot be addressed as an organic whole, but rather as a fragmentary totality in dialogue with itself 19 See, as representative examples of the immense approaches to the many strands of Pessoa readings, Jorge de Sena, Fernando Pessoa e Cª Heterónima (Lisbon: Edições 70, 1982), 10; Eduardo Lourenço, O lugar do anjo: Ensaios pessoanos (Lisbon: Gradiva, 2004), 55ff 174 i sabel c apeloa g il 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 logic of modernity, but it is also a symptom of the creative uncertainty that marks the writer’s works 20 The short story sets out to develop a logical argument proving that the path to dominating, not destroying, social fictions is individual, because although human beings are constrained by the social relations they enter into, they are in effect born different and unequal Natural qualities then provide for the development of different skills that will make all individuals naturally different and hence socially diverse In a social Darwinist fashion, the banker argues that the state of inequality will condemn all collective attempts to alter it, because a group of naturally diverse individuals will never be able to destroy the social fictions as such. Henceforth, anarchism as a collective doctrine is doomed, as the anarchist wishes to foster freedom for him/ herself and for all others (59), but resorts to collective means that will nonetheless lead to yet another form of tyranny 21 While the first law the banker arrives at is the natural inequality amongst citizens, the second follows from the realisation that since anarchism is unrealisable, only bourgeois society is just and fair (57) With his tentative Cartesian method, the banker reduces all systems to the common denominator of fictions so as to simply conclude that none is natural per se but becomes natural by habit. Because bourgeois capitalism is the social fiction the banker was born into, it seems to be the most natural of all Nonetheless, as an anarchist, he knows that it is a fiction that promotes social inequality and oppression The way ahead may be tricky, but since all collective actions to destroy it are doomed by the natural inequality amongst individuals, he knows the only path to freedom is personal Yet, as an individual, he cannot destroy the fiction, but solely aim to control it. Therefore, in order to be free, the banker must subjugate the fiction of capitalism, which is based on the accumulation of money, “the most important social fiction ever.” (72) The result is that, to achieve personal freedom, the anarchist must turn into a (neo) liberal and act accordingly, promoting self-interest and doing away with moral concerns and 20 The piece has been discussed as a satirical exercise of modern discursive practice (Sapega, “Logical Contradiction,” 110); within the framework of Pessoa’s work and its negotiations with heteronimity (Lourenço, Lugar, 10; Balrusch, “O banqueiro,” 39); and from a social-political standpoint and as an exercise in neoliberal economics (Macedo, “Fernando,” 130; David K Jackson: “The Adventure of the Anarchist Banker: Reductio ad absurdum of a Neo-liberal,” Portuguese Studies 22 2 1 [2006], 209-218) 21 According to Pessoa, the same argument can be made for socialism and its aim to impose a dictatorship of the proletariat that, by relying on revolution, will impose a permanent state of war (Anarchist Banker, 56) The Risky NPV of Literature in Dos Passos and Pessoa 175 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 solidarity 22 By reducing self-interest to personal egotism, the anarchist understands he may only control the fiction of money by being free of its influence, which means he will need to acquire just as much money as he possibly can “By acquiring money, one is freed of its influence” (73), i.e. of its domineering fictionality. Thus, only the hoarder may become the true anarchist. In the process of anarchic hoarding that underlies accumulative capitalism, the banker manages to reduce risk to a minimum, increasing wealth at the expense of oppressing the workers At this stage, it proves useful to look at the fictional relationship the short story establishes with the commercial pieces Pessoa wrote, despite the fact that these essays for the Revista do Comércio are certainly far in aim and rhetoric from the fictional contradiction of The Anarchist Banker However, they may provide some insights into a suggestive reading of the role risk plays in this self-questioning labyrinth In the articles for this professional journal, Pessoa comes across as a liberal in defence of a free and self-regulating market, advocating limits to government As he claims in “Shackles,” this derives from the fact that a society of equals cannot be self-regulated 23 Equality is here understood as similarity of interest The State is not placed above us, but rather amongst us so that it is moved by self-interest just as the merchant is moved by his interest to sell Because the State’s self-interest will inevitably compete with the individual’s, the former is incompetent at regulating the social egotism of citizens in money economies This leads the State into a conundrum, for whilst government regulation is a form of decay arising from a monopoly over economic life, utter deregulation may also bring about syndication, that is, control of social life by major 22 The banker’s ethics of self-interest clash with the emancipation narratives of modernity Because he abolishes the social contract as a model of class dialogue, he can only conceive of an interaction based on the control of one social fiction by another. It is thus that the social is always and already conceived as a state of war amongst fictions. It is nonetheless striking that the unwarranted promotion of self-interest that some have understood as neoliberal ethics (Jackson, “Adventures,” 210), does actually address some of the concerns of the Austrian school of neoclassical economics and the belief in an utterly self-regulated market where only the best suppliers thrive The banker strikes against Kant’s second critique by arguing that even if the idea of morality and justice is natural and inbred, self-interest will naturally clash with solidarity for the other Clearly, “[…] a ideia de dever só poderia considerar-se natural se trouxesse consigo uma compensaç-o egoísta.[…] sacrificar um prazer, simplesmente sacrificá-lo n-o é natural; sacrificar um prazer a outro, é que já está dentro da Natureza.” (“[…] the idea of duty can only be considered natural if it brings along some sort of personal compensation. […] To sacrifice a pleasure is simply unnatural; to sacrifice a pleasure to the attainment of another, that lies within nature’s purposes ”) (61) The banker does away with any attempt at promoting the categorical imperative as no personal moral rule may be treated as universal for any purpose whatsoever 23 Pessoa, “Shackles,” 429 176 i sabel c apeloa g il 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 monopoly trusts 24 In Friedrich Hayek’s fashion, it seems that for Pessoa, the accountant, only individual difference and cautious self-rule may contribute to the market’s utopian self-regulation Because he brands markets, though fickle and feeble, as ultimately psychological phenomena 25 that may be controlled by the rational assessment of the merchant, Pessoa himself, the accountant, concedes that the uncertainty of markets is regulated by the movement of the market itself and that the biggest risk comes from the destabilising of this ‘natural order’ by unwarranted state intervention. This is however not the road Pessoa the fictionist takes. Within the deregulated world of the anarchist hoarder, the only apparent risk is the wrongful use of one’s natural abilities to promote the submission of the individual to social fictions (67). Once the fiction of money is tamed by personal wealth accumulation, the uncertainty that arises from the lack of liberty and the tyranny of social fictions is curbed. The irrational, continuous volition for money George Simmel refers to 26 becomes for the banker the logical argument for the managing of social risk The dialectical satire proves the rational argument utterly irrational, a structured form of the obsessive fictionalising of the discursive practice of hoarding The contradictory logic becomes a logical fiction that whilst revealing the logical banker as the ultimate fictionist of the money narrative, discloses fiction as the last stand of modernity’s self-critique. Because fiction is the place where the contradictory master narratives of modernity are confronted and their risky rationality questioned, the satirical argument ultimately discloses the banker’s certainty as yet another mask of modernity Emplotting the logic of contradiction is arguably a good description for Dos Passos’ discussion of American capitalism Following The 42nd Parallel (1930) and 1919 (1932), The Big Money (1936) is the third part of John dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy reflecting on the discursive management of the promises of success dealt out by American democracy and its counterpart American capitalism The fragmented nature of Dos Passos’ novel embodies the modern sense of sensorial override marking the experience of modernity 27 The novel 24 Ibid , 447 25 Ibid , 429 26 Georg Simmel, “Zur Psychologie des Geldes,” Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft 13 (1889), 320 27 The trilogy presents four different modes of narration: a third-person narrator that tracks the lives of the contenders, usually told in free indirect speech; the Camera Eye, snapshots of modern urban experience that provide a kind of moral undertone to the promises of modern America; Newsreel, a collage of contemporary front page headlines, which in The Big Money come from The New York World, a local popular paper, or even fragments of popular songs and shows Finally, there are biographical depic- The Risky NPV of Literature in Dos Passos and Pessoa 177 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 brings to a close the life story of several characters, whose development had been followed since 42nd Street, weighing their odds and opportunities, their potential for success and their failures. Unlike Pessoa’s short story, which provides a satirical guideline on how to tame risk and control money, Dos Passos presents the embedding of spectacular promise and disappointment, of euphoric success and crushed disgrace that is at the heart of the modern narrative of America In a sense, The Big Money scans risk and uses fragmented focalisation and different text types to denaturalise the dream of capitalist discourse, or rather to de-essentialise the fiction. Focusing on the post-war years and the Golden Age of high capitalism before the market crash of 1929, the novel ‘tells’ of the birth and the rise of risk society In this world where, as Niklas Luhmann argues, there are no heroes and no absolute rulers, but where for better or worse everyone is a player, money is the sole master narrative 28 Charley Anderson, the decorated war hero who returns to New York after having overcome the trials of combat in the French trenches, epitomises the pitfalls of chance Having invested his family money in the emerging aeronautics business, he rides the rollercoaster once the company’s stock is put on the market and bucks or dips with the interest of investors, gaining and losing fortunes The social recognition a wealthy marriage wins him is soon endangered by lack of self-rule Alcohol and sex combined with ill-conceived market betting become the fast lane to death on Florida’s roads The killings in the stockmarket 29 eerily disclose a hidden victim at the other end of the rainbow Considered by Lionel Trilling as an apology for the moral integrity of America in his discussion of the novel for the Partisan Review in 1938, 30 The Big Money is a keen instance of literature’s negotiation of the narrative of capitalism and the danger it injects into the moral core of the nation The promise of American democracy that “pushes its best forward” (1019) becomes the bottom line of a discourse of economic growth Henry Ford, one of the characters hailed in the novel’s short biographies as the hallmark of American capitalism, summed it up with the industrial factory production of the Tin Lizzie The key to success is “[…] economical quantity production, quick tions of some of America’s modern heroes and villains, from Henry Ford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Isadora Duncan to Thorstein Veblen or the Wright Brothers John Dos Passos, U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel/ 1919/ The Big Money (New York: The Library of America, 1996) 28 Niklas Luhmann, Soziologie des Risikos (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), 141 29 John Dos Passos, U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel/ 1919/ The Big Money (New York: The Library of America, 1996), 988, 1042, 1224 Subsequently, quotations from The Big Money are referenced in parentheses in the text 30 Lionel Trilling, “The America of John dos Passos,” John dos Passos: The Critical Heritage, ed Barry Maine (1938; London: Routledge, 1988), 159 178 i sabel c apeloa g il 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 turnover, cheap interchangeable easily replaced standardized parts ” (808) Automotive production provides the blueprint for a model of economic development that draws on quick, standardised assembly, and builds on a social model where a few decide and many execute As it turned out, “there were strings to it ” (809) On the downside stood not only bad investors, like Charley Anderson, but also the impoverished working class, defiled and abused by both capital and political interests, from the U S Congress to the persecuted socialist groups, depicted in the story of social worker Mary French In a certain way, both Charley Anderson’s desire for big money and Mary French’s hopes of an equitable society are crushed by the radical inhumanity of America’s risky Gilded Age The stock market’s promise of large returns on high risk and the drive for productivity are finally symbolised by the third route on the roadmap of American happiness: show business In the end, it is Margo Dowling, emerging actress and show girl, who epitomises the road to success on Broadway and in the movies and ultimately becomes the only successful character in the novel 31 Before the market crash and the aporias of oppressive labour, it is, after all, on the screen that the hollow promise of America’s capitalist democracy continues to hold, as a ghostly presence in Hollywood’s dreamy landscape As argued in The Anarchist Banker, Dos Passos also conveys a world where money is society’s strongest social fiction. However, unlike the banker who engages in hoarding procedures as the individual way to subdue the fiction that will, in the end, totally immerse him (Anarchist Banker 55), the urban characters in the Dos Passos’ novel struggle throughout to tame the money plot, as an object with both material and symbolic appeal Money becomes a telos and a quagmire It is both a promise of hope and a high road to hell, it is a fiction of happiness, and its lack a gruesome sign of despair. Embedded in the deep tissue of the narrative of America, money is precisely the tall tale the U.S.A. trilogy clearly aims to denaturalise; money is not actually tantamount to American success, most particularly after the First World War In fact, this is not simply a critique of money, it is a statement of the hollowness of Deweyan ‘moral democracy ’ The target of moral recovery brings the Dos Passos project very close to the ideas of another icon of socialism in America, Thorstein Veblen, also depicted in The Big Money. The contrasts between the clashing social worlds of corporate America and labour, which the novel carefully constructs, acquire a certain programmatic outlook in the biographical presentation of Veblen’s proposal of a new social diagram in The Theory of 31 See on the relation of spectacle and money culture in Hollywood film Elisabeth Bronfen, “The Violence of Money,” Revista de Comunicaç-o e Cultura 6 (2008), 53-66 The Risky NPV of Literature in Dos Passos and Pessoa 179 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 the Leisure Class (1899) However, Dos Passos depicts the two social models Veblen envisages, those of the warlike society vs the common-sense society, as limited The novel does, in fact, move closer to the realism of the warlike society, where social Darwinism rules Whether in the wake of the Spanish American War, for Veblen, or in the aftermath of WWI, for the Dos Passos characters, these offer a powerful diagnosis of how the social continues to be guerroyant beyond the politically defined violence of war. This is contrasted with the social utopia of a ‘matter of fact, common sense society’ (Big Money 852) where private skills are developed to the best of one’s abilities, though crushed in the raw diagnosis of socialist America and in the utopian selflessness of the social worker, Mary French Veblen, in fact, like other Dos Passos’ biographies of the American tale, from captains of industry to genial inventors, such as the Wright Brothers, or artistic characters, such as Isadora Duncan, joins the ranks of those who are ultimately normalised by the society they aim to renew. In other words, he is crushed by the social fiction he aims to deconstruct These true players of American culture end up unable to overcome the risks dealt to them by society I contend that Dos Passos paints a remarkable picture of the risk society Losers are guilty of unreasonable wager and winners attain their profits by skilfully handling hazard and distributing risks amongst the less knowledgeable, who find themselves on the short end of the stick. Risk is not simply a hazard that will undoubtedly bring about doom for the gamer, but within the novel’s economy may be considered from a threefold perspective: first as an opportunity; secondly as an uncontrollable hazard, and thirdly as a spectacular practice Risk is presented as an opportunity for those on the winning end, or at least while they are on the winning end As another Dos Passos character in Manhattan Transfer, muckraker journalist Jimmy Herf, claims, New York and America are mesmerised by the fiction of a “land of opportoonity,” 32 where nothing succeeds like success Should money be the founding American fiction, opportunity and risk are its guiding doctrines. The novel follows the pull towards investment spreading into speculation and wagering on the odds prevailing in the stock market, completely oblivious to the real conditions of the labour market or the economy in general Charley Anderson, Dick Savage, and the host of lawyers and bankers who follow big capital are well trained in the task of risk assessment (Big Money 1133-34) and in the need for ‘moulding the public mind’ (1199) to ‘take risks ’ The road to the crash of 1929 is paved precisely with the encouragement to take risk and overcome the aversion to hazard, as expressed in the headlines of Newsreel 32 John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 242 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 180 i sabel c apeloa g il LX: “Speculative sentiment was encouraged at the opening of the week by the clearer outlook Favourable weather was doing much to eliminate the signs of hesitation lately evinced by several traders ” (1041) The irrationality of the market and its psychological fickleness comes clearly across. Yet, although the coming crash upsets exchange for a while, the risk doctrine is presented as a resilient fiction, clearly betting on the cyclical waves of boom and bust that Joseph Schumpeter named capitalism’s ‘gales of creative destruction ’ The mimetic nature of the crisis recalls that market failure will be followed by big killings on the stock market, 33 as moral hazard and adverse selection are the necessary downsides of the successful risk incurred by others Precisely on the downside of the investment merry-go-round are those, such as Mary French, who perceive risk as an unwarranted danger, uncontrollable for those affected by the irrational speculative sentiment of investors, like Charley Anderson: “I got a kind of feel for the big money […] Nat Bentley says I got it … I know I got it I can travel on a hunch, see ” (1069) The contrast between the sentiments of the worker and the investor reflects the growing gap between those for whom money has a material-substantial meaning and those perceiving money as a self-referential ghost-like value For the workers, survival is continuously at jeopardy and they are forced to take risks while fully aware that the certainty of failure overpowers the feeble odds of success Arguably then, what mediates between the two disparate concepts is the co-opting of the risk doctrine by the spectacular culture of American showbiz The Big Money thus works the negotiation between the promise of democracy and capitalism that brands the fabric of America with the growing industry of film and showbiz. Finally, the actress Margo Dowling is the only character on the rise in the novel and the one who manages to overcome the hazard of disadvantaged social conditions and glow in the limelight of Hollywood It has been argued by Stanley Cavell, amongst others, that Hollywood helped to foster a place where the contradictions of the social are convincingly sewn together 34 Whilst theatre had been a continuous source for the renegotiation of the disparaged social pact and had helped bring together a split country in postbellum America, 35 the novelty of film was that it rapidly became a very popular medium, giving way to a sharp increase in the number of movie 33 “Wall Street stunned This is not Thirty-Eight but it’s old Ninety-Seven” (Big Money, 1205) This headline from Newsreel LXVIII brings the 1929 crash in line with the Big Fear of 1838 and the speculative crash of 1897, two economic crises from which the market resourcefully recovered 34 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979), 25 35 Rosemary K Bank, Theatre Culture in America, 1825-1860 (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), 225 181 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 The Risky NPV of Literature in Dos Passos and Pessoa theatres and appealing to a very wide audience This convincingly fostered a national community of feeling, whilst giving vent to the contradictions of the system Films such as Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) reflected the pitfalls of the money economy and reflected on money as symbol and fiction, 36 as promise and quagmire, but at the end of the day resolved the conflict by means of a spectacular on-screen happy ending. Dos Passos’ U.S.A., just as Manhattan Transfer, is strongly indebted not only to film montage but also to film culture, as a means of coming to terms with the very discourse of America Whilst the novel’s fragmented montage discloses the disjointed nature of the social, conveying the structural work of film as foundational for the cultural and literary work of modernity, on a representational level, showbiz acts as a self-reflexive trope of the paradoxes of modern American money culture For not only does it denounce the spectacular dissolution of moral democracy into the phantasm of film and theatre, but it also draws attention to the individual failure to uphold rational choice As a popular song in Newsreel L claims: “Don’t blame it all on Broadway […] You have yourself to blame/ Don’t shame the name of dear old Broadway ” (844) The Big Money drifts as a phantasm in the minds of the unlikely contenders, but the novel’s appeal is for the individual to act responsibly and use choice as the final resort of humanity in the last ditch competitive nexus of capitalist culture. On Broadway, the risk doctrine is finally presented as a spectacular hoax that supports the structural work of entertainment, but which also provides the self-critical means to diagnose the unreasonable hazards dealt out by social life From a representational and conceptual perspective, the two prose works disclose risk as a major narrative of modernity The uncertainty dealt by money culture becomes both a stimulant and a limit that dares individuals to run risks in order to succeed Either in the subversive logical operations of the conte philosophique, or in the presentation of the fragmentary lives of urban America, these pieces of modernist prose challenge the phantasm of wholeness and homogeneity suggested by social fictions. Within this framework, risk is a foundational trait supporting the instability of the money narrative, a leap of faith that promises opportunity and deems failure an acceptable hazard for the success of others Nevertheless, I suggest that this structural narrative of modernity does not simply serve a subversive logic As a conceptual metaphor of modernity’s ambivalence, the risk doctrine prepares the ground for individual resil- 36 The routine ‘We’re in the money,’ led by Ginger Rodgers, provides a mise en abyme for economic discourse in the film. ience, diagnosing hazard and instructing the reader about the pitfalls of moral choice before the perils dealt by the social fictions we inhabit. And literature is ultimately revealed as the platform managing the inand outflows of cultural and fiduciary capital. Works Cited Balrusch, Burghard “O banqueiro anarquista e a construç-o heteronímica de Fernando Pessoa ” Lusorama 81-82 (2010), 39-65 Bank, Rosemary K Theatre Culture in America, 1825-1860 Cambridge: CUP, 1997 Barthes, Roland S/ Z: An Essay. Trans Richard Miller New York: Hill and Wang, 1985 Beck, Ulrich Risikogesellschaft Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986 Bouss, Wolfgang Vom Risiko: Unsicherheit und Ungewissheit in der Moderne Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995 Bronfen, Elisabeth “The Violence of Money ” Revista de Comunicaç-o e Cultura 6 (2008), 53-66 Bruner, Jerome “The Narrative Construction of Reality ” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991), 1-21 Cavell, Stanley The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979 Dos Passos, John Manhattan Transfer. (1925) Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986 --- U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel/ 1919 / The Big Money (1930-1936) New York: The Library of America, 1996 Fish, Stanley Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretative Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982 Galbraith, John Kenneth A History of Economics: The Past as Present Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987 Gil, Isabel Capeloa/ Helena Silva, eds The Cultural Life of Money Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2014 Goodman, Nelson Ways of Worldmaking Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978 Hook, Andrew, ed Dos Passos: A Collection of Critical Essays Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1976 Jackson, David K “The Adventure of the Anarchist Banker: Reductio ad absurdum of a Neo-liberal ” Portuguese Studies 22 2 1 (2006), 209-218 Hall, Stuart/ Doreen Massey/ Michael Ruskin “On Vocabularies of Neoliberal Economy: The Kilburn Manifesto ” openDemocracy, 16 July 2013, https: / / www opendemocracy net/ en/ opendemocracyuk/ on-vocabularies-of-neoliberal-economy-kilburn-manifesto/ Accessed 22 June 2020 Klein, Naomi The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism New York: Picador, 2007 Lourenço, Eduardo O lugar do anjo: Ensaios pessoanos Lisbon: Gradiva, 2004 Luhmann, Niklas Soziologie des Risikos Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988 Macedo, Suzete “Fernando Pessoa’s The Anarquist Banker and The Soul of Man under Socialism ” Portuguese Studies 7 (1991), 106-132 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 182 i sabel c apeloa g il 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0008 Mumford, Lewis The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development New York: Mariner Books, 1967 Pessoa, Fernando Cartas de Fernando Pessoa a Jo-o Gaspar Simões (1932) Lisbon: Europa-América, 1957 --- Prosa publicada em vida. Ed Richard Zenith Lisbon: Assírio e Alvim, 2006 Ravetz, Jerome R “Public Perceptions of Acceptable Risks as Evidence for their Cognitive, Technical and Social Structure ” Technological Risk: Its Perception and Handling in the European Community Eds Meinholf Dierkes/ Sam F Edwards/ Rob Coppock Cambridge, MA: Oelgeschlager, Gunn Hain, 1980, 40-58 Rescher, Nicholas Risk: A Philosophical Introduction to the Theory of Risk Evolution and Management Washington D C : UP of America, 1983 Samuelson, Paul/ William D Nordhaus Economics Boston: McGraw Hill, 2010 Sapega, Ellen “A Logical Contradiction and Contradictory Logic: Fernando Pessoa’s O Banqueiro Anarquista ” Luso-Brazilian Review 26 (1989), 111-117 Schumpeter, Joseph Alois “Depressions ” The Economics of the Recovery Program New York: Whittlesey House/ MacGraw Hill, 1934, 27-49 Sena, Jorge de Fernando Pessoa e Cª Heterónima Lisbon: Edições 70, 1982 Shell, Marc Money, Language and Thought Baltimore/ London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993 Simmel, Georg “Zur Psychologie des Geldes ” Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft 13 (1889), 319-324 ---. Philosophie des Geldes Cologne: Anaconda, 2009 Trilling, Lionel “The America of John dos Passos ” (1938) John dos Passos: The Critical Heritage Ed Barry Maine London: Routledge, 1988, 157-163 183 The Risky NPV of Literature in Dos Passos and Pessoa 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 e lizabeth K oVach Collapsing the Economic and Creative Values of Contemporary Literature in Sheila Heti’s Motherhood and Ben Lerner’s 10: 04 1 Introduction: A Literary Sub-Genre about Two Types of Value In the Oxford English Dictionary, various definitions of ‘value, n.’ are relegated to two main categories: “I Worth or quality as measured by a standard of equivalence,” under which the first definition listed is “The material or monetary worth of something; the amount at which something may be estimated in terms of a medium of exchange, as money or goods, or some other similar standard” 1 and “II Worth based on esteem; quality viewed in terms of importance, usefulness, desirability, etc.,” under which the first definition listed is “The relative worth, usefulness, or importance of a thing or (occasionally) a person; the estimation in which a thing is held according to its real or supposed desirability or utility ” 2 ‘Value’ thus most generally pertains either to worth in a monetary, economic, market-determined sense or to worth in a non-monetary - cultural, ideational, ideological, political, societal, or personal - sense This volume is clearly focused on the latter category, as its impetus is to explore why literature and literary studies are worth bothering with and valuing, particularly in light of urgent 21st-century concerns such as climate change, surges in right-wing nationalism, on-going forced migration, and others raised by the volume’s editors and contributors This article, however, addresses both categories of value in its discussion of contemporary ‘novels of commission,’ which reflect upon the institutional and economic structures underlying literature’s production along with the creative value of literature Such novels force a consideration of the value of literature as something that is at once economic and creative, because they explicitly draw attention to situations in which these two kinds of value vitally inform one another The term ‘novels of commission’ was coined by literary scholars Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan to denote novels that “consider the institution’s presence in the writing process […] to reimagine rather than evade their institutional bonds Novels of commission do not at- 1 “value, n ” Oxford English Dictionary, 17 December 2019 2 Ibid 186 e lizabeth K oVach 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 tempt to transgress institutionalized novelistic conventions or win freedom from the institutions of which they are a part ” 3 Buurma and Heffernan draw upon two examples of contemporary literature, the semi-autobiographical novels How Should a Person Be? (2010) by Sheila Heti and Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) by Ben Lerner Heti’s novel chronicles the struggle of the writer Sheila Heti to complete a commissioned play for a feminist theatre It is about the various ways in which she evades writing (spending time with friends, in relationships, going to parties, etc ) due to an agonising case of writer’s block Lerner’s novel follows a similar premise: it details everything the protagonist, Adam Gordon, thinks and does during his stay in Madrid besides pursue the Fulbright-funded poetry project that brought him there As Buurma and Heffernan state, these novels are about “[m]oving from the fantasy of writing a canonical work to a realization that the preparation for writing the work in fact slowly and over time constitutes the work ” 4 In other words, these novels are deviations, or side projects, that describe the conditions, emotions, thoughts, and creative processes under which other commissioned works are evaded 5 Instead of being the projects their authors initially intended to complete, these works describe deviations from these projects’ completion Such novels thus collapse the separation between literature’s economic and institutional frameworks, on the one hand, and artistic creation purported to transcend and subvert such frameworks, on the other hand They describe the activities of the commissioned writers themselves instead of presenting works thematically and formally sealed off from the economic and institutional conditions that made them possible In what follows, I will draw connections between Buurma and Heffernan’s observations on contemporary novels of commission, Marxist conceptions of literature’s market and creative value, and sociologist Bernard Lahire’s notion of ‘the double life of writers’ to suggest that, while discourses surrounding the contingency between literature’s economic and creative value is not something new or unique to novels of commission, these novels offer distinctive perspectives and stances from which to 3 Rachel Buurma/ Laura Heffernan, “Notation After the ‘Reality Effect’: Remaking Reference with Roland Barthes and Sheila Heti,” Representations 125 1 (2014), 88 4 Ibid 5 In a New Yorker review of Heti’s newest book Motherhood, Alexandra Schwartz notes that the play Heti struggles to write in How Should a Person Be? did reach completion in real life: “Heti did complete the play that gave her so much trouble Called ‘All Our Happy Days Are Stupid,’ it was produced in Toronto in 2014 and the following year in New York, where I happened to see it It was close to pantomime, heavily stylized and difficult to decipher, a strange antithesis of the almost anarchically naturalistic novel that describes its agonized creation ” See Alexandra Schwartz, “Sheila Heti Wrestles With a Big Decision in ‘Motherhood’,” The New Yorker, 15 November 2019, n p 187 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 Collapsing the Economic and Creative Values of Contemporary Literature consider literature’s value in these dual senses This discussion will reference passages from David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King (2011), which I read as a forerunner to novels of commission in its overt discussion of literature’s economic and creative potentials and motivations I proceed with an analysis of two later novels by Heti and Lerner - namely, Motherhood (2018) and 10: 04 (2014), which can be read as thematic and narrative continuations of How Should a Person Be? and Leaving the Atocha Station, upon which Buurma and Heffernan base their discussion of novels of commission These works complicate Buurma and Heffernan’s definition of novels of commission by adding new facets to and pushing the boundaries of this novelistic sub-genre Nevertheless, these novels continue the theme of being deviations from other projects, and it is precisely through this deviation that the value of literature continues to be this novelistic sub-genre’s most prevalent concern I conclude by situating contemporary novels of commission as products of and critical responses to the so-called ‘rise of the creative class,’ to borrow the title phrase of Richard Florida’s 2002 book, and the 21st-century’s creative economy that has arguably blurred the activities and social positions of workers and artists to a historically unprecedented degree - and made the question of literature’s value so pressing for the contemporary novelists at hand 2 Comparing and Collapsing Literature’s Economic and Creative Values To define more clearly my notions of literature’s economic and creative values, the Marxist concepts of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ offer a productive starting point A basic tenet of Marxist thought is that the economic ‘base’ is a foundation in relation to which a political, juridical, ideological, and cultural ‘superstructure’ takes shape In the oft-cited passage that addresses this dynamic in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx writes that: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life 6 6 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marxists.org, 15 October 2019, n p 188 e lizabeth K oVach 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 According to this account, “definite forms of social consciousness” are not autonomous nor are they arbitrary in their formation and development Rather, they are conditioned by “[t]he mode of production of material life,” which is itself never a static phenomenon but rather an on-going emergence of social relations and economic forces The writing of literature is one type of expression of social consciousness that, in the words of Terry Eagleton in Marxism and Literary Criticism, is not “mysteriously inspired” but rather produced in “relation to the dominant ways of seeing the world which is the ‘social mentality’ or ideology of the age ” 7 Such “ways of seeing” are specific to each historical stage of economic development The material production of life and social consciousness (including literary expression) are thus fundamentally bound to one another in their on-going emergence This is not to say that literary texts can be directly explained by the economic relations of their times. This would be a crude simplification of the way in which Marx had framed the relationship between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure.’ As Eagleton points out, the vectors of influence are by no means unidirectional: “elements of the superstructure constantly react back upon and influence the economic base,” and the relationship between the two is one of “complexity and indirectness ” 8 In Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams dissuades from the very use of the categories of base and superstructure, finding that the tendency to oversimplify the relationship between them is indeed “a radical persistence of the modes of thought which [Marx] attacked ” 9 The assumption that the two fields can be thought about as distinct entities is, according to Williams, a vulgarisation of Marx’s intention Williams thus advocates the idea of ‘overdetermination,’ i e “determination by multiple factors,” to explain cultural and economic phenomena 10 The base and superstructure together form a historically contingent horizon of both limitation and possibility. Rather than functioning as a second-order reflection of an economic ‘foundation,’ artistic expression can generate new accents or shifts within social consciousness that impact economic relations, and vice versa It is also worth pointing to the simple fact that published literary texts are themselves commodities with specific market value. In Theories of Surplus Value (1863), Marx states that “[a] writer […] is a worker not in so far as he produces ideas, but in so far as he enriches the publisher, in so far as he is 7 Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976; New York: Routledge Classics, 2002), 6 8 Ibid , 9 9 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977; Oxford/ New York: OUP, 2009), 78 10 Ibid , 83 189 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 Collapsing the Economic and Creative Values of Contemporary Literature working for a wage ” 11 Literature does not simply reflect or arise out of an economic base, because it exists as a constitutive element of this very base The publishing industry is, to borrow the phrasing of Eagleton, “internal to art itself, shaping its forms from within ” 12 The monetary goals of a given author or publisher are considered to be “internal” to a commissioned work’s creation In light of this framework, the economic value of a given work of literature refers to its monetary worth on the literary market - to its material value from an economic standpoint and as a constituent of the economic base Creative value, on the other hand, pertains to a work of literature’s contribution to the horizon of possibility in imagination, thought, expression, and action From a Marxist standpoint, literary texts do not miraculously spring from a genius author’s mind Rather, emphasis is placed on the intellectual and literary-expressive - i e superstructural - horizon available to an author at a given time and place Daniel Hartley, in The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics (2017), offers the term “configurer” to describe the author, whose “labour is determined and determinate, since it is limited both by the type of social content available and by the sedimented paradigms which the configurer inherits from the tradition ” 13 The author may construct innovative configurations, but she works with a historically determined sphere of “content available” and “sedimented paradigms ” The work of writing is never performed in a void; its potential contribution to thought and expression arises out of a social consciousness that cannot be divorced from the economic forces through and against which it takes shape. Such a notion of the author as configurer implies that literature, in addition to enriching publishers when sold on the market, produces ideational, expressive, and political value This value of writing, which I will refer to as creative value, is artistic, social, and political for its potential to alter expressive possibility and social consciousness From this Marxist perspective, literature’s economic and creative values enfold into one another, just as the base and superstructure comprise a shared horizon of mutual influence. While such notions of value are often applied to the Marxist-critical analysis of literature, these notions need not be ‘applied’ in the case of novels of commission Rather, novels of commission generate and draw attention to these notions themselves by collapsing the fields of economic base and cultural superstructure Buurma and Heffernan argue that novels of commission belong to a lineage of thinking started by Roland Barthes in his lecture series Preparation for the Novel (2010 [1978-1980]) In the 11 Cited in ibid , 56 12 Eagleton, Marxism, 63 13 Daniel Hartley, The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 57 190 e lizabeth K oVach 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 lectures, Barthes claims to be setting out to write a novel, but, as Buurma and Heffernan find, “the ‘Grand Project’ of the seminar” is actually another one - namely, “to become a writer reimagining the university as a part of his writing life rather than a block to it ” 14 Barthes asks: what if, instead of setting institutional demands against a classically pure and apparently uninstitutional writing life, he could “invest the Course and Work in the same (literary) enterprise”? Such a solution, Barthes imagines, would “put a stop to the division of the subject ” He would “no longer have to keep up with all the work to be done (lectures, demands, commissions, constraints)”; instead “each moment of [his] life would henceforth be integrated into the Grand Project ” 15 Barthes explores the possibility of collapsing the divide between a potential “writing life” and his obligations as a university professor While Buurma and Heffernan rightly focus on the institutional nature of the latter role, it is also, of course, a salaried position that enables creative work by producing economic value The notion of erasing boundaries between the two, of relegating both activities - economically/ institutionally and creatively motivated - to a space that is a “Grand Project” is the endeavour that Barthes hypothesises and which, according to Buurma and Heffernan, novels of commission also pursue These novels do not merely conjoin the realms of economic and creative value-production but rather stage a collapsing of their distinctions They go beyond depicting what sociologist Bernard Lahire describes as a “literary game” in an article entitled “The Double Life of Writers” (2010) Lahire argues that Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, which includes a conception of the literary field, fails to account for the experience of a majority of writers, who juggle between at least two, if not multiple, social fields. Out of financial necessity, writers “seldom have both feet in that [the literary] field, but rather keep one foot outside: the money-making foot that allows the other one to ‘dance ’” 16 The “literary game” according to Lahire entails the continuous shuffling between fields whose activities aim at generating either economic or creative value Lahire’s point is that “in seeking to account for the specificity of the workings of the literary universe, the investigator must […] ask what the agents located in the literary universe do and who they are outside literature ” 17 Novels of commission, however, follow Barthes’ goal of seeking 14 Buurma/ Heffernan, “Notation,” 87 15 Cited in ibid , 87 Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the College de France (1978-1979 and 1979-1980) (New York: Columbia UP, 2011), 8 16 Bernard Lahire, “The Double Life of Writers,” New Literary History 42 2 (2010), 448 17 Ibid , 445-446 191 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 Collapsing the Economic and Creative Values of Contemporary Literature a way out of such a game - of narrating a time and space beyond the notions of “inside” and “outside,” or back and forth, between fields of economic and creative value A key aspect of this strategy is the mixture of fictional with autobiographical material, often referred to as an autofictional mode of narration. In his unfinished novel The Pale King (2011), for instance, David Foster Wallace directly thematises the value of writing in both monetary and creative senses by inserting his authorial voice into the narrative The novel depicts the experiences of employees at the Internal Revenue Service in the Regional Examination Center of Peoria, Illinois in the 1980s Wallace’s descriptions of tax agents’ work, interactions, and life stories are based on his own experience as a government-employed bureaucrat: Wallace worked at this very centre from 1985-1986 while on a forced leave from college In chapter 9, Wallace breaks away from the story and begins with the lines, “Author here Meaning the real author, the living human holding the pencil, not some abstract narrative persona ” 18 He goes on to stress that The Pale King “is really true,” 19 a fact that contradicts the publication’s legal disclaimer about the novel being pure fiction. He makes clear that his intention is not to trap the reader between opposing claims of truthfulness and fiction: Please know that I find these sort of cute, self-referential paradoxes irksome, too - at least now that I’m over thirty I do - and that the very last thing this book is is some kind of clever metafictional titty-pincher. That’s why I’m making it a point to violate protocol and address you here directly […] 20 Rather than construct a playful work of metafiction, Wallace intends to capture a “true” and decisive moment in IRS history, during which significant changes were made to the procedures and philosophy of U S taxation He believes that a candid recording of his experience of this historical moment is of “significant social and artistic value. That might sound conceited, but rest assured that I wouldn’t and couldn’t have put three years’ hard labor […] into The Pale King if I were not convinced it was true ” 21 Wallace frames his “hard labor” as an effort to make a “social and artistic” contribution Yet this lofty ambition is tethered to a practical one Wallace hastens to add that his decision to write a “memoir” is also fuelled by monetary considerations: 18 David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (New York/ Boston/ London: Little, Brown and Company, 2011), 66 19 Ibid , 67 20 Ibid 21 Ibid , 82 192 e lizabeth K oVach 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 I, like so many other Americans, have suffered reverses in the volatile economy of the last few years […]; and meanwhile all sorts of US writers […] have made it big with memoirs, 22 and I would be a rank hypocrite if I pretended that I was less attuned and receptive to market forces than anyone else 22 Wallace cites the “market forces” of a post-financial-crisis economy as central in shaping his writing He positions himself as an author motivated by an impulse to create something of non-monetary value who is also at the mercy of economic pressures in postmillennial U S -America His writing is a product of both of these motivations They function in tandem in shaping the novel When Wallace writes that he labours for the sake of achieving something of “social and artistic value” as well as producing value in monetary terms, he draws attention to writing as something that both “produces ideas” and “enriches the publisher ” He labours towards both ends, engaging in a process of economic production while also attempting to contribute to social consciousness He is a worker-writer in Marx’s sense and committed to another kind of work - that of affecting thought and expression through a creative/ configurative act. In bringing these dual senses of his literature’s value to the fore, Wallace announces his breach of the divide between fact and fiction. Yet a clear distinction is maintained between the fields of his real life and the fictionalised account of his time at the IRS. In novels of commission, however, fiction and autobiography are not marked by authorial insertions or footnotes as in Wallace’s work. Rather, distinctions between fields are dissolved to create narratives of indeterminate status with regard to fact and fiction. This dissolution, I contend, works in conjunction with the project of collapsing the divide between literature’s economic and creative value The world of the novel’s institutional and economic setting and the world constructed creatively are placed on a shared plane Wallace’s novel could thus be read as a forerunner to the novels of commission by Heti and Lerner. It conjoins two fields and notions of literary value within a single work but maintains the “game” of shuffling back and forth that Lahire finds is characteristic of “the double life of writers.” Heti and Lerner blend these fields as part of a single project in the spirit of Barthes 22 Ibid , 81 (footnote 22 in original) 193 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 Collapsing the Economic and Creative Values of Contemporary Literature 3 Negotiating and Affirming the Value of Literature Through Further Deviations Since Buurma and Heffernan defined novels of commission based on the examples of Heti’s How Should a Person Be? and Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station in 2014, Heti and Lerner have published further novels that are thematic continuations of those preceding them Heti’s Motherhood returns to the protagonist of How Should a Person Be? , Sheila Heti herself, who is now age 37, an established writer, and living with a boyfriend The book centres on Heti’s concern over whether to have a child before it is too late In Lerner’s novel 10: 04, we find an unnamed protagonist very similar to Adam Gordon of Atocha, presumably Ben Lerner himself, who now resides in Brooklyn and, due to the success of his first novel, is promised a sizable advance from a New York publisher for a second book Like Heti, Lerner’s narrator has reached his mid-to-late thirties and is also preoccupied by the prospect of parenthood: his best female friend Alex asks him to donate sperm and play a role in raising their child The parallels between these two works are striking in their shared focus on writers who have recently broken into the literary scene and are grappling with the bourgeois concerns of 21 st -century thirty-somethings Both also complicate and thereby push the genre of the novel of commission in new directions Their previous works performed the blending of two distinct worlds and values of literature: that of the creative project and the world in which the writer attempts yet fails to realise the intended project and generates a work that describes this very process In these continuations, further layers of identity and activity are added to the blend, while the issue of literature’s value remains central In Heti’s case, deliberation over whether to become a mother or not is what keeps Heti from pursuing other planned projects Motherhood is a recording of this deliberation Instead of describing the ways in which she avoids writing an intended and commissioned project, as in How Should a Person Be? , Heti turns her ambivalence about a personal decision into the subject of her writing - a decision that would directly affect her ability to generate both economic and creative value through writing During “a long conversation about women having children,” Heti’s boyfriend Miles states that, “one can either be a great artist and a mediocre parent, or the reverse, but not great at both, because art and parenthood take all of one’s time and attention ” 23 It is interesting to find this notion of the creative artist devoted exclusively to 23 Sheila Heti, Motherhood (London: Harvill Secker, 2018), 35 Subsequent quotations from this novel are referenced in parentheses in the text 194 e lizabeth K oVach 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 her work within a piece of writing that is structurally arranged to topple the notion of art as something generated outside of - or apart from - institutional, economic, personal, and familial concerns and constraints Such ambivalence and undermining of messages persists throughout this Heti’s meditation on authorship and motherhood Heti wavers between many positions on these subjects, yet repeatedly arrives at the conclusion that motherhood would result in a compromise of the potential to create value through literature At one point she writes, “I wonder if my thinking about having children is connected to losing faith in the bigger ideas - art, politics, romance. […] Maybe it reflects a cynicism about literature […] ” (84) Here she clearly speaks of a loss of faith in the value of literature in a creative sense, in its ability to have an impact on expression, thought, and action Motherhood is positioned as something that would require giving up on the generation of creative value and directing energies to a project disassociated from “bigger ideas ” Earlier, however, she draws a direct parallel between the projects of authorship and motherhood: The egoism of childbearing is like the egoism of colonizing a country - both carry the wish of imprinting yourself on the world […] Yet perhaps I am not so different from such people - spreading myself over so many pages, with my dream of my pages spreading over the world My religious cousin, who is the same age as I am, she had six kids And I have six books Maybe there is no great difference between us, just the slightest difference in our faith - in what parts of ourselves we feel called to spread (84-85) While Heti entertains the idea that the motives behind childbearing and publishing literature are perhaps not very different from one another, she maintains a sense that one path must be chosen over another in an all-or-nothing fashion Either she loses faith in the creative value of literature and becomes a mother or she resists cynicism about the potential impact of “my pages” along with the urge to procreate The writing of Motherhood is positioned as an act of delay and avoidance of becoming a mother: “the longer I work on this book, the less likely it is I will have a child Maybe that is why I am writing it - to get myself to the other shore, childless and alone ” (193) In the end, she decides against children and is relieved that she was able to resist personal temptation and cultural expectations in order to realise and honour how much writing has given me, and feeling so lucky that this passion was mine - right there, in the center of my life And you are never lonely while writing, I thought, it’s impossible to be - categorically impossible - because writing is a relation- 195 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 Collapsing the Economic and Creative Values of Contemporary Literature ship You’re in a relationship with some force that is more mysterious than yourself As for me, I suppose it has been the central relationship of my life (93) In wishing to maintain conditions in which writing can be the “center of my life,” Heti affirms her belief in the value of literature as “the central relationship” of her life With “relationship” she means a tie to a world of ideas, a “force” that awakens “passion” through the process of creative production Yet, in her cultivation of the novel of commission, Heti’s contribution is that of a side project pursued in lieu of other officially commissioned works. Motherhood is a more complex form of creative deviation than How Should a Person Be? Instead of describing the many ways in which she avoids commissioned projects that are waiting in the pipeline, Heti makes a project out of a personal decision that preoccupies and distracts her from this other work While Motherhood delays other literary projects, it also delays and diminishes the likelihood of the narrator becoming a mother It is a deviation in two directions, moving away from officially commissioned creative projects, on the one hand, and the project of becoming a mother, on the other hand Heti thereby complicates the novel of commission by generating a work that not only foregrounds its own institutional and economic environment but also the structures of class, gender, and social norms through and against which Heti writes throughout her contemplations on the social meaning of motherhood Heti turns a description of her positioning within a complex scheme of the social pressures, gender norms, financial institutions and economies into the project itself What Motherhood clearly demonstrates, however, is that, for Heti, this kind of project, which entered the market on the shoulders of major publishing houses, is as valuable as any other creative pursuit It is not that such a side project is inferior to or stands in the shadow of some other more central works but rather comprises her principal creative task While she refers to her writing as “a relationship” between herself and a world of ideas and “mysterious” creative energies, it is also defined by the mapping and description of many further relationships - institutional, social, economic, amorous, and familial The novel of commission thus moves from focusing on institutional ties related to funding of a specific work to engaging in a dense description of the myriad and entangled relations through which literature’s economic and creative values are generated Ben Lerner’s 10: 04 maintains a much stronger focus on the commissioning institutions that made its writing possible The novel begins with the narrator eating baby octopus in an expensive New York restaurant with his literary agent He writes: 196 e lizabeth K oVach 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 A few months before, the agent had e-mailed me that she believed I could get a ‘strong six-figure’ advance based on a story of mine that had appeared in The New Yorker; all I had to do was promise to turn it into a novel I managed to draft an earnest if indefinite proposal and soon there was a competitive auction among the major New York houses and we were eating cephalopods in what would become the opening scene 24 The “opening scene” of the novel to which the narrator refers is thus the opening scene of 10: 04, which details the story of its commissioning, among other themes. Lerner immediately positions the novel in terms of its “six-figure” economic value and the market-driven aims of the agent that initiated its writing in the first place. The novel that gets written, however, is not an expansion of the story that appeared in The New Yorker (a story entitled “The Golden Vanity” that was actually published in the magazine’s June 18, 2012 issue) When the narrator asks his agent what would happen if he were not to deliver on the promise of what he described in his proposal, the agent responds, “Depends. If they like it, fine. But you need to keep the New Yorker story in there, I think ”(157) The New Yorker story is “in there” but as a verbatim copy of what was published in 2012, isolated as a chapter that interrupts 10: 04’s principle narrative 10: 04 does not deliver on the proposal upon which “a competitive auction” was based It presents itself as a workaround, a narration of how the writer arrives at this very commission and what he does instead of produce what had been promised In this novel, the narrator chronicles various processes of work and social activity He puts in hours preparing groceries at the Park Slope Coop, his neighbourhood community grocery store that requires members to contribute labour each month He details his interactions with a young schoolboy, Roberto, whom he tutors on a regular volunteer basis He describes his encounter with a protester participating in the Occupy movement, to whom he offers his bathroom and a warm meal as part of a volunteer support team for the cause And he describes his and his best female friend Alex’s decision to have a child together; the novel ends with the two of them on an epic walk through Manhattan and Brooklyn after public transportation has been brought to a standstill by a hurricane. They are returning from a first ultrasound appointment At one point in the baby-planning process, Alex warns, “I don’t want what we’re doing to just end up as notes for a novel ” (137) The narrator has obviously gone against these wishes, turning their experiences into the notes that serve as the basis for 10: 04 All the while, the depiction of these experi- 24 Ben Lerner, 10: 04 (London: Granta, 2014), 4 Subsequent quotations are referenced in parentheses in the text 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 197 Collapsing the Economic and Creative Values of Contemporary Literature ences maintains a precision of language, includes various reflections on the meaning of art and literature, and is rife with allusions to the poetry of Walt Whitman These elements turn the description of activities that comprise the novel into a poetic endeavour 10: 04 is dedicated to bringing forth the creative value in everyday life It also complicates the genre of the novel of commission by compounding forms of deviation from the originally intended work The protagonist has been awarded “a house, a stipend, a car” to work as a writer-in-residency at a “foundation in Marfa, Texas,” and part of the novel details his temporary hiatus in Marfa (159) He intends to use the time away to write his commissioned novel and plans a strict writing schedule ahead of time Yet both the schedule and the writing are replaced by their opposites For one, “instead of beginning my residency by rising at 6: 00 a m and walking several miles in the early morning dark, then working until lunch, walking again, then working again until dinner,” the narrator sleeps throughout the day and works by night (166) What is more, he was at work, but on the wrong thing Instead of […] earning my advance, I was writing a poem, a weird meditative lyric in which I was sometimes Whitman, and in which the strangeness of the residency itself was the theme Having monetized the future of my fiction, I turned my back on it, albeit to compose verse underwritten by a millionaire’s foundation (168) While urged by his agent to produce something more mainstream for his second novel, the narrator works on “a weird meditative lyric” during the night These scenes suggest that his creative productivity springs from acts of deviation. His defiance of what is institutionally and contractually expected of him is what frees him to productively “compose verse ” The novel suggests that the defiance of expectations can spur creativity. Yet this creativity is no less tethered to financial value, having been made possible by “a millionaire’s foundation ” Values creative and monetary remain part of a shared scheme As both Heti and Lerner slowly reach mid-life, they develop the novel of commission in terms of thematic complexity Their originally clear bifurcations of commissioned proposals, on the one hand, and the projects they actually complete, on the other hand, are complicated by further kinds of deviation not simply creative but also social and personal Motherhood and 10: 04 demonstrate that the novel of commission can encompass more than the collapsing of literature’s monetary and creative values into a mutually constitutive relationship These projects are about showing how the depiction of this very collapse can itself affirm literature’s potential to simultaneously 198 e lizabeth K oVach 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 expose the determinates of its own institutional and financial value and generate creative value 4 Conclusion: Values of Literature in the Age of Creativity As the examples of Heti and Lerner demonstrate, novels of commission erase the divide between their own financial and institutional settings and the settings of their narratives. In doing so, they function as reflections upon literature’s value in both its economic and creative dimensions This fusing of worlds and values, I would argue, is indicative of a culture in which the notions of creative labour and the creative class have dissolved boundaries between many forms of white-collar work and artistic practice, workers and artists, creativity and commerce In Literature and the Creative Economy (2009), Sarah Brouillette summarises the development as follows: “The artist has been subsumed into the creative class, bohemian values persist only as lifestyle choices, and creativity and market circulation are synonymous and unfold in tandem ” 25 In The Invention of Creativity (2017 [2012]), Andreas Reckwitz observes “the coupling of the wish to be creative with the imperative to be creative” as something that “encompasses the whole structure of the social and the self in contemporary society” since the late twentieth century, a phenomenon he names “a heterogeneous yet powerful creativity dispositif ” 26 The realms of art and other commercial activities enter a blend: The dissolution of the borders between and around artistic practices in the context of the creativity dispositif poses the problem of how to maintain a clear-cut distinction between art and its social environment What remains of art’s particularity when aesthetic social forms have spread into other areas of society and placed them under the regime of aesthetic novelty? 27 According to this narrative, as the ideal, white-collar worker is increasingly encouraged to adopt the dispositions and practices traditionally associated with artists, the social role of the artist loses distinction Novels of commission draw attention to this trend, explicitly presenting themselves as works of literature in which “creativity and market circulation are synonymous and run in tandem ” From the Marxist-theoretical perspective presented earlier in this article, this tandem between the economic base and superstructural creative pro- 25 Sarah Brouillette, Literature and Creative Economy (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009), 145 26 Andreas Reckwitz, The Invention of Creativity (Cambridge/ Malden: Polity, 2017), 5 27 Ibid , 82 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 duction has always existed. The late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, have witnessed an acceleration and exaggeration of the reciprocal relationship between economic and creative values Literature both absorbs and critically comments upon this development in myriad ways David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King exemplifies a novel in which the author interjects his financial motives as a writer into a narrative aimed at generating creative value While The Pale King maintains a clear distinction between the author’s actual world and the world(s) of the narrative presented, novels of commission blur fact with fiction as a means of erasing the ontological distinction between themselves and the institutional and financial worlds that make their writing possible This turns them into meditations on both the economic and creative values of literature in an era of the ‘creativity dispositif ’ Heti and Lerner’s second novels, Motherhood and 10: 04, are thematically more complex than their predecessors and thereby question multiple senses of their own value As literary projects that turn everyday, personal life into Works themselves, they might be read as mere dupes of the era - relinquishing literature’s autonomy and subsuming all activity under the rubric of ‘creative project ’ Yet this would miss these novels’ critical edges, which have to do with what they ask of the reader Reckwitz suggests that some art, which he terms “centrifugal art,” continues to be of a value other than that of “non-artistic artistic practices” in the era of the ‘creativity dispositif’ by directing audience reception in such a way as to nurture an attitude of aesthetic reflection. The audience is encouraged to go beyond its sensuous-affective stimulation and excitement and to reflect on it from without. Centrifugal art thereby promotes second-order operations - artistic operations taking account of the conditions of their own possibility 28 The novel of commission is committed to these very aims in its focus on “the conditions of [its] own possibility ” It pushes the reader into “second-order” considerations of its - literature’s - institutional, economic, personal, and social motivations and entanglements Near the end of 10: 04, the narrator passes by the Goldman Sachs building in New York City’s Financial District It is one of the only illuminated buildings in the entire city after a hurricane has caused a widespread power outage The narrator mentions that an image of the bright building would eventually be used “for the cover of my book - not the one I was contracted to write […], but the one I’ve written in its place for you, on the very edge of fiction.” (237) To use an image of one of the most powerful financial institutions of the world 28 Ibid , 82 Collapsing the Economic and Creative Values of Contemporary Literature 199 200 e lizabeth K oVach 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0009 as the cover image of this novel is a most blatant instance of how novels of commission strive to direct our view to both the economic and creative values of literature The novel is written “for you,” the reader, to consider its value as both a commercial product and an effort to push the limits of expressive and creative possibility Works Cited Barthes, Roland The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the College de France (1978-1979 and 1979-1980) Ed Nathalie Léger Trans Kate Briggs New York: Columbia UP, 2011 Brouillette, Sarah Literature and the Creative Economy Stanford: Stanford UP, 2014 Buurma, Rachel Sagner/ Laura Heffernan “Notation After the ‘Reality Effect’: Remaking Reference with Roland Barthes and Sheila Heti ” Representations 125 1 (2014), 80-102 Eagleton, Terry Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976) New York: Routledge Classics, 2002 Hartley, Daniel The Politics of Style: Towards a Marxist Poetics Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017 Heti, Sheila Motherhood London: Harvill Secker, 2018 Lahire, Bernard “The Double Life of Writers ” New Literary History 42 2 (2010), 443-465 Lerner, Ben 10: 04 London: Granta, 2014 Marx, Karl A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) Marxists.org, 15 October 2019 www marxists org/ archive/ marx/ works/ 1859/ critique-pol-economy/ Last accessed 15 February 2019 Reckwitz, Andreas The Invention of Creativity Trans Steven Black 2012 Cambridge/ Malden: Polity, 2017 Schwartz, Alexandra “Sheila Heti Wrestles With a Big Decision in Motherhood ” The New Yorker 7 May 2018 www newyorker com/ magazine/ 2018/ 05/ 07/ sheila-heti-wrestleswith-a-big-decision-in-motherhood Last accessed 15 November 2019 “Value, n ” The Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed , 2011 oed com/ view/ Entry/ 221253 Last accessed 17 December 2019 Wallace, David Foster The Pale King New York/ Boston/ London: Little, Brown and Company, 2011 Williams, Raymond Marxism and Literature 1977 Oxford/ New York: OUP, 2009 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 m arioN g ymNich The Value of Literature in an Aging Society 1 Introduction: Literary Representations of Old Age In recent decades, it has become widely acknowledged that we live in an ‘aging society ’ “According to the United Nations, the global population of those 65 and older is expected to triple to 1.5 billion by 2050 with, for the first time, people 65 and over outnumbering children under age 5,” as Carole B Cox points out 1 This momentous demographic shift tends to be discussed primarily in the context of “challenges with regard to employment, health, retirement, families, and the economy” 2 and has given rise to a large number of studies exploring the implications this development may have for fields ranging from health care to architecture Though there are numerous very practical issues that need to be addressed in an aging society, the question of how both old age and the process of aging are perceived across different age groups is of equal importance It is especially in this context that literature turns out to be relevant, for individuals as well as, hopefully, for wider public discourses about aging Literary works may provide insights into how old age and the process of aging were conceived of in the past. Moreover, contemporary fiction may often be related to how old age is currently being re-configured in the light of increasing knowledge about physical and cognitive changes that accompany the process of growing old Since the 1990s, when Anne M Wyatt-Brown and others coined the term ‘literary gerontology’ to refer to approaches that seek to link gerontology and literary studies, 3 this field has grown, but it arguably has not become as visible as one might expect 4 The reluctance on the part of literary scholars to embrace literary gerontology might partially be due to the 1 Carole B Cox, Social Policy for an Aging Society: A Human Rights Perspective (New York: Springer, 2015), ix 2 Ibid 3 Anne M Wyatt-Brown, “The Coming of Age of Literary Gerontology,” Journal of Aging Studies 4 3 (1990), 299-315 4 The contributions in the following two volumes provide good examples of what literary gerontology may look like: Christa Jansohn, ed , Old Age and Ageing in British and American Culture and Literature (Münster: LIT, 2004); and Katharina Boehm/ Anna Farkas/ Anne-Julia Zwierlein, eds , Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Aging in Nineteenth-Century Culture (New York/ Abingdon: Routledge, 2014) 202 m arioN g ymNich 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 scarcity of representations of old age that go beyond reiterating clichés More often than not, literary texts prove to be ageist by relegating old characters to the periphery of the plot or by exploiting their physical or cognitive shortcomings for comic effects Ever since antiquity, representations of old age have often been informed by stereotypes, perpetuating stock characters like the senex amans and the grotesque old woman 5 as well as the (more positive, but no less stereotypical) image of the wise old man or woman While such conventional depictions of old age are hardly conducive to furthering an understanding of the actual experience of aging, there are also more nuanced representations of old and very old characters in literary texts, which are apt to foster a discussion of what aging means for the individual and for his or her environment, even if, as pointed out above, this type of text is comparatively rare In a cultural context that is (rightly) preoccupied with the representation of groups that have traditionally been marginalised or misrepresented in literature and popular culture, it is striking that the depiction of elderly people so far appears to have played at best a marginal role in the increasingly heated debates about the politics of representation On the whole, it is the process of growing up rather than that of growing old that seems to have captured writers’ and readers’ interest in the last few decades, as Katherina Dodou points out: “The period since the 1970s has […] seen an intense novelistic preoccupation with the child Indeed, in the past few decades, childhood has become established as one of the major themes in the contemporary British novel ” 6 The number of literary texts focusing on children and portraying childhood as an important stage in human life is legion Cases in point include Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), Meera Syal’s Anita and Me (1996), Nick Hornby’s About a Boy (1998), Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans (2000), Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), and Fiona Mozley’s Elmet (2017) Even novels that feature elderly narrators, such as Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) and Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (2011), often focus on memories of childhood and adolescence for a considerable part of the story This fascination with youth coincides with the emergence of what appears 5 This concept is discussed by Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (New York/ London: Routledge, 1994) 6 Katherina Dodou, “Examining the Idea of Childhood: The Child in the Contemporary British Novel,” The Child in British Literature: Literary Constructions of Childhood, Medieval to Contemporary, ed Adrienne E Gavin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 238 On the current popularity of the theme of childhood in literature see also Sandra Dinter, Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel (New York/ Abingdon: Routledge, 2019) The Value of Literature in an Aging Society 203 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 to be a second ‘golden age’ of children’s literature in the mid-1990s, when enormously successful children’s novels such as Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995-2000) and the first volumes of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997-2007) were published A further development that provides evidence of the focus on youth in Anglophone literature is the growing importance of young adult fiction as a segment of literature in its own right, a development that has been fuelled by the international success of texts such as Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy (2008-2010) and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga (2005-2007) The phenomenon of children’s novels like the ones mentioned above turning into what has come to be called ‘all-ages’ or ‘crossover’ fiction proves that literary texts may also be appreciated by a readership that is significantly older than the original target group Elderly readers may enjoy depictions of childhood and adolescence for all sorts of reasons, including, but by no means limited to, the feeling of nostalgia for their own youth and/ or for the time when their children were young According to Vera Nünning, “[o]ne of the most important affective consequences of reading fiction is related to the activation of emotional memories on the part of the readers ” 7 Revisiting a range of emotions, experiences, and ways of seeing the world that are deemed typical of childhood through the lens of fictional depictions of young protagonists may help readers create a sense of continuity with regard to their own life narratives Literature focusing on childhood does not necessarily exclude representations of old age; in fact, children’s fiction has brought forth some truly iconic elderly characters, including the wise wizard Dumbledore in J K Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, the grumpy Earl of Dorincourt in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), and Charlie Bucket’s grandparents in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) Yet, upon closer scrutiny, the functions of characters like the ones just mentioned within the respective narratives typically turn out to be determined by the young protagonists’ needs and goals In other words, the main function of many elderly characters in children’s literature seems to be that of supporting the young protagonists in various ways, for instance by offering them advice or by providing comfort and moral support Due to its focus on young characters, children’s literature may sometimes even create the impression that elderly characters have hardly any interests and motivations beyond those directly related in 7 Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), 124 204 m arioN g ymNich 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 some way to the young protagonist(s) 8 Many elderly characters in children’s literature (and beyond) are portrayed in a manner that seems to imply that being old is almost synonymous with adopting the role of a grandparent or grandparent-like figure. Given the fact that investing a lot of effort in one’s role as a grandparent tends to be widely approved in today’s society, literary depictions of elderly people who are first and foremost grandparents reiterate a cultural norm and at the same time forestall a more complex understanding of what old age may mean, especially as long as grandparents are frequently represented in a highly stereotypical, reductive fashion across different media 9 The present article starts from the assumption that literature may play a vital role in cultural negotiations of old age and aging by creating a deeper understanding of and empathy for the situation of elderly people “As people age, they are vulnerable to increasing dependency, frailty, and discrimination by societies”, 10 and literature may, on the one hand, contribute to raising an awareness of the various physical, cognitive, and emotional challenges associated with old age On the other hand, literary texts may serve as a reminder that agency, mobility, and independence should not be regarded as the privilege of younger generations Neither should it be a foregone conclusion that well-being and old age are mutually exclusive Literary texts about old age may also help to combat fears concerning the process of aging Since “old age and ageing is not simply a fixed biological or chronological process but a complex cultural and social phenomenon,” as Christa Jansohn observes, 11 a comparison of literary representations of elderly characters from different pe- 8 A lack of all other interests apart from spending time with the grandchild is, for instance, ascribed to Charlie’s grandparents in Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964; London: Penguin, 2013), 19: “Every one of these old people was over ninety They were as shrivelled as prunes, and as bony as skeletons, and throughout the day, until Charlie made his appearance, they lay huddled in their one bed, two at either end, with nightcaps on to keep their heads warm, dozing the time away with nothing to do But as soon as they heard the door opening, and heard Charlie’s voice saying, ‘Good evening, Grandpa Joe and Grandma Josephine, and Grandpa George and Grandma Georgina,’ then all four of them would suddenly sit up, and their old wrinkled faces would light up with smiles of pleasure - and the talking would begin For they loved this little boy He was the only bright thing in their lives, and his evening visits were something that they looked forward to all day long ” 9 For a critical exploration of the role and image of grandparents, see Ursula A Falk/ Gerhard Falk, Grandparents: A New Look at the Supporting Generation (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002) 10 Cox, Social Policy for an Aging Society, 10 11 Christa Jansohn, “Introduction,” Old Age and Ageing in British and American Culture and Literature, ed ead (Münster: LIT, 2004), 2 The Value of Literature in an Aging Society 205 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 riods promises to reveal recurring patterns as well as changes in cultural conceptualisations of old age In the following, I will juxtapose representations of old age in four well-known novels from the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries, i e , from two centuries that share a widespread fascination with childhood, while tending to marginalise old age: Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (2015) 2 Representations of Old Age in Selected Nineteenth-Century Novels: Jane Austen’s Emma and Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations In demographic terms, the society in nineteenth-century Britain differed from that in the twenty-first century in so far as “the percentage of older people among the population was less pronounced” 12 than it is today In this context, childhood increasingly came to be seen as a unique stage of human development, “an idealized life quite apart from the corruptions of adulthood, and for that very reason, childhood and children represented an ideal to strive for, and to protect ” 13 Though the idealisation of childhood has its roots in the eighteenth century, this attitude intensified in the course of the nineteenth century, as Claudia Nelson points out: even while we concede that the Victorians inherited from older generations their interest in childhood, and some of their ideas about it, we may legitimately contend that Victorian conceptions of childrearing, of the state of being a child, and of the emotional importance of children to a society dominated by adults took on such weight as to represent something new in Western history Never before had childhood become an obsession within the culture at large - yet in this case ‘obsession’ is not too strong a word 14 Thus, it comes as no particular surprise that nineteenth-century novels are replete with portrayals of childhood and have arguably brought forth some of the most memorable child protagonists in Anglophone literature, including Emily Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff (in Wuthering Heights), 12 Katharina Boehm/ Anna Farkas/ Anne-Julia Zwierlein, “Introduction,” Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Aging in Nineteenth-Century Culture, eds eaed (New York/ Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 1 13 Lewis C Roberts, “Children’s Fiction,” A Companion to the Victorian Novel, eds Patrick Brantlinger/ William B Thesing (Malden, MA/ Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 354 14 Claudia Nelson, “Growing Up: Childhood,” A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed Herbert F Tucker (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 69 206 m arioN g ymNich 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Mowgli, Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre In contrast to the long list of well-known young characters, there are comparatively few iconic elderly characters in nineteenth-century novels For the most part, elderly characters appear in minor roles, being typically neither particularly important for the plot nor especially memorable, unless they happen to be singled out by their quirks and eccentricities What tends to be missing in many literary works from the nineteenth century is a thorough exploration of elderly characters’ emotions, thoughts, and motivations Jane Austen’s Emma features two characters that prove to be very interesting from the point of view of literary gerontology One of these is Mrs Bates, who is introduced as “the widow of a former vicar of Highbury, […] a very old lady, almost past every thing but tea and quadrille” 15 and who is portrayed both implicitly and explicitly as a “harmless old lady” (51) throughout the novel She appears to be a singularly unassuming character who is hardly ever shown to even engage in a conversation, which may to some extent be accounted for by her being described as hard of hearing Arguably, the remarkable reticence of Mrs Bates is the key to what appears to be her main function in the overall design of the character constellation in Emma: Mrs Bates’s persistent silence throws into sharp relief her daughter’s garrulousness In fact, the only time Mrs Bates is shown to speak in the course of the novel is when Emma visits the Bateses after the Box Hill incident and neither Miss Bates nor Jane Fairfax are keen on seeing their guest Mrs Bates is quite ill at ease when left alone with Emma: Poor old Mrs Bates, civil and humble as usual, looked as if she did not quite understand what was going on ‘I am afraid Jane is not very well,’ she said, ‘but I do not know; they tell me she is well I dare say my daughter will be here presently, Miss Woodhouse. I hope you find a chair. I wish Hetty had not gone. I am very little able - Have you a chair, ma’am? Do you sit where you like? I am sure she will be here presently ’ (371) The unease felt by the old woman when politeness requires her to talk to her young guest is captured quite vividly in these few lines Due to its almost mimetic quality, this short passage of direct speech may perhaps even trigger a brief moment of empathy for the character For the most part, though, Mrs Bates remains too much in the background to evoke much empathy Time and again, it is made clear that Mrs Bates has little agency and relies on her 15 Jane Austen, Emma (1816; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 51 Subsequent quotations from this novel are referenced in parentheses in the text The Value of Literature in an Aging Society 207 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 daughter to take the lead Still, despite a certain tendency to marginalise the old widow, it is also apparent that Mrs Bates is systematically included in activities of her social circle; she has visitors, and there appears to be a general consensus that she must be treated with respect The elderly woman, thus, is part of a social network that is interested in her well-being Another elderly character in Emma who is treated respectfully despite displaying a number of quirks is the title character’s father, Mr Woodhouse Though his age is not specified, he is explicitly referred to as an “old man” (295) by the heterodiegetic narrator While Mr Woodhouse might be interpreted as a hypochondriac due to his demeanour, Margaret Morganroth Gullette argues that he shows symptoms of dementia: His limited repertory of subjects, his nervousness about going out or being left alone, his craving for the familiar, his ready depressions and fear of having changes made in his routine are among many signs, scattered here and there, of the anxiety that apparently Austen knew can accompany serious cognitive impairment 16 Even more than Mrs Bates, Mr Woodhouse is part of a social network that provides him with a certain amount of pleasure; despite “his horror of late house and large dinner-parties” (51), he is “fond of society in his own way” (51) and enjoys being visited by old friends Notwithstanding some comments that would certainly be thought of as inappropriate if they were uttered by someone else (e g asking Jane Fairfax whether she has changed her stockings after having been out in the rain, 295), he endears himself to his acquaintances as well as to the readers by being “kind-hearted” (295) and always “polite” (295) and by worrying as much about others’ health and comfort as about his own According to Gullette, the depiction of Mr Woodhouse as a likeable character combined with the respectful way in which he is treated by most other characters despite his eccentricity may help readers to “get past some of the ignorance, misinformation, and terror the blanket diagnosis [of Alzheimer’s/ dementia] has inspired ” 17 Even if he worries a lot and is dependent on others (most of all his daughter), Mr Woodhouse all in all seems to have a quite pleasant life In Emma, old age is thus presented as a stage in life that makes the characters dependent on others, but that may still be enjoyed due to the existence of a supportive social network that goes beyond the immediate family 16 Margaret Morganroth Gullette, “Annals of Caregiving: Does Emma Woodhouse’s Father Suffer from ‘Dementia’? ” Michigan Quarterly Review XLVIII 1 (2009), n p 17 Ibid 208 m arioN g ymNich 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 The portraits of old age in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations almost amount to caricatures The elderly character people who have read the novel are likely to recall most vividly is presumably Miss Havisham, who reminds the protagonist Pip of a “skeleton” 18 and a “waxwork” (55) figure, who is described as being “corpse-like” (57), and who, according to Pip, with the “crutch-headed stick on which she leaned […] looked like the Witch of the Place.” (80) Yet, though this character at first sight seems to correspond to the “classic archetype of female aging” 19 due to her looks and demeanour, she is not all that old, especially when Pip sees her for the first time. 20 According to Marta Miquel Baldellou, “[b]y means of this figure, aging is depicted as a process of decline, with aging female characters portrayed as bizarre and disturbing, when they resist the cultural demand that they should give up their sexual allure and, instead, surrender to sheer invisibility ” 21 Miss Havisham’s physical decline and her death-in-life situation may also be attributed to the destructive impact passionate emotions (in her case both infatuation and a desire for revenge) were widely believed to have in the Victorian period 22 Her unwillingness to ‘move on’ after having been jilted by her fiancé is what prevents her from leading a contented life and from aging well The notion that ‘aging well’ is indeed possible and is closely linked with being content is expressed by the striking contrast between Miss Havisham and a truly old character who is introduced later in the novel: John Wemmick’s father, who is living with his son and who is described as “a very old man in a flannel coat: clean, cheerful, comfortable, and well cared for, but intensely deaf ” (191) At a later point, the readers are informed that the character who 18 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 55 Subsequent quotations from this novel are referenced in parentheses in the text 19 Marta Miquel Baldellou, “How Old Is Miss Havisham? Age and Gender Performances in Great Expectations and Sunset Boulevard,” Age Culture Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3 (2016), n p 20 Baldellou (ibid ) explains that Miss Havisham’s age can be reconstructed quite precisely on the basis of Dickens’ manuscript: “According to Dickens’s annotations, Pip appears to be seven at the opening of the story and twenty-three towards the end, while in the last stage of the narrative, Dickens portrays Miss Havisham as a woman of fifty-six. If the story that Pip unfolds covers the span of approximately sixteen years, Dickens’s annotations signify that, when Pip meets Miss Havisham for the first time, at the beginning of the novel, she is a woman of scarcely forty years of age Nonetheless, in spite of her chronological age, her markedly aging appearance at first sight has taken precedence in the reception of the novel ” 21 Ibid 22 On Victorian attitudes towards emotions, see Gesa Stedman, Stemming the Torrent: Expression and Control in the Victorian Discourses on Emotion, 1830-1872 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) The Value of Literature in an Aging Society 209 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 is always referred to and addressed by his son as ‘aged parent’, ‘the Aged’ or even ‘Aged P ’ is 81 years old, 23 which makes him approximately twice as old as Miss Havisham is when Pip first encounters the eccentric lady. The unusual expressions used routinely by Wemmick when referring to his father or talking with him are apt to create the impression that old age is the single defining feature of this character Moreover, his being hard of hearing is depicted in a way that pokes fun at the character’s impairment: He misunderstands what is said, he is supposed to be nodded at continuously because this puts him “in great spirits” (191), and his special treat is hearing his son fire a cannon, upon which he shouts “exultingly, ‘He’s fired! I heerd him! ’” (192) All of this amounts to a stereotypical image that exploits the challenges of old age for comic effect and infantilises the character Yet, there are also some features of the depiction of Wemmick’s father that go beyond the image of a somewhat ridiculous, childlike old man Unlike Mrs Bates in Emma, he likes to talk to and interact with people, even if he cannot really figure out what they say. This suggests that he has maintained an outgoing personality Moreover, various hints at the everyday life of the old man imply that he is taking care of small tasks around the house, such as “feed[ing] the fowls” (191), making toast (272), and reading the newspaper aloud to his son and guests. (273) The idea that fulfilling domestic duties contributes to making the character content appears to be rooted in the Victorian tendency to idealise the home When he is reading the paper aloud, for example, he is “so busy and so pleased, that it really was quite charming ” (273) Yet, the readers are also informed that the old man needs to be watched over during this task, which again reinforces the idea that he is childlike: As he wanted the candles close to him, and as he was always on the verge of putting either his head or the newspaper into them, he required as much watching as a powder-mill But Wemmick was equally untiring and gentle in his vigilance, and the Aged read on, quite unconscious of his many rescues Whenever he looked at us, we all expressed the greatest interest and amazement, and nodded until he resumed again (273) Even if passages like the one above doubtlessly infantilise the character, they also reveal that the other characters, and most of all his son, genuinely like the old man All in all, the Wemmick household appears to be rendered more cosy by the old man’s presence and by the love he and his son clearly feel for each other Miss Havisham, by contrast, has turned her house into a gloomy, almost Gothic place where her bitterness and her dreams of revenge ulti- 23 Wemmick tells Pip that his father will “‘be eighty-two next birthday ’” (238) 210 m arioN g ymNich 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 mately destroy her own life and all but ruin her adopted daughter Estella’s prospects for being truly happy 3 Representations of Old Age in Recent British Novels: Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant Representations of old age in contemporary British fiction increasingly appear to be informed by current scientific knowledge about the various physical, cognitive, social, and emotional challenges elderly people are likely to face This renders the texts particularly interesting from the perspective of a theory-of-mind approach As Vera Nünning explains, “[t]hough there are different conceptualisations of theory of mind, there is an overall agreement that it is basically a mainly analytical cognitive process which focuses on knowledge about what other people think or feel ” 24 According to the theory-of-mind approach, “humans assess the beliefs and desires of others on the basis of their own knowledge, while taking into account the particularities of other people’s preferences, dispositions and knowledge ” 25 Contemporary literary texts about old age often promise to broaden the readers’ understanding of particularities of elderly people’s cognitive processes The main focus in this context seems to be an exploration of the consequences of dementia, as works such as Emma Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing (2014) and the two novels which will be discussed below illustrate In Ian McEwan’s Saturday, the account of a day in the middle-aged protagonist’s life includes a visit to the old people’s home where his mother lives This visit is described exclusively from the perspective of the protagonist, Henry Perowne, who serves as focaliser throughout the novel and whose expertise as a neurosurgeon explains his familiarity with the physical processes that are causing his mother’s progressing dementia: “The disease proceeds by tiny unnoticed strokes in small blood vessels in the brain Cumulatively, the infarcts cause cognitive decline by disrupting the neural nets She unravels in little steps Now she’s lost her grasp of the concept of a gift, and with it, the pleasure ” 26 Yet, knowing exactly what is damaging his mother’s brain does not help him to come to terms with the situation on an emotional level For Henry, visiting his mother is a duty that is associated primarily with negative feelings: 24 Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions, 134 25 Ibid , 137 26 Ian McEwan, Saturday (2005; London: Vintage, 2006), 162 Subsequent quotations from this novel are referenced in parentheses in the text The Value of Literature in an Aging Society 211 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 He knows the routine well enough Once they’re established together, face to face, with their cups of dark brown tea, the tragedy of her situation will be obscured behind the banality of detail, of managing the suffocating minutes, of inattentive listening. Being with her isn’t so difficult. The hard part is when he comes away, before this visit merges in memory with all the rest, when the woman she once was haunts him as he stands by the front door and leans down to kiss her goodbye That’s when he feels he’s betraying her, leaving her behind in her shrunken life, sneaking away to the riches, the secret hoard of his own existence Despite the guilt, he can’t deny the little lift he feels, the lightness in his step when he turns his back and walks away from the old people’s place and takes his car keys from his pocket and embraces the freedoms that can’t be hers (152-153) This passage, which describes a typical visit from the point of view of the protagonist, portrays both the time spent together and the life of Lily Perowne in a very bleak way The middle-aged man sees visiting his mother as a burden, as references to “the suffocating minutes” and “the little lift he feels, the lightness in his step” upon leaving her make abundantly clear, but the encounter also evokes guilt and a feeling of loss As the passage quoted above already suggests, the current stage of his mother’s life is conceptualised exclusively in terms of decline and deprivation (“the tragedy of her situation,” “her shrunken life,” “the freedoms that can’t be hers”) Lily’s cognitive and emotional situation is represented as being defined entirely by her dementia, which causes extreme disorientation, concomitant with fear: “she hardly possesses the room because she is incapable of finding it unaided, or even of knowing that she has one And when she is in it, she doesn’t recognise her things […] a small journey disorients or even terrifies her.” (153) Moreover, “[e]ven boredom is beyond his mother’s reach; ” (159) i e her experience is presented as being totally alien for her son as well as, presumably, for many readers Due to the distance that is established with respect to this character, the portrayal of Lily Perowne, who is described as “[c]hildlike in her obedience” (166), is more likely to evoke sympathy than empathy in the readers 27 Her state of decline is thrown into sharp relief by her son’s memory of Lily as a capable homemaker and as a strong, fast, and graceful swimmer, who even won second place “in the county championships ” (156) The section 27 On the distinction between empathy and sympathy, see Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions, 122: “While empathy and the Spanish as well as German definition of sympathy imply a reduction of the distance between reader and character, pity involves a greater distance: in the case of compassion for a character, the reader has to adopt the position of an observer who judges and evaluates the situation and then feels an emotion that is likely to be different from that of the character ” 212 m arioN g ymNich 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 detailing Henry’s memories of his mother (154-158) serves to convey the impression that the person Lily Perowne once was is now irretrievably gone This assessment of Lily’s situation echoes the widespread conceptualisation of dementia derived from “medical and neuropsychological studies [that] have pictured dementia and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) from the perspective of a gradual loss of memory and the entirety of selfhood ” 28 The notion of dementia as “[m]ental death” (165) and disintegration of identity in Saturday is also supported by the fact that it has become impossible for Lily’s son to engage in a real conversation with her Notwithstanding the fact that her utterances almost invariably come across as “nonsense monologues” (162), the protagonist notices that “[i]t pleases her if he nods and smiles, and chimes in from time to time” (162), which establishes a kind of reassuring, essentially phatic communication that is reminiscent of the one enjoyed by Wemmick’s father in Dickens’ Great Expectations What is predominant in the interpretation of dementia in Saturday, however, is the fear felt by the protagonist, who “thinks how in thirty-five years or less it could be him, stripped of everything he does and owns ” (165) In McEwan’s Condition of England novel, which shows “the privileged and print-savvy Perownes” 29 capable of coping with all sorts of problems, including criminal violence, by using their language skills, the threat of losing one’s ability to communicate by means of language is bound to loom especially large While the three novels discussed so far present aged characters in quite marginal roles, embedded in essentially realist scenarios, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant departs from this pattern in so far as it features “an elderly couple” 30 called Axl and Beatrice as main characters in a vaguely delineated historical setting that borrows heavily from fantasy fiction. The Buried Giant is a hybrid novel that seems to have baffled most reviewers with its combination of features known from fantasy and historical fiction: It is a quest narrative that is set in Britain during the so-called Dark Ages after Roman rule, i e during a period for which hardly any historical documents exist This age is referred to in the novel as a time when “ogres […] were […] still native to this land ” (3) Throughout the text there are references to creatures such as ogres or pixies and to a dragon called Querig as well as to King Arthur, Merlin, and an (elderly) Sir Gawain, who even appears as one of the main charac- 28 Matti Hyvärinen/ Ryoko Watanabe, “Dementia, Positioning and the Narrative Self,” Style 51 3 (2017), 337 29 Michael L Ross, “On a Darkling Planet: Ian McEwan’s Saturday and the Condition of England,” Twentieth-Century Literature 54 1 (2008), 93 30 Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (2015; London: Vintage, 2016), 4 Subsequent quotations from this novel are referenced in parentheses in the text The Value of Literature in an Aging Society 213 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 ters All of this situates The Buried Giant in the tradition of fantasy literature Using creatures and figures from myth and legend may, however, also be read as a tribute to medieval historiographic texts, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s chronicle Historia Regum Britanniae (c 1135) Similar to Ishiguro’s novel, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia liberally draws upon what would be categorised as legend from today’s point of view, which also accounts for the lasting impact the Historia has had on the tradition of Arthurian literature from the Middle Ages to the present The unusual setting in The Buried Giant provides unique opportunities for addressing the theme of old age Much like (high) fantasy following in the footsteps of both medieval romances and prototypical fantasy novels such as J R R Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), The Buried Giant features a plot that is a variation on the pattern of the hero’s quest as described by Joseph Campbell in one of the classics of comparative mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces The journey undertaken by Axl and Beatrice in Ishiguro’s novel evokes many of the stages identified by Campbell as being constitutive of quest narratives, ranging from the initial “call to adventure,” 31 to the “womb image of the belly of the whale [where] [t]he hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died,” 32 and, last but not least, a “succession of trials” 33 heroes must face before they reach their goal Campbell does not suggest that the hero’s journey is the privilege of young characters; in fact, from the point of view of comparative mythology age appears to be largely irrelevant in this context: no matter what the stage or grade of life, the call [to adventure] brings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of transfiguration - a rite, or moment, of spiritual passage […] The familiar life horizon has been outgrown; the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand. 34 In recent fantasy, however, the typical hero or heroine - Rowling’s Harry Potter, Pullman’s Lyra Belacqua, Jon Snow and Arya Stark in George R R Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire (1996 - ongoing), and many others - tends to be young or even very young, and the quest plot often turns out to be interwoven with a coming-of-age story In novels focussing on elderly characters, by contrast, and especially in those addressing dementia, “the wish of ‘coming 31 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949; Novato, CA: New World Library, 2008), 48 32 Ibid , 74 33 Ibid , 81 34 Ibid , 42-43 214 m arioN g ymNich 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 home’ to familiar surroundings, which promise safety and comfort, is a common trope,” as Susanne Christ points out 35 Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant defies these expectations by featuring elderly characters who embark on a journey to find their long-lost son’s village and who get involved in the larger quest to slay a dragon All the while, the physical and cognitive challenges associated with old age are not downplayed Axl is struggling with his “eyesight [which] had grown annoyingly blurred with the years” (22), Beatrice is suffering from a mysterious illness that causes a lot of pain, and both appear to be affected by dementia None of this, however, is regarded as an unsurmountable obstacle by the protagonists The emphasis on their agency could be read as a response to “[c]urrent debates about aging […] [which] share a language of maintaining and enabling agency in old age: catchphrases like ‘active aging,’ ‘positive aging,’ and ‘productive aging’ promote a vision of successful late life ” 36 By drawing upon the fantasy quest plot, The Buried Giant seems to suggest that it is never too late to answer the call to adventure while taking the characters’ ailments very seriously Despite its focus on maintaining agency in the later stages of life, the novel does not conjure up a utopian vision of aging; instead, it refers to a range of problems that also tend to be associated with old age in today’s society Axl and Beatrice feel exposed to disrespect due to their age; they live “at the periphery of the community” (7) and are no longer allowed to keep a candle in their room at night - something that Beatrice complains about bitterly: “‘It’s an insult, forbidding us a candle through nights like these and our hands as steady as any of them ’” (9) Another experience that is addressed in Ishiguro’s novel is the fear of having to cope with the death of one’s partner after many years of living together This topic is introduced already quite early during the couple’s journey, when they encounter a querulous old woman whose husband has been taken to an island, “a place of strange qualities” (44), by one of the mysterious ‘boatmen ’ This image picks up the idea of the ferryman Charon taking the dead across the river Styx from Greek mythology as well as the Celtic notion of the island of Avalon The encounter with the old woman who has lost her husband foreshadows what will happen at the end of the novel, when Beatrice will be taken away from Axl by a boatman What invites the reader to feel empathy with their fear of being parted is the portrayal of the love Axl and Beatrice feel for each other This love is apparent in 35 Susanne Christ, “Fictions of Ageing, Illness and Dementia: Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother (2006) and Emma Healey’s Elizabeth Is Missing (2014),” The British Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Cultural Concerns - Literary Developments - Model Interpretations, eds Vera Nünning/ Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2018), 219 36 Boehm/ Farkas/ Zwierlein, “Introduction,” 2-3 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 The Value of Literature in an Aging Society 215 the characters’ utterances, in their loving gestures, and in the passages where they function as focalisers, as the following quotation illustrates: “Her [Beatrice’s] grey mane, untied and matted, hung stiffly down past her shoulders, but Axl still felt happiness stir within him at this sight of her in the morning light ” (27) When Beatrice worries that their failing memory will eventually make it impossible for them to convince the boatman that they ought to stay together, Axl tries to reassure her, promising her that “‘the feeling in my heart for you will be there just the same, no matter what I remember or forget ’” (51) At the end of their quest, however, it is remembering rather than forgetting that brings about their separation, since the memories that are retrieved make the characters aware of mutual betrayal and guilt As in previous novels by Ishiguro, the ending is informed by melancholy and disillusionment The Buried Giant offers a very unusual approach to the representation of dementia, which combines psychologically plausible depictions of the characters’ cognitive processes and elements of fantasy fiction. The novel invites the reader to imagine what it means to struggle with a failing memory by providing insight into the characters’ fruitless efforts to retrieve lost memories The reader witnesses both the characters’ frustrating failure to remember (“now, as earlier outside, nothing would quite settle in his mind, and the more he concentrated, the fainter the fragments seemed to grow,” 7) as well as the pleasure caused by the experience of recalling something that seemed forgotten (for instance when Axl is “well satisfied: for he had this morning succeeded in remembering a number of things that had eluded him for some time,” 5-6) What turns The Buried Giant into a particularly innovative novel about dementia is the fact that memory loss is presented as a collective phenomenon, which affects all generations In the course of their quest, the protagonists find out that this collective amnesia has been caused by Merlin and is meant to make people forget atrocities committed during the war, which supposedly is the prerequisite for making a peaceful coexistence between Britons and Saxons possible Due to this collective dimension of memory loss, Ishiguro’s novel is read as a political allegory by Bernadette Meyler 37 Yet, similar to Ishiguro’s dystopia Never Let Me Go (2005), The Buried Giant combines a political/ collective dimension with an exploration of individual psychology The fact that “oblivion is not represented as an unalloyed evil” 38 in The Buried Giant is bound to be particularly thought-provoking, since this idea runs counter to prevalent discourses about both cultural and individual memory 37 See Bernadette Meyler, “Aesthetic Historiography: Allegory, Monument, and Oblivion in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant,” Critical Analysis of Law 5 2 (2018), 243-288 38 Ibid , 253 216 m arioN g ymNich 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 The depiction of characters who manage to live lives that are worth living despite failing memories might even lead readers to see the widespread fear of dementia in a somewhat different light Recent research has begun to question long-standing beliefs which equate dementia with a loss of identity Matti Hyvärinen and Ryoko Watanabe, for instance, argue that traditional formulations of the narrative self and identity - all of which are drafted for the purpose of theorizing the self in distinctively human terms - seem to run into severe problems when applied to people facing the advanced stages of dementia and AD [Alzheimer’s disease] Either we decide that people with severe memory problems no longer have a narrative self at all, or we revise the terms of the narrative self so that it is not necessarily equated with extensive, autobiographical stories 39 The depiction of Axl and Beatrice might provide some inspiration for re-configuring narrative identity. Although, for the most part, representations of “[d]ementia in 21st century British novels can be understood as the culmination of problems of frailty, memory, dependence and care,” 40 Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant offers an alternative way of conceptualising both dementia and old age by stressing agency and independence despite memory loss 4 Conclusion As the discussion of the four novels by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro has shown, an analysis of representations of old age in literary texts provides insights into historically variable notions of what aging (well) may mean Beyond that, novels like Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant may contribute to raising an awareness of “the need to radically rethink the ways in which age and ageing have been culturally configured.” 41 In this context, various literary strategies may prove to play an important role Ishiguro’s novel, for instance, demonstrates that genre hybridisation, which, as Ansgar Nünning and Christine Schwanecke have shown, “has recently become even more important as a catalyst for generic change than ever before,” 42 may also open up new ways of exploring the manifold facets of aging Liter- 39 Hyvärinen/ Watanabe, “Dementia, Positioning and the Narrative Self,” 338 40 Christ, “Fictions of Ageing, Illness and Dementia,” 220 41 Hannah Zeilig, “The Critical Use of Narrative and Literature in Gerontology,” International Journal of Ageing and Later Life 6 2 (2011), 16 42 Ansgar Nünning/ Christine Schwanecke, “Crossing Generic Borders - Blurring Generic Boundaries: Hybridization as a Catalyst for Generic Change and for the Transformation of Systems of Genres,” The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change in Contemporary Fiction: Theoretical Frameworks, Genres and Model Interpretations, eds Michael Basseler/ Ansgar Nünning/ Christine Schwanecke (Trier: WVT, 2013), 119 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 ature about old age may thus share “a central impulse in critical gerontology, which aims to unsettle our habitual and comfortable frameworks and needle us towards personal and cultural transformation ” 43 Dementia, for instance, is a condition that is currently associated first and foremost with fear for many people Yet, as Anne Davis Basting claims, “living a full life with dementia or fully living with and loving people with dementia” 44 is possible, provided one understands the cognitive and emotional changes gradual memory loss causes The huge potential of literary texts for creating empathy and “enlarging the scope of readers’ experience with and knowledge of various emotions” 45 may play an important part in this context Though literary texts of course cannot claim to represent the state of the art in gerontological research, different, potentially even contradictory interpretations of old age and innovative re-configurations of the challenges and opportunities associated with aging may provide an invaluable repertoire of ideas for working towards the well-being of all generations in an aging society Works Cited Austen, Jane Emma (1816) Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 Baldellou, Marta Miquel “How Old Is Miss Havisham? Age and Gender Performances in Great Expectations and Sunset Boulevard ” Age Culture Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3 (2016), n p Basting, Anne Davis Forget Memory: Creating Better Lives for People with Dementia Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2009 Boehm, Katharina/ Anna Farkas/ Anne-Julia Zwierlein, eds Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Aging in Nineteenth-Century Culture New York/ Abingdon: Routledge, 2014 --- “Introduction ” Boehm/ Farkas/ Zwierlein 2014, 1-17 Campbell, Joseph The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) Novato, CA: New World Library, 2008 Christ, Susanne “Fictions of Ageing, Illness and Dementia: Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother (2006) and Emma Healey’s Elizabeth Is Missing (2014) ” The British Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Cultural Concerns - Literary Developments - Model Interpretations Eds Vera Nünning/ Ansgar Nünning Trier: WVT, 2018, 217-230 Cox, Carole B Social Policy for an Aging Society: A Human Rights Perspective New York: Springer, 2015 Dahl, Roald Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) London: Penguin, 2013 Dickens, Charles Great Expectations (1861) Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994 43 Ibid 44 Anne Davis Basting, Forget Memory: Creating Better Lives for People with Dementia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2009), 4 45 Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions, 110-111 The Value of Literature in an Aging Society 217 218 m arioN g ymNich 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0010 Dinter, Sandra Childhood in the Contemporary English Novel New York/ Abingdon: Routledge, 2019 Dodou, Katherina “Examining the Idea of Childhood: The Child in the Contemporary British Novel ” The Child in British Literature: Literary Constructions of Childhood, Medieval to Contemporary Ed Adrienne E Gavin Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 238-250 Falk, Ursula A / Gerhard Falk Grandparents: A New Look at the Supporting Generation Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002 Gullette, Margaret Morganroth “Annals of Caregiving: Does Emma Woodhouse’s Father Suffer from ‘Dementia’? ” Michigan Quarterly Review XLVIII 1 (2009), n p Hyvärinen, Matti/ Ryoko Watanabe “Dementia, Positioning and the Narrative Self ” Style 51 3 (2017), 337-356 Ishiguro, Kazuo The Buried Giant (2015) London: Faber & Faber, 2016 Jansohn, Christa, ed Old Age and Ageing in British and American Culture and Literature Münster: LIT, 2004 Jansohn, Christa “Introduction ” Jansohn 2004, 1-8 McEwan, Ian Saturday (2005) London: Vintage, 2006 Meyler, Bernadette “Aesthetic Historiography Allegory, Monument, and Oblivion in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant ” Critical Analysis of Law 5 2 (2018), 243-288 Nelson, Claudia “Growing Up: Childhood ” A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture Ed Herbert F Tucker Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, 69-81 Nünning, Ansgar/ Christine Schwanecke “Crossing Generic Borders - Blurring Generic Boundaries: Hybridization as a Catalyst for Generic Change and for the Transformation of Systems of Genres ” The Cultural Dynamics of Generic Change in Contemporary Fiction: Theoretical Frameworks, Genres and Model Interpretations Eds Michael Basseler/ Ansgar Nünning/ Christine Schwanecke Trier: WVT, 2013, 115-146 Nünning, Vera Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014 Roberts, Lewis C “Children’s Fiction ” A Companion to the Victorian Novel Eds Patrick Brantlinger/ William B Thesing Malden, MA/ Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, 353-369 Ross, Michael L “On a Darkling Planet: Ian McEwan’s Saturday and the Condition of England ” Twentieth-Century Literature 54 1 (2008), 75-96 Russo, Mary The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity New York/ London: Routledge, 1994 Stedman, Gesa Stemming the Torrent: Expression and Control in the Victorian Discourses on Emotion, 1830-1872 Ashgate: Aldershot, 2002 Wyatt-Brown, Anne M “The Coming of Age of Literary Gerontology ” Journal of Aging Studies 4 3 (1990), 299-315 Zeilig, Hannah “The Critical Use of Narrative and Literature in Gerontology ” International Journal of Ageing and Later Life 6 2 (2011), 7-37 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 J aN r upp Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing 1 Introduction: Refugee Writing as a Literature of Survival This is a woman to whom I might tell my story If I do not share my story, then I have only this one year to my life I am a one-year-old man who walks with heavy steps I am a man burdened with hidden history 1 These are the words of Solomon, an African civil war refugee He has escaped to a village in the north of England, but his ordeal is far from over On top of being haunted by his traumatic past, Solomon is struggling with the local population’s xenophobia and an acute sense of isolation His only contact is his next-door neighbour, a middle-aged single lady, weighed down by a difficult past of her own. The prospect of being able to tell and share his story, at last, takes on an almost life-saving significance for Solomon. Without giving testimony of his experiences, he will effectively be reduced to the one year he has lived as an unwelcome outsider in his new home Only telling his story will restore an integral sense of his grown-up self Solomon’s words articulate the value of storytelling in the most fundamental way imaginable - and by extension the value of narrative fiction and literature more broadly 2 For though the reader may relate Solomon’s fate to the dire topicality of forced migration in the real world, he is a central character in Caryl Phillips’ novel A Distant Shore (2003), which in turn belongs to a growing body of new refugee writing in the 21st century What Solomon does as a narrator, the novel does as a work of literature: It tells a story of refugee 1 Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore (2003; London: Vintage, 2004), 300 2 For current reappraisals of the ethical potential of literature and narrative see, inter alia, Sibylle Baumbach/ Herbert Grabes/ Ansgar Nünning, eds , Literature and Values: Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating and Constructing Norms and Values (Trier: WVT, 2009), Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), and Hanna Meretoja, The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) 220 J aN r upp 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 migration, putting a name and an individual life to those who are portrayed, all too often, as a faceless group or ‘mass,’ scandalised as ‘waves’ of immigrants causing a refugee ‘crisis ’ In short, the novel restores nothing less than a sense of humanity and human dignity to Solomon and refugees at large In the context of 21st-century refugee migration, any number of examples testifying to the central role of storytelling and narrative fiction will come to mind As countless creative and artistic projects of refugee aid suggest, telling stories as well as reading and writing literature arguably contributes to the well-being and sanity of refugees as much as decent accommodation, medical help, and food supply In the Calais ‘Jungle’, the infamous symbol of Europe’s migrant ‘crisis’ in 2015 and after, central facilities included a church, a mosque, a theatre, and a library The Good Chance theatre offered a space for refugees to express themselves, as well as to participate in workshops and performances - a varied programme that, in the words of Tom Stoppard, testified that “life without culture is nothing more than biology in survival mode ” 3 The Jungle, a play based on the reality of the camp’s inhabitants, yet featuring a fictional storyline, premiered in 2017. The collection Voices from the ‘Jungle’: Stories from the Calais Refugee Camp appeared in the same year As I shall argue in this chapter, both testimony as a storytelling practice and fictional narratives inform the value of new refugee writing. This is an extremely diverse body of literature, in which boundaries between fiction and non-fiction are frequently blurred. I will adopt a wide understanding of ‘literature’ to cover this spectrum Extending across it, the value of refugee writing may be based, even premised on giving voice to authentic stories otherwise repressed or little heard However, away from oral history or therapeutic settings, articulating and writing the refugee experience is often expanded by drawing on the fictional imagination. While not necessarily identical, testimonial and fictional narratives may overlap, with both feeding into new refugee writing as a literature and “art of survival ” 4 An important way in which the value of refugee writing manifests itself, I suggest, is through taking recourse to iconic extant narratives, which are reworked to interpret current events Over the past couple of decades, these have included anything from the bible to ancient Greek epics like The Aeneid 3 Quoted in the jacket of Joe Murphy/ Joe Robertson, The Jungle (London: Faber and Faber, 2017) Stoppard collaborated with Murphy and Robertson in Calais, two British playwrights who had set up the Good Chance theatre He is echoed by Tarek, a refugee from Syria, in another quotation in the jacket of Murphy and Robertson’s play: “The refugee who sits alone, he does not just need food, or some materials, he needs also hope Good Chance theatre gives hope ” 4 Meretoja, Ethics of Storytelling, 1 Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing 221 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 and The Odyssey My key and core example will concern recent adaptations of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, in particular Refugee Tales (2016, 2018, 2019), an activist project, and Patience Agbabi’s modern-day remix Telling Tales (2014) Before moving on this case study, more needs to be said about the larger trajectory of 21st-century refugee writing, as well as about different facets of its value in representing refugees Refugee writing shares common ground with, but in crucial respects departs from, earlier histories of migrant writing As opposed to a degree of relative access and agency provided for by post- WWII multicultural society, to which previous accounts date back, 21st-century refugee writing is engaged in a fundamental struggle over representation If only to counter racist and xenophobic stereotypes in public images and discourses, mediating the refugee experience, including its creative reworking in fictional accounts, becomes a matter of particular urgency. 2 The Value of Refugee Writing from Testimony to Hospitable Empathy Any discussion of the value of literature and 21st-century refugee writing is well advised to contextualise the latter within larger literary-historical and social developments Refugee writing in the new millennium is faced with conditions of migration markedly different from post-WWII multicultural society, which arguably leads to new forms of representation and places renewed emphasis on the value of literature 21st-century refugee writing constitutes a new phase indeed, as already predicted by Bruce King in his 1948-2000: The Internationalization of English Literature: “The story I tell of England’s multiracial literature needs to be superseded by later stories of the troubles of new refugees from other parts of the world at the start of the new century […] As societies change, their histories need to be revised ” 5 Writing in the early 2000s, King could not envision yet the current development of refugee migration from Africa and the Middle East But he was clearly right in suggesting that “new refugees from other parts of the world” were increasingly going to shape literary production They have done so in a way that complements 1948 as a reference point for “England’s multiracial literature” both temporally and spatially - temporally, because new refugees follow on from earlier post-WWII migration and the genesis of multicultural society; and spatially, because they often come to Europe from conflicts different to the former colo- 5 Bruce King, 1948-2000: The Internationalization of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 325 222 J aN r upp 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 nial world. King’s reference of refugees is significant, too, drawing attention to forced migration as a symptomatic case of global travel and movement in the 21st century Two decades on from King’s account, the revision of literary history is well under way, prompted by expanding bodies of refugee writing which in turn respond to shifting sociological conditions In a telling phrase, Paul Lauter has delineated a new state of “immigration shock,” 6 as shorthand for the nature and effects of 21st-century globalisation According to Lauter, the era of immigration shock replaces or at least suspends an earlier paradigm of multiculturalism, which falls short of attending to a situation of increasing levels of immigration, economic disparity and terrorist violence in the 21st century: Multiculturalism focused on access and integration, but these are not the primary issues of globalization and the immigration it has generated The issues here are legitimization, whether one is, and is seen and received as, legal, legitimate, fully a citizen […] The issue is not what constitutes an identity that needs to be respected, but what constitutes a viable political community and offers the possibility of decent work 7 The fact that the new millennium has witnessed distinctively different patterns and evermore precarious forms of migration, with a corresponding need for adapting conceptual frameworks, is an insight widely echoed by scholars of migration 8 As Lauter’s quotation makes clear, the era of immigration shock introduces far more precarious conditions than the framework that multiculturalism operates in At issue here are basic questions of citizenship and legitimacy, which more often than not exclude a growing number of asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, and stateless refugees According to Agnes Woolley, a “precarious relationship to the law and the condition of statelessness” 9 constitute the single-most important characteristic of contemporary asylum narratives, too She repeatedly stresses “the ways in which asylum seeking - as both legally precarious and persistently indeterminate - is distinct from the traditional narratives of diasporic accommodation that have historically shaped discourses of migration ” 10 This situation does not render 6 Paul Lauter, “From Multiculturalism to Immigration Shock,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 1 1 (2009), 1 7 Ibid , 12 8 See, e g , Doris Bachmann-Medick/ Jens Kugele, eds , Migration: Changing Concepts, Critical Approaches (Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter, 2018) 9 Agnes Woolley, Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-First Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 6 10 Ibid , 3 Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing 223 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 multiculturalism obsolete, but it can only be engaged again, as it were, once a viable political community has been established or restored In the absence of rights and representation, refugee testimony takes on an overriding existential, political, and ethical value As has been noted with regard to Holocaust testimony and histories of suffering generally, for those affected, to tell their stories is a central precondition of survival, of overcoming their plight: “There is, in each survivor, an imperative need to tell and thus to come to know one’s story […] One has to know one’s buried truth in order to be able to live ” 11 To begin with, testimony is part and parcel of a private, individual healing process, seeking to mend the rupture of traumatic experiences Even in its private form, however, testimony is never a solipsistic affair It is an “imperative to tell and be heard” 12 at the same time In my example quoted at the beginning, the protagonist of Phillips’ novel crucially needs an interlocutor, an “empathic listener” 13 to witness his story This essentially dialogical constellation of testimony takes on an overtly political dimension, the larger the narrative audience becomes Public performances of testimony, such as Asylum Monologues (2006), a long-running stage show in the UK, are a central element of refugee aid and activism They are a key site of a “struggle to come into representation” in order then to engage in a “struggle over […] the politics of representation,” 14 in a situation where refugees are both denied basic rights and are discriminated against by racism and xenophobia While these public performances seek to communicate authentic experience, fictional narratives are frequently part of mediating testimony in ethically significant ways. Even ostensibly non-fictional performances like Asylum Monologues tend to be framed by a creative setting of sorts They frequently involve actors and are staged in theatres or similar venues Moreover, many accounts of refugee testimony draw on fictional elements as a way to counter and think beyond dehumanising public images Imaginatively extending their testimony enables refugees to work through their past and present, as well as to transcend it at the same time This process, I suggest, is closely bound up with what Hanna Meretoja, via Robert Musil, calls a “sense of the possible” - an all-around sense in which “narratives can cultivate our sense of how our narrative interpretations of the past shape our space of possibil- 11 Shoshana Felman/ Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routldegde, 1992), 78 12 Ibid 13 Ibid , 68 14 Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed D Morley/ K Chen (1988; London: Routledge, 1996), 442 224 J aN r upp 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 ities in the present and our orientation to the future ” 15 The aforementioned collection Voices from the ‘Jungle’: Stories from the Calais Refugee Camp is a case in point. It is divided into five sections, the first three of which are entitled “Home,” “Journeys,” and “Living in the ‘Jungle’,” respectively In the last two sections - “Living in and leaving the ‘Jungle’” as well as “Life after the Jungle” - the Calais writers move on to imagine a life after the camp and beyond their status as refugees The value of refugee writing as a cross between testimony and imaginative storytelling is equally (if not more) present when authors do not have direct experience as refugees themselves Indeed, a good many works of 21st-century refugee writing rely on “empathetic perspective-taking” 16 and the fictional imagination instead. As Agnes Woolley has argued, fiction may serve as “a site of contestation which offers alternative, non-coercive, narrative forums in which to explore the condition of statelessness ” 17 These alternative forums differ from certain real-life scenarios, such as the credible account of their reasons to flee that refugees are required to provide as part of their asylum claim, all the while having to adhere to highly regulated story patterns As opposed to these constraints of the asylum process, fictional narratives may thus serve as “hospitable representations,” 18 going at least some way towards compensating for the de facto lack of hospitality in many real-world contexts It is in this sense that I identify and speak of a general potential of ‘hospitable empathy’ in works of refugee writing, with authors (as well as readers) drawing on the power of the imagination to engage in perspective-taking and open up a more welcoming space The value of refugee writing in facilitating testimony and hospitable empathy is further emphasised, I suggest, by a set of extant literary works which have variously underwritten recent accounts 19 References to predecessor texts from a wide-ranging literary archive are among the most conspicuous features of 21st-century refugee writing Any number of examples could be cited of the way in which stories of refugees have been modelled on older pre-texts, broaching these as hospitable representations of current refugee migration Literary life in the Calais ‘Jungle’ and the camp’s makeshift li- 15 Meretoja, Ethics of Storytelling, 90, 95 16 Ibid , 3 17 Woolley, Asylum Narratives, 20 18 Ibid , 27 19 Narrative techniques that might (or might not) induce empathy have been explored by a large body of scholarship; see, e g , Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Rather than on specific textual cues, I primarily focus on the overall constellation of storytellers, readers, and extant narrative templates to locate hospitable empathy in refugee writing Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing 225 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 brary, called Jungle Books, might be cited once more While possibly a playful rather than programmatic allusion to Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, the library’s name is suggestive of various interpretations of how the colonial classic might reflect on the current status quo. For one, Kipling’s children’s book and its colonial provenance fit in with a larger narrative that positions 21st-century refugee migration as a symptom of global inequality and a legacy of colonialism. More specifically, as is well known, the colonialist trope of the jungle was used, in Kipling and elsewhere, to set up a binary distinction between civilisation and native anarchy, human and animal 20 In the Calais migrant camp, it can now be seen to emerge as an empowering trope of resistance, appropriated by refugees from places once identified as the colonial jungle, who in today’s climate of xenophobia are no less likely to be portrayed as animals than their ancestors While literature of and in the Calais ‘Jungle’ can be interpreted in revisionist terms, Kipling’s Jungle Book has also been taken up in a less antagonistic way At the Edinburgh Festival 2017, Kipling’s classic was adapted for the musical The Concrete Jungle Book, with Mowgli the orphan being reimagined as a modern-day refugee Separated from his mother, Mowgli is struggling to get by in a ‘jungle’ of urban concrete in the metropolitan West, which is shown to fail refugees and asylum seekers arriving on its shores Among others, this example demonstrates that new refugee writing has taken a less adversarial approach than works of postcolonial criticism have tended to suggest 21 Instead, relational and multidirectional constellations are brought to the fore, to borrow Michael Rothberg’s concept for convergent and mutually enabling rather than competitive memories 22 Developments of current refugee writing have indeed capitalised on principles of multiplicity and relation with older established texts In the process, antagonistic conceptions of the Western or European canon and of some of its central works are being revised Reconstructing a “relational mnemohistory” of Homer’s epics, Astrid Erll argues that “they are often erroneously cast as ‘European heritage’ or ‘foundations of the West ’” 23 By contrast, she 20 See Yasmin Ibrahim/ Anita Howarth, Calais and Its Border Politics: From Control to Demolition (New York/ London: Routledge, 2017) 21 See, e g , John Thieme’s Postcolonial Con-texts: Writing Back to the Canon (London/ New York: Continuum, 2001), even though Thieme’s study deals with a far broader range of responses than the metaphor of ‘writing back’ implies 22 See the title of Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009) for the Holocaust and decolonisation as a paradigm example of multidirectional memory 23 Astrid Erll, “Homer: A Relational Mnemohistory,” Memory Studies 11 3 (2018), 274 Referring to the concept’s use across a wide spectrum of disciplines, including phi- 226 J aN r upp 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 highlights “Near and Middle Eastern, and possibly Egyptian influences on Homer’s epics,” among others, to demonstrate that the latter in part emerged from, and continue to circulate well beyond, Europe Thus, “in twentieth-century literary history […] remediations of Homer flourished most in colonial and postcolonial situations ” 24 In Europe’s post-2015 refugee situation, the Odyssey arguably serves as an enabling and productive rather than limiting reference, too A similar relational network has been fleshed out for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Candace Barrington and Jonathan Hsy characterise it as “a text - or an assemblage of texts - that simultaneously reflects and constructs an entire world ” 25 They thoroughly extend or suspend Chaucer’s role as a national English poet, highlighting his extra-European settings and characters as well as his “wide world of cultural influences,” moreover emphasising “how pervasively his influences were filtered and reprocessed through layers of translation as they moved around the Mediterranean ” 26 From this perspective, the Canterbury Tales, like Homer’s Odyssey, emerges as a highly conducive and hospitable template to inscribe present-day accounts of refugee migration Proceeding to my case study, I will now analyse the role and conspicuous returns of Chaucer in 21st-century refugee writing Iconic and widely circulating works like The Canterbury Tales are an integral part of the “culturally available repertoire of narrative models in relation to which we (re) interpret our experiences and lives, the past and the future ” 27 As a relational and highly resonant narrative for modern times, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales has informed both testimonial and fictional narratives, adding to the ethical potential of current refugee writing 3 Hospitable Returns of Chaucer in 21st-Century Refugee Writing Like the Odyssey and the Aeneid, Chaucer is a frequent reference in current debates as well as in literary mediations of the refugee situation, both within and beyond the Anglophone world A great number of examples from the losophy, sociology, and postcolonial studies, Erll defines relationality as “describ[ing] an ongoing connectivity among diverse elements, which creates meaningful structures and at the same time transforms all elements involved” (ibid , 278) 24 Ibid , 278, 282 25 Candace Barrington/ Jonathan Hsy, “Editors’ Introduction: Chaucer’s Global Orbits and Global Communities,” Literature Compass 15 (2018), 2 26 Ibid 27 Meretoja, Ethics of Storytelling, 171 Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing 227 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 past couple of decades attest to the popularity that Chaucer’s œuvre and the Canterbury Tales in particular have gained in a wide variety of contexts 21st-century refugee writing or asylum narratives generally circumscribe a highly diverse field, including non-fictional genres and other media apart from literature The BBC adapted and updated Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in a six-part series of television dramas as early as 2003 One of the episodes is based on “The Man of Law’s Tale,” which is fast becoming a quintessential element of Chaucer’s medieval storytelling contest for present-day times The BBC version of “The Man of Law’s Tale” features a Nigerian refugee among its modern-day cast of characters, who is found hiding on a boat in Kent and becomes embroiled in a romantic relationship resisted by her lover’s family - not unlike in Chaucer’s original, in which Constance is washed ashore in the north of England en route from the Mediterranean By casting her mother-in-law and her lover’s former partner as Arab and African characters respectively, the BBC version elaborates on Constance’s racial diversity In this and other respects, it is not an example of strict textual “fidelity,” but still “faithful to tradition of the Constance legend,” 28 with a theme already present in Chaucer being enlarged and foregrounded in the latter-day television drama It and “Chaucer’s narrative may be considered companion pieces, instantiations of the Constance story, resonating with each other in essential ways ” 29 In a relational constellation, both adaptation and original undergo change, as “each version enriches an understanding of the other ” 30 Eventually, Chaucer’s tale emerges as a blueprint of cultural diversity and an early example of refugee migration, which is able to address and speak out against racism and xenophobia in today’s multi-ethnic Britain As for literary adaptations, a major book-length reworking of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales comes in Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales (2014) 31 An “inspired 21st-century Remix of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales” (blurb), Agbabi’s collection assembles a polyglot party of modern storytelling voices as well as a wide variety of styles from performance poetry to the sonnet A “cross-cultural Can- 28 Susan Yager, “The BBC ‘Man of Law’s Tale’: Faithful to the Tradition,” Literature and Belief 27 1 (2007), 58, 57 29 Ibid , 58 30 Ibid , 57 31 For Agbabi’s collection and Refugee Tales I have elaborated on an earlier reading in Jan Rupp, “21st-Century Refugee Writing as a Refraction of World Literature: Rerouting Multicultural Canons,” Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 31 2 (2020), 35- 51 228 J aN r upp 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 terbury Tales,” 32 Agbabi’s rewriting highlights characters and settings that gesture beyond England or Europe in Chaucer, like the BBC’s adaptation In addition, it is significant that Abgabi reproduces the tales’ cross-cultural content also in her fictive cast of storytellers, complete with flamboyant names and far-flung “author biographies.” 33 Among others, these include “Dr Kiranjeet Singh,” a “plastic surgeon with a passion for poetry,” “Missy Eglantine,” who was “born St Lucia/ raised in Lewisham/ R singer-rapper-poet,” and “Tim Canon-Yeo,” from “Singapore but schooled in the UK,” who “resides in Kent and writes a poem a day ” 34 Thoroughly diversifying what remains a domestic crop of pilgrims and storytelling contestants in Chaucer, Agbabi’s speakers travel on a “Routemaster bus” from “Tabard Inn to Canterbury Cathedral,” as announced in the collection’s “Prologue ” 35 As “poet pilgrims competing for free picks,” they retell “Chaucer’s Tales, track by track, here’s the remix/ from below the belt to the topnotch ” 36 Their cross-cultural competition can self-confidently take inspiration from Chaucer’s model, as Agbabi’s tongue-in-cheek reference in her acknowledgements makes clear: “Finally, I want to thank Geoffrey Chaucer for creating a literary work that defies time and space.” 37 Drawing on Chaucer allows for ‘telling’ tales in more than one sense, to take up the collection’s productively ambiguous title Telling Tales On the one hand, Agbabi’s tales are telling in that they reveal and pay homage to a long cross-cultural (pre-)history, dating back as far as Chaucer On the other hand, they constitute an empowering act of telling tales in the present, by speakers who share in the migrant or refugee experience of a character like Constance, and who on top of this (unlike Constance) are even given narrative agency themselves Having cross-cultural characters not only appear in, but actually tell her modern-day tales, Agbabi’s collection is a veritable ‘companion piece’ in its own right. Rather than a case of strict textual fidelity, it powerfully extends and transforms Chaucer’s original, similar to the BBC’s television drama In principle, the same is true of Refugee Tales as well, though here potentials for hospitality and hospitable empathy are even more pronounced For all its multiperspectival structure and imaginary cross-cultural poet pilgrims, Agbabi’s Telling Tales remains a single-authored text, seeking to trace and 32 See Patience Agbabi, “Stories in Stanza’d English: A Cross-Cultural Canterbury Tales,” Literature Compass 15 (2018), 1-8 33 Patience Agbabi, Telling Tales (London: Cannongate Books, 2014), 155-120 34 All ibid 35 Ibid , 2 36 Ibid 37 Ibid , 124 Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing 229 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 carve out a legacy of cultural diversity from within Chaucer By comparison, Refugee Tales relies on a de facto collaboration between British-resident writers and refugee testimony The stories collected in Refugee Tales are effectively co-produced, further extending cross-cultural multiperspectivity from the level of characters and extradiegetic narrators (as in Agbabi) to the level of authorship Refugee Tales is based on actual empathetic encounters and conversations between refugees and a go-between writer, who then goes on to communicate their experience to a wider reading public As a relational companion piece, too, this complex mediation of testimony significantly adds to reinscribing Chaucer in Refugee Tales In the process, Chaucer is thoroughly repositioned, as echoed by Marion Turner’s recent biography Chaucer, tellingly subtitled A European Life (2019) In it, Turner rejects a number of conventional associations of Chaucer as “a figure of Englishness” or as “father” of “a national literature.” 38 Instead, she stresses his European travels and influences, a relational network newly retrieved: Chaucer, indeed, has been much resurrected in ever more inventive ways in recent years No longer entombed and monumental, he is an inspiration for diverse writers around the globe Rather than thinking about Chaucer in his tomb, I’d like to think about him as the starting point for Refugee Tales, a collection published in 2016 that brings together contemporary politics, current writers, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales 39 Refugee Tales is an activist project first carried out in 2015, slightly ahead of that year’s historical curve of refugee migration into Europe It consisted not only in recording, but also in performing refugee stories on historic ground The tales were first read out while walking along the North Downs Way in Kent, which largely coincides with the ancient Pilgrims’ Way from London to Canterbury Annual walks and readings have continued ever since, with online video recordings of various stories adding to the project’s narrative archive Apart from the publication mentioned by Turner, two more book-length collections of stories have been released since 2016 Highlighting itineraries that link Chaucer’s pilgrims to elsewhere in the world, Refugee Tales retrieves a proto-cosmopolitan vision while simultaneously reflecting back on domestic conditions of immigration Facilitated by well-known multi-ethnic as well as mainstream writers in the UK - a “who is who of contemporary progressive 38 Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2019), 508 39 Ibid 230 J aN r upp 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 British writing in the age of transnational postcolonial globality” 40 -, the project protests indefinite immigration detention in particular, a practice unique in Europe, which allows the UK to hold migrants without a time limit The stories collected are by individuals who have direct experience of this policy In a physical space that typically excludes refugees, performing their tales opens up a cultural space contesting indefinite detention. Chaucerian connections in Refugee Tales concern its narrative set-up, its investment in language, its meditation on journeying and remapping of geography, and its construction of a new social community The project’s complex constellation of telling is signalled by its title, which is worth reproducing in full: Refugee Tales, as Told to Ali Smith, Patience Agbabi, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Inua Ellams and Many Others Both title and subtitle have the same structure in all three volumes of Refugee Tales (except for differing sets of contributors in the subtitle), thus foregrounding the collection’s status as a multi-authored volume, consisting of co-authored tales In a complex mediation of refugee testimony, the tales have been told to a go-between writer, such as Ali Smith and Patience Agbabi, in order to be retold and expanded by them in turn The original storytellers remain unnamed for various reasons, because they were too traumatised or did not want to be identified for fear of reprisal, and so were protected by activists and writers serving as community gatekeepers Refugee Tales III for the first time includes a number of first-person narratives, written by former detainees themselves Again, however, their identity is protected, with only their initials, such as “A,” “J,” or “F,” being provided as author names For the most part, Refugee Tales relies on what might be characterised as a heterobiographical rather than autobiographical mode, which is particularly conducive to empathetic perspective-taking 41 As in Chaucer, the writers contributing to Refugee Tales thus mediate life-stories of others and give expression to what otherwise might not get heard They perform an important function as interlocutors, witnessing and corroborating the refugees’ experience While chosen for reasons of gatekeeping, among others, this collaborative set-up might be criticised for not directly representing subaltern voices To be sure, this is a problem of long standing in literatures involving testimony or marginalised subject positions in terms 40 Dirk Wiemann, “Make English Sweet Again! Refugee Tales, or How Politics Comes Back to Literature,” Hard Times 101 1 (2018), 72 41 Drawing on Philippe Lejeune’s work, Lucia Boldrini, Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (London/ New York: Routledge, 2012), 9 defines heterobiography as a “collaborative autobiograph[y] in which the writer […] speaks of another in the first person,” effectively constituting a “collaboration between the two ‘I’s’ involved” (ibid , 10) Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing 231 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 of gender and race 42 Addressing such concerns, Helen Barr emphasises that “Refugee Tales is also a physical, bodily realization of The Canterbury Tales,” 43 in which refugees do have a direct, visible presence as part of the project’s walks and readings along the way Paradoxically, the fact that the refugees’ names are textually absent might not be seen to detract from, but in fact help to authenticate their accounts: “by signposting their names, the contributing writers make themselves accountable […] for the accuracy of the telling of the story,” with the “visible author” moreover serving as an “identifying device for the average reader,” 44 enabling the latter to share in the concrete encounters that many stories stage Indeed, Refugee Tales holds a significant potential for hospitable empathy, which derives from a close interaction of refugees with the project’s local activists and authors, as well as with previous experiences of migration as a multidirectional memory All this feeds into a relational act of Chaucerian storytelling mapped onto a global scale - “re-humanising some of the most vulnerable and demonised people on the planet,” as pointed out by an endorsement printed on the collection’s cover In challenging existing frameworks of immigration policy, Refugee Tales draws heavily from Chaucer’s role in establishing the vernacular as a literary idiom Where Chaucer not only painted a multi-faceted portrait of society, but popularised English at a time when sophisticated writing tended to appear in French or Latin, the project also seeks to develop a new language, away from the dehumanising discourse and practice of indefinite detention. Right away David Herd’s “Prologue” is a case in point In it, the tales to follow are characterised and signposted as: Stories of the new geography Stories of arrival Of unaccompanied minors Of people picked up and detained Networks of visitors and friends This new language we ask for Forming Strung out Along the North Downs Way 45 42 See John Beverly, “The Margin at the Center: On testimonio (testimonial narrative),” Modern Fiction Studies 35 1 (1989), 11-28 on problems of representation informing testimonial literature 43 Helen Barr, “Stories of the New Geography: The Refugee Tales,” Journal of Medieval Worlds 1 1 (2019), 105 44 Wiemann, “Make English Sweet Again,” 73, 74 45 David Herd/ Anna Pincus, eds , Refugee Tales (Manchester: Comma Press, 2016), vii-viii 232 J aN r upp 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 The collection’s collaborative set-up is crucial to this new language forming It uses the writers’ craft and the dialogical model of Chaucerian storytelling to construct these “networks of visitors and friends” in the first place, replacing the dehumanising discourse of indefinite detention with an alternative vision of convivial culture As much as on language, Refugee Tales capitalises on Chaucer’s intersection with international geographies and tales of journeying Several of the project’s stories draw on “The Man of Law’s Tale” in Chaucer, which is worth recapitulating in some more detail Constance or Custance, the story’s central character, is the emperor’s daughter in Rome She is married off to a Sultan in Syria, but the Sultan’s mother has him killed for turning his back on Islam Brutally widowed, Custance is made to leave Syria, flees across the Mediterranean and is eventually washed up on English shores She gets married for a second time, but again to the dismay of her (new) husband’s mother So Custance is displaced yet again and embarks on another perilous journey at sea Only at the very end, back in Rome, is she reunited with her English husband, the Northumbrian king Alla Unmistakably, this is a tale that resonates presciently with itineraries of current refugee migration The fact that “The Man of Law’s Tale” circulated across the Mediterranean long before Chaucer drew on it in translation creates an added significance, extending the relational network at play well beyond Chaucer 46 In Refugee Tales, Constance is invoked several times, such as in “The Migrant’s Tale, as told to Dragan Todorovic ” The tale is based on Todorovic’s conversation with Aziz, a young political refugee from Syria, who attempted to flee to Europe twice, only to be detained on his arrival in England. In alternating sections, Todorovic retells Aziz’ ordeal and constantly interweaves Custance’s original story, as a prism through which to interpret current events: “For days, for years floated this creature across the eastern Mediterranean, and into the Strait of Gibraltar - such was her fate Often she expected to die ” 47 Today, a similar kind of suffering has violently inscribed itself on Aziz: “He holds his upper arms and rocks back and forth Slow and steady, waves in the bay I’ve seen this same movement, this same posture, in other times and other cultures ” 48 History repeats itself, with the only redeeming factor that Aziz, similar to Custance, might ultimately hope to be rejoined with his family, who he has left behind in Syria 46 See Yager, “Faithful to the Tradition,” 56 on Chaucer’s sources for “The Man of Law’s Tale ” 47 Herd/ Pincus, Refugee Tales, 7 48 Ibid , 4 Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing 233 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 In whichever scenario, refugees like Aziz have little to expect from the law, as other stories in the collection make clear “The Lawyer’s Tale, as told to Stephen Collis” shifts attention from Constance’s story to its narrator, the eponymous Man of Law In a combination of critical commentary and lyrical passages, this time not based on a particular refugee’s story, Collis reflects on the Man of Law as a curious blank space in the pre-text: “Chaucer’s Man of Law tells us precious little about the law, or himself […] It is not clear what Constance’s story means to him, either personally or professionally ” 49 The Man of Law is an enigmatic figure and difficult to place indeed, just as legal representation or even basic human rights will be impossible to attain for many present-day refugees in a framework like indefinite detention. Chaucer’s Man of Law thus becomes symptomatic of a fundamental split between the law and any sense of compassion or moral justice, failing to attend to structures of global precarity that prompt people to flee their home in the first place. As Collis’ tale asserts: “the law sits/ a hooded falcon/ on whose arm/ privilege preys ” 50 Both Constance and the Man of Law in Chaucer’s tale ominously foreshadow the fate of refugees today “The Man of Law’s Tale” also features in Patience Agbabi’s Telling Tales, in which Constance is reimagined as a refugee from Zimbabwe Her time in England is retold deliberately from her mother-in-law’s point of view, who is pictured as an older woman from Newcastle: “I didn’t want all the tales to be delivered by sympathetic characters In fact, writing from a negative viewpoint was ultimately more rewarding because you had to work harder to engage the reader ” 51 In Agbabi’s version of the “The Man of Law’s Tale,” subtitled “Joined-Up Writing,” it soon becomes clear that the mother expresses some staunchly racist views in describing Constance: She wasn’t bonny, always overdressed, I’d never understand her when she spoke Not that I’m prejudiced, some of my best friends are foreign These days folk are folk but then was different: Constance was coloured, brown, a name so long you’d sweat to break it down 52 From Constance’s poor English to the spurious racist disclaimer “Not that I’m prejudiced,” this passage - the sestet of a sonnet - contains a number 49 Ibid , 108 50 Ibid , 117 51 Agbabi, “A Cross-Cultural Canterbury Tales,” 5 52 Agbabi, Telling Tales, 22 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 234 J aN r upp of familiar stereotypes The mother-in-law’s xenophobia is further thrown into relief by the quite regular, formal style of Agbabi’s use of the corona, a sequence of sonnets where every new first line picks up on the previous sonnet’s concluding line Agbabi exploits this formal principle to particular effect, demonstrating psychological repercussions for Constance as a result of her xenophobic experiences: Didn’t belong, nigh verging on a breakdown and Ollie, such a softy African She’d not talk much, her face a constant frown, must have been pity made him take her hand - raped, or so she said We were dead close, Ollie and me, until she came, from nowhere: whole house smelt of sadza; all his clothes designer labels; cut his bonny hair 53 In the (new) first line of this subsequent, third sonnet of the corona, Constance is “nigh verging on a breakdown ” This is linked back to her name being “so long you’d sweat to break it down,” as stated in the second sonnet’s concluding line In other words, her nervous breakdown is linked to the fact that people cannot break down, get their head around even Constance’s name The third sonnet then elaborates on the mother’s account, who generically refers to Constance as “African,” objects to her cooking smells, and suspects her of using “Black Magic ” Significantly, the voices featured in Telling Tales include not only migrants and refugees, but representatives of the host society, too The same is true of Refugee Tales, where readers get to hear, among others, “The Migrant’s Tale,” “The Chaplain’s Tale,” or “The Lorry Driver’s Tale,” all of whom figures who play important roles in the refugee process as well As in Chaucer, diverse social groups are bound together, working towards a viable community that is not established yet in the political arena: “In creating a space of appearance, and a polity out of the structural model of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, The Refugee Tales project reads back into Chaucer’s work a community of fellowship and common purpose ” 54 Even Constance’s racist mother in “Joined-Up Writing” is part of a multiperspectival community that Agbabi chooses to stage and contain, including its divisions and tensions Both Telling Tales and Refugee Tales thus provide a collective and reciprocal account of refugee migration, gesturing towards common effort while pointing up lingering chal- 53 Ibid , 23 54 Barr, “Stories of the New Geography,” 103 235 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0011 Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing lenges In both cases, Chaucer’s hospitable returns yield important modes of relation, afforded by his work as well as reflecting back on it. As a matter of their geographical scope and polyglot cast, the Canterbury Tales becomes a powerful model and metaphor for these new refugee writings 4 Conclusion: Literature as Refuge and Shelter in a Hardening World Works like Telling Tales and Refugee Tales provide ample evidence of the role and nature of refugee writing as a literature of survival, which I noted at the outset Like many other creative and activist projects, they give voice to life-saving stories of refugee testimony and facilitate empathy, going a long way towards rehumanising refugees in the light of exacerbating xenophobic sentiment and resurgent nationalisms around the globe It bears repeating that resonant and relational narratives like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are part and parcel of this literature of survival As I hope to have shown, they demonstrate the value of culturally available repertoires in launching hospitable representations at a time when hospitality in real-life contexts proves elusive As well as survival, refugee writing thus throws into relief the multiple ways in which “literature provides shelter,” 55 as Arundhati Roy has recently observed Revaluing literature in a “world that is rapidly hardening,” Roy includes in her commentary the extent to which “[c]apitalism’s gratuitous wars and sanctioned greed have jeopardised the planet and filled it with refugees.” 56 Responding to such developments, refugee writing is a literature of survival while offering a place of refuge and shelter at the same time Projecting and accommodating stories of refugee experience and existential struggle, refugee writing rearticulates the ethical potential of literature in a rather emphatic way If “[i]n the contemporary world, literature and art have lost much of their community-building force,” refugee writing offers a timely reminder of the “shared affectivity and the weaving of narrative fabrics […] central to art ” 57 Stories and characters from literature’s far-reaching archive, such as Chaucer’s international tableau of travellers, hold an important legitimising function and affective appeal They offer an instructive historical precedent and reaffirm the way in which “[l]iterature and the other arts have 55 Arundhati Roy, “Literature provides shelter That’s why we need it,” The Guardian, 13 May 2019, https: / / www theguardian com/ commentisfree/ 2019/ may/ 13/ arundhati-roy-literature-shelter-pen-america, n p 56 Ibid 57 Meretoja, Ethics of Storytelling, 118 power not only to strengthen existing social bonds but also to envision new social formations and relationships ” 58 At a time when social and cultural diversity are newly attacked, retrieving Chaucerian connections and a proto-cosmopolitan vista from works like the Canterbury Tales is a highly symbolic move Novels like Phillips’ A Distant Shore highlight the promise and power of literature and storytelling, too At the same time, many works of 21st-century refugee writing are informed by the pervasive number of bleak stories existing yet Solomon, Phillips’ protagonist, while having been able to tell and share parts of his story, is ultimately left dead in a ditch, murdered by racist thugs It will take political solutions as well as laws, rights, and a more equal distribution of wealth to address such deplorably familiar turns of events This being said, literature arguably has an indispensable role to play in envisioning more humane and hospitable responses to today’s hardening world Works Cited Agbabi, Patience Telling Tales Edinburgh: Cannongate Books, 2014 --- “Stories in Stanza’d English: A Cross-Cultural Canterbury Tales ” Literature Compass 15 (2018), 1-8 Bachmann-Medick, Doris/ Jens Kugele, eds Migration: Changing Concepts, Critical Approaches Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter, 2018 Barrington, Candace/ Jonathan Hsy “Chaucer’s Global Orbits and Global Communities ” Literature Compass 15 (2018), 1-12 Baumbach, Sibylle/ Herbert Grabes/ Ansgar Nünning, eds Literature and Values: Literature as a 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London: Amnesty International, 2006 [first performed]. Meretoja, Hanna The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible Oxford: OUP, 2018 Nünning, Vera Reading Fictions, Changing Minds: The Cognitive Value of Fiction Heidelberg: Winter, 2014 Phillips, Caryl A Distant Shore (2003) London: Vintage, 2004 Robertson, Joe/ Joe Murphy The Jungle London: Faber and Faber, 2017 Rothberg, Michael Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2009 Roy, Arundhati “Literature provides shelter That’s why we need it ” The Guardian, 13 May 2019, https: / / www theguardian com/ commentisfree/ 2019/ may/ 13/ arundhati-roy-literature-shelter-pen-america Accessed 19 June 2019 Rupp, Jan “21st-Century Refugee Writing as a Refraction of World Literature: Rerouting Multicultural Canons ” Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 31 2 (2020), 35-51 Thieme, John Postcolonial Con-texts: Writing Back to the Canon. London/ New York: Continuum, 2001 Turner, Marion Chaucer: A European Life Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2019 Wiemann, Dirk. “Make English Sweet Again! Refugee Tales, or How Politics Comes Back to Literature ” Hard Times 101 1 (2018), 68-76 Woolley, Agnes Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-First Century Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014 Yager, Susan “The BBC ‘Man of Law’s Tale’: Faithful to the Tradition ” Literature and Belief 27 1 (2007), 55-68 237 Telling Stories, Saving Lives: The Value of 21st-Century Refugee Writing 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 s usaN a rNdt P(r)oEthics: Imaginary In(ter)vention, FutureS, and the Agency of Dream*Hopes 1 Literature & Agencies Literature pleases and entertains, yet it is under no obligation to be always accommodating; it also unsettles, shocks and startles, with the potential to share ideas and moralities In doing so, literature lives in, and as, discourse, so much so that there is no literature beyond discourse Fictional characters, their (speech) acts, conflicts, and visions do not spring from a vacuum; rather, they emerge from spaces in time - that is, historical contexts - and respective situated knowledges and values Foucault proclaims the “death of the author ” 1 And yet, no author is ever an utterly powerless and mindless marionette of the discourse of her*his space*time Discourses have agency, but so do authors, which they practice by, for instance, addressing or silencing certain societal norm(alities) and respective ideas That is why authors, despite their “death,” are also alive and conscious beyond what Fredric Jameson calls the “political unconscious ” Roland Barthes, too, argues that “the author is dead”: The text lives in reading, and since no re-readings of a text are ever identical, meaning-making and hence textuality is an unstable process Moreover, while the reader has more than (just) a little say in what s*he can see in a text, and what not, all readings are positioned within specific power constellations and respectively coded knowledges and moralities “All things are subject to interpretation,” as Nietzsche puts it, “whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not of truth ” 2 Therefore, neither the reader nor the given textual realms exist beyond the discourse that encompasses both Hermeneutic circle meets butterfly effect: So long as texts and the readings thereof 1 Cf Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur? ,” Bulletin de la société française de philosophie 62 (1969), 73-104 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (London: CUP, 1982), 16 240 s usaN a rNdt 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 continue to change, contexts do, too Contexts change texts change readings change contexts change … This circle hosts a vibrant polylogue between discourse, reader, and author as well as all respective contexts Being an agent within that polylogue, the author is not dead, but rather a ghost that keeps haunting the scenery Thus tuned, literature triggers change by holding steadfast to its principle of keeping itself and humans (as well as their moralities and knowledges) in motion Literature does not merely mirror the conundrum of being human; it lives right in the thick of it Literature does not simply represent social processes; it shapes them as well Narrations range amongst “the most important ways of self-, senseand indeed world-making,” says Ansgar Nünning 3 Narrations shape “communities, nations, and selves, as well as conflicts, enemies, and wars ” Therefore, they “can […] be abused as ideological and propagandistic devices, as means of fostering collective delusions, and as ‘weapons of mass destruction ’” 4 William Blake’s celebrated claim comes to mind here that “The Foundation of Empire […] is Art and Science Remove them or Degrade them and the Empire is No more Empire follows Art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose ” 5 Likewise literature also has the potential to undo its ancestors’ wor(l)ds, to muse through past atrocities, thus reconfiguring moralities and respective minds/ ets This “persuasive power” of narratives “can alter beliefs of readers” and hence narratives “are important tools for spreading values, emotional dispositions and cognitive practices,” 6 writes Vera Nünning In the same vein, Ottmar Ette speaks of literature as “ÜberLebensWissen” that remains pertinent for generating human futures 7 In complementary fashion, Édouard Glissant’s “poétique de la relation” suggests that literatures inhabit a “tout monde,” an “all-world,” that keeps generating a “unity in diversity” by means of imagination 8 Glissant holds: “[S]omething in the imagination, in the imaginary” is able to “understand these phases and tangles, where the people in the world are located today ” 9 3 Ansgar Nünning, “My Narratology: An Interview with Ansgar Nünning,” DIEGESIS 4 1 (2015), 105 4 Ibid 5 William Blake, cited in: Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 12-13 6 Vera Nünning, “The Ethics of (Fictional) Form: Persuasiveness and Perspective Taking from the Point of View of Cognitive Literary Studies,” Arcadia 50 1 (2015), 38 7 Ottmar Ette, ÜberLebenswissen: Die Aufgabe der Philologie (Berlin: Kadmos, 2004) 8 Glissant, Èdouard, Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris: Éditions Gallimard 1996), 14, 71 9 Edouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010), 24 241 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 P(r)oEthics Glissant’s notion of imagination maintains that any knowledge is as diverse as it is incomplete and instable Unrestrained by the obligation to know, imagination can delve into the unknown as well as into what cannot (yet) be known; and even into the impossible Not bound to what is or might be possible, imagination can make things up: “Imagination is the very precondition of human freedom,” writes Richard Kearney, “to be free means to be able to surpass the empirical world as it is given here and now in order to project new possibilities of existence ” 10 Thus tuned, imagination equips all protagonists of the con*text*author*reader*discourse polylogue with the agency of in(ter)ventions, i e inventions that intervene. These in(ter)ventions display, reflect, and reconfigure moralities. This is what I call p(r)oEthics: a poetics that affirms the search for an ethics of freedom and justice. This p(r)oEthics keeps reflecting the dis*continuity of moralities, reconfiguring them on behalf of freedom and justice in the process Such p(r)oEthics is, amongst others, displayed in and via imagination; and this is what I wish to exemplify in the following by referring to Imagination and Maafa 2 Maafa and Imagination as In(ter)vention and P(r)oEthics “The greatest tragedy that can befall us,” Scott Momaday writes in The Man Made of Words (1997), “is to go unimagined ” 11 Of course, this is a figurative exaggeration The greatest tragedies, after all, are those that exceed imagination One of the possible German phrasings for the imperative “Imagine! ,” “Stell dir doch mal vor! ” is very frank on stressing “Das ist unvorstellbar (This cannot be imagined! ) This is beyond be-greifen; comprendre, grasping, to be known ” Just think of the atrocities of Shoah, meaning “catastrophe” in modern Hebrew, or Maafa, which is Kiswahili for “great tragedy” and refers to the European enslavement of Africans Yet no such word would ever enable us to truly know “The horror, the horror! ,” to cite Kurtz’s last words in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness 12 What cannot be comprehended in terms of grasping and knowing, though, can be approximated by narrativised emotion Vera Nünning’s “‘meta-affective’ value of fiction” comes to mind here that features the “nuanced language for understanding emotions and the complex scenarios in which they are embedded” 10 Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining from Husserl to Lyotard (London: HarperCollins Academic, 1991), 6, original emphasis 11 Scott N Momaday, The Ancient Child (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 55 12 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Edinburgh; Blackwood’s Magazine, 1899), part III, 12 242 s usaN a rNdt 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 as “an important part of the value of fiction.” 13 Emotions become a way of knowing (beyond) words by means of narrativising and contextualising them both ethically and aesthetically This is what Glissant’s notion of “imagine” is all about, as well: “Imagine two hundred human beings crammed into a space barely capable of containing a third of them. Imagine vomit, naked flesh, swarming lice, the dead stumped, the dying crouched ” 14 This “Imagine! ” invites its recipient to enter trauma - an emotion that flees from being felt, a memory that fights being remembered, a knowledge that does not want to be known It is imagination, in Glissant’s understanding, that offers the means to enter the (emotional) knowledge within trauma to whatever extent a person or a collective can manage, bear, survive Whereas this horror cannot be escaped physically (you may resist, but the body and soul are harmed nevertheless), the imagination thereof offers a way to combine both knowing and transcendence, facing and escaping, thus offering a wider range of individual agency within and beyond the horror Within the realm of imagination, you can close your eyes, leave the room, stop watching, skip the passage while reading, because you may not wish to imagine, to see, to know what is narrated Yet, whatever strategies are employed, a certain amount of picturing the scene imaginatively does happen I belong to those who evade reading passages or watching scenes that narrate brutality in a naturalistic way. And it is this watching-through-fingers aesthetics that is employed by Steven Spielberg in his film Amistad (1997) 15 The deportation of enslaved Africans as cargo in a ship’s hold is narrated via an “aesthetics” that conveys how enslaved humans suffer in the midst of the horror. The sound displays disturbing screams of pain, while flashing images show limbs, arms, faces They are synecdoches, featuring that humans are turned into a ware made of flesh. Moreover, body parts of different characters overlap, entangle, which evokes to see the enslaved Africans as rhizomatic collective In doing so, Spielberg’s Amistad performs Glissant’s aesthetics of imagination which claims that such a horror can neither be known nor understood - yet by being narrativised emotionally, it can be sensed into a new ethics This scene is, to me, a telling example of how imagination keeps entering my fantasy, taking me to the edge of the unimaginable, thus affecting my way of learning about the Maafa emotionally, triggering empathy and change 13 Cf Vera Nünning, “The Affective Value of Fiction: Presenting and Evoking Emotions,” Writing Emotions: Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature, eds Ingeborg Jandl et al (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2017), 50 14 Glissant, Poetics, 5, my emphasis 15 Stephen Spielberg, dir , Amistad (USA, 1993) 243 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 P(r)oEthics This “‘meta-affective’ value of fiction” (Vera Nünning) is also displayed by Bernardine Evaristo’s poststructuralist novel Blonde Roots (2008) 16 The novel turns well-known topological and temporal patterns upside down “Europa” is situated in the Global South and 16th-century feudalism, while “Amarika” features 19th-century plantation economy “Aphrika,” however, is turned into the enslaver’s continent Situated in the Global North, it inhabits Maafa’s dystopic future Again, the passage about the horrors of the Middle Passage triggers pain, and hence, my strategy of skim reading Yet by turning positions in Maafa upside down and making white persons endure the horrors of the Maafa, Blonde Roots forces me into leaving my trained comfort zone of skim reading While trying not to see the horror, I, somewhat aporetically, tried, on the other hand, eagerly to cast white people in this scenario In more than ten pages, the white focaliser, Doris Scagglethorpe, narrates what resonates powerfully with Glissant’s wording: white people “crammed into a space barely capable of containing a third of them”; white people vomiting, “naked flesh, swarming lice, the dead stumped, the dying crouched.” 17 Yet, no matter how hard I try to see all of this as being done to white people, my imagination fails me, making me see Black people instead And in my eagerness to follow the narrator’s lead and thus to imagine white people in the ship’s cargo hold, I overcome my strategy of skim reading, eventually imagining the horror more than I would usually accept to bear, emotionally This is, to me, a very powerful aesthetic strategy of emotional un*learning that also triggers the question: Why can I imagine a Black person in chains but not a white enslaved person? Because it did not happen like this? Or because this imagination would be afflicting my very own privileged white Self with this pain? The latter is a fearsome thought because it somewhat suggests that my imagination and emotional costume has been trained to see and feel such atrocities being done to Blacks, to Jews, but not to whites Evaristo’s imagination is, of course, far from proposing to enslave white people Rather, and somewhat paradoxically, the novel’s imagination claims that any such (Maafa) atrocity is “unvorstellbar,” unimaginable Evaristo’s p(r)oEthics triggers empathy and emotions for reflexivity in order to intervene into humanism’s morality that accepted the Maafa as naturally given and just While Evaristo’s p(r)oEthics reconfigures moralities by means of triggering pain, imagination’s in(ter)vention may also contribute to the un*making of moralities by spreading visions about healing Here, one of this planet’s most beautiful “Imagines” comes to mind - John Lennon’s from 1971: “Imagine all 16 Bernardine Evaristo, Blonde Roots (London: Riverhead/ Penguin, 2009) 17 Ibid , 5 244 s usaN a rNdt 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 the people/ Living life in peace ” And in line with Glissant’s “tout monde,” he continues: “Imagine all the people/ Sharing all the world ” While Evaristo’s “imagine” stresses, in line with Glissant’s imagination, that the horror of Maafa cannot be known yet sketched emotionally, Lennon’s imagine (also corresponding to Glissant’s notion) is about knowing that humans do not know yet how to share the world evenly and peacefully And yet, we can incubate it in our imagination, thus generating emotions that trigger agency towards it While Evaristo’s “imagine” is nightmarish, Lennon’s “imagine” invites the hearer to co-dream him or herself into a hope: “You may say I’m a dreamer/ But I’m not the only one/ I hope someday you’ll join us/ And the world will live as one ” 18 Evaristo’s and Lennon’s calls to “imagine” are, however, not antithetical In fact, the p(r)oEthics of disturbing and hoping are complementary and interactive modes of (affective) intervention that entangle both an imagining against and imagining into an evenly shared planet and respective futureS In the following, I wish to dig deeper into hopes and dreams as one specific mode of imagination against and into, delving into their capacities to inspire agencies of in(ter)vention, p(r)oEthics and the un*making of futureS 3 Dream*Hopes’ FutureS Dreams unfold visually and/ or verbally, ranging from all sorts of unconscious dreams (while sleeping) to daydreams; they might be nightmarish, displaying fears, or feature hopes narrating what is wanted, desired and/ or strived for. In the following, I focus on one specific type of dream only: dreams within the realm of the literary imagination that display and trigger hopes While dreams may easily exceed what is seemingly plausible in the very now, hopes tend to be more grounded in plausibilities The famous saying (often accredited to Aristotle) “hope is a waking dream” 19 suggests that a dream is a moment in an unconscious Now; yet, when holding on to it, a dream may turn into a more sustainable mode of hope It is in this very sense that I speak, in the following, of dream*hopes (the asterisk is to mark the complementary entanglement of the two concepts) As a joint venture, dream*hopes express individual as well as collective thoughts, images and sensations in various states, ranging all the way from sleep to speech, from likeability to unlikability, from the slightest to the high- 18 John Lennon, “Imagine” (New York: Apple Records, 1971) 19 This is a quote often attributed to Aristotle (4th century BC) by Diogenes Laërtius (3rd century AD), in Lives of Eminent Philosophers (London: W Heinemann, 1925), Book 5, Chapter 1, Verse 18 245 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 P(r)oEthics est form of fulfilment - thus displaying needs, ideas and desires. Whether composed by the human unconscious or uttered intentionally, dream*hopes are very outspoken about their very source: If, as Toni Morrison puts it in Playing in the Dark (1992), “The subject of the dream is the dreamer,” 20 then it can be said that dream*hopes are about dream*hopers These dream*hopers are socially positioned subjects who own power-coded agencies, and these very subject positions, in turn, inform their dream*hopes Ultimately, however, dream*hopes are much freer than their subjects, i e the dream*hoping person(s) Obviously, dream*hopes, just like humans, can be silenced, but they cannot be truly censored, nor can they be imprisoned, nor killed What is more, dream*hopes comment on “reality” without being hindered by its obstacles Dream*hopes offer and enter futureS without being expected to map the road or hand out the tools or manuals needed to realise them. Therefore, dream*hopes are even better qualified to narrate what should (not) be/ come (anymore) In this sense, dream*hopes are not agency per se, but they offer the agency to intervene, give orientation, resist, and affect change In spite of their residing beyond the realm of matter, dream*hopes materialise when they are translated into agency and actions In doing so, dream*hoping relies on knowledge as offered by memory Triggered by the Now and nourished by its memories, dream*hopes become collective, forceful and communicative motives, drives, orientations, and goals I dream because I can remember; I hope because I have come to know that alternatives are out there Thus tuned, dream*hopes disagree with Goya’s quintessential visual summary of the “Enlightenment,” suggesting that the “The Sleeping of Reason Produces Monster ” 21 Rather, dream*hopes are, to me, a mode of knowing on the move and, as such, vital agents in the generation of futureS I capitalise the “S” to stress that “future” does not exist in the (simplicity of any) singular: FutureS are causally intersected with both the past and the present as well as the respective power constellations that have shared futureS unevenly Throughout global historieS, some futureS have advanced and some hindered the other Therefore, the term futureS (with capitalised plural S) also addresses all the futureS that could not (yet) happen, because more powerful futureS have stolen them, thus preventing them from happening Moreover, the capital S is designed to stress that futureS do not happen; 20 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992), 17 21 Francisco Goya, Plate 43, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” from Los caprichos, 1799, the Metropolitan Museum of Art: https: / / www metmuseum org/ art/ collection/ search/ 338473 246 s usaN a rNdt 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 they are made - and unmade - by agencies that oppose the denial of history and the tautology of myths / insisting, as Roland Barthes puts it, that “[i]t is and will be like this because it is like this ” As for agencies of future-making, imagination in general and dream*hopes in particular have the capacity to enter, sense, and probe futureS Being able to enter the impossible may even advance into the resurrection of murdered futureS as well as spawning new ones In the following, I wish to explore imaginations in general and dream*hopes in particular To do so, I will discuss how imaginations manipulated Europe into accepting colonialism as a legitimate undertaking and how dream*hopes, on the other hand, have offered agencies as pathways into resisting colonialism and its aftermath I will therefore begin with delving into Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), and continue by touching upon Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival” (1978), Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech (1963), and J Cole’s song “Be free” (2014) in a more concise discussion 4 Post*colonial Imagination and Dream*Hopes in Literature 4.1 William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) 22 In The Tempest, Prospero rules over an island and reigns over Caliban, labelling him monstrous, cannibalistic, vicious, and animalistic While still offstage, Caliban is characterised by Prospero as “a freckled whelp, hag-born … not honoured with/ A human shape ” (1 2 283-284) Others call Caliban a monster, (2 2 31, 155, 159; 3 2 3, 4, 7, 24, 28; 5 1 258, passim ) a devil, (1 2 321; 2.2.58, 99, passim) a fish, a tortoise or some other kind of animal, (1.2.317, 1 2 283-4, 318; 2 2 25-6, 85, 107; 3 2 20, 28; 5 1 266, passim) or “a thing most brutish ” (1 2 359) These utterances have, throughout the centuries, often caused stage directors and artists to imagine Caliban as an animal-like creature, which crawls or hops 23 Still the question remains crucial: How can Caliban be so many things at the same time? Taking a closer look at the texture of this imagination quickly reveals one point: These negative attributes are invoked by the play’s white characters, while Caliban’s own speech and actions undermine these white gazes So, how reliable are the white characters’ gazes and labels, after all? 22 William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1611; London: Arden Shakespeare, 2000) Subsequent quotations from this play are referenced in parentheses in the text 23 Cf Harold Bloom, The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998) 247 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 P(r)oEthics They are not, I argue For one thing, they vary, noticeably, from one white character to another - without any one being more convincing or displaying more consistency than the other For another, their unreliability is supported by the following scene: Prospero’s magical powers create the illusion of a rich banquet (3 3 stage direction) Antonio, however, takes this banquet to be real In sheer ignorance of being tricked by an illusion, Antonio insists: “And I’ll be sworn ‘tis true: Travellers ne’er did lie,/ Though fools at home condemn ‘em ” (3 3 26-27) Antonio is unreliable 24 yet thinks that his (and all) travel accounts are reliable This is a sarcastic undermining of travel literature that also suggests that the gazes of the travellers in The Tempest might be unreliable in other respects, too Against this backdrop, Toni Morrison’s formula - “The subject of the dream is the dreamer” 25 comes to mind again, inducing us to ask: What do the gazes tell us about the gazing characters? Though miscellaneous, the labels converge in narrating Caliban as being non-human This is their smallest common denominator So, either Caliban is non-human (yet why then do the characters use different labels rather than calling him unitarily what he would be, species-wise) or his being non-human is an invention that serves a unitarily shared need on the part of the gazing characters Here, Frantz Fanon’s claim begins to deeply resonate The settler, i e coloniser, “paints the … [colonised, S A ] as a sort of quintessence of evil […] The … [colonised, S A ] is declared insensible to ethics ” At times this Manichaeism goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanises the colonised, using “zoological terms,” referring to the Black’s “bestiary ” 26 Thus tuned, I suggest that these utterances do not qualify Caliban but the colonial gaze and desire to define the colonial space and its subjects according to colonial needs as non-human and hence a terra nullius waiting to be exploited by Europe The strongest proof for this claim is the following first encounter-gaze on Caliban by Trinculo, which stages how he imagines Caliban in sequential flashes of inspiration: “What have we here, a man, or a fish? ” (2.2.24) So he starts off wondering, whether Caliban is human He makes a decision that he doubts from the outset: “A fish, he smells like fish […] a strange fish.” (2.2.25) It is not just reeking senses that guide his guess - an even stronger motif is in line with the economic desire of colonialism: 24 Antonio is not only untrustworthy because he takes an illusion to be the truth Moreover, Antonio is also not to be trusted in as far as he uses the voyage (and its unexpected turn) to attempt killing his brother, the king 25 Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 17 26 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961; London: Penguin, 1985), 32-33 I take the liberty to replace the translator’s “native” into contemporary postcolonial terminology, i e colonised or Black 248 s usaN a rNdt 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 [W]ere I in England now […] and had this fish painted; […] when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian […] I do now let loose my opinion; hold it no longer; this is no fish, but an islander […] (2.2.27-32) At first, Trinculo’s gaze marks Caliban as fish; however, when becoming aware that he could profit from Caliban’s status as colonial subject, Trinculo sees an ‘Indian’ (i.e. colonised) in Caliban (since he could even profit from a dead one, let alone a living one) This monologue manifests exactly how the colonial space was invented by Europe to legitimate its invasion: imagine them as nature (thus lacking culture); imagine them as monster and devilish (thus lacking morality); imagine them as animal (thus lacking humanity) This ‘imagine’ corresponds to Glissant’s idea that imagination is beyond knowing for certain; and yet, it simultaneously behaves as antithetical to Glissant’s imagination in that it functions as if ascertainable To Glissant, such a comprendre, which he accredits to anthropology and colonial epistemologies, displays a repressive meaning 27 inasmuch as it relies on a single, monologic story The colonial-gaze story about Caliban, thus configured, is pillared on a logic that is as simple as it is fatal: If the colonised were not humans, humanism would not be applicable to them Rather, they had to be colonised to be taught culture, morality, and how to be human (including the human longing for freedom) Thus tuned, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), 28 for example, spreads the narration that white people are entitled to own colonial territories and respective resources and that Friday volunteers to be a slave This colonial rhetoric is, however, subverted in Shakespeare’s The Tempest For one thing, Caliban claims that the island was his and that he is not willing to be Prospero’s slave The latter admits: “We cannot miss him: he does make our fire,/ Fetch in our wood and serves in offices/ That profit us.” (1.3.292- 294) Yet in his very first speech sequence, Caliban makes clear: “There is wood enough within” (1 3 315) - somewhat suggesting: Well, as for me, I do have enough firewood. Go and fetch your own. Caliban is resistant and Prospero knows he is: Caliban “never yields … [him, S A ] kind answer ” (1 3 308-30) And he does so in blank verse Complementing Caliban’s capacity to be resistant in high register English, there are other features that characterise him as being 27 Glissant, Poetics, 26 28 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719; London: W W Norton, 1994); cf Susan Arndt, “Rassist Robinson,” Tagesspiegel, 13 February 2017, www tagesspiegel de/ wissen/ kritische-editionen-von-kolonialromanen-rassist-robinson/ 19381006 html 249 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 P(r)oEthics human - doing so in a consistent way that suggests reliability after all with respect to “Who is Caliban? ” To begin with, upon seeing Ferdinand for the first time, Miranda says “This/ Is the Third man I e’er saw ” (1 2 445-6) Third man? Whom did she see before besides Prospero: Caliban Yet it is not only Miranda who knows Caliban to be human; Prospero does as well - somewhat against his ways of addressing and imagining Caliban terminologically For example, when he wants to ensure Miranda that Ferdinand is a human being, how does he characterise being human? “[I]t eats and sleeps, and hath such senses/ As we have.” (1.2 413-14) So why not apply this definition of Prospero to deduce whether Caliban is human? Well, Caliban eats, sleeps, and has senses As for eating, in his very first encounter with Prospero, when claiming that he is not up to fetching firewood for him, Caliban stresses that he is busy eating: “I must eat my dinner ” (1 2 331) Dining is way more human than animal-like eating As for sleeping, he does it as well, displaying senses in the process: Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices, That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming, The clouds, methought, would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again (3 2 136-153) Caliban’s capacity to dream attests to his having human senses and emotions What is more, his dreams imagine “open clouds” as a metaphor for freedom and “riches” as alluding to him owning the island Freed only in his dreams from being disowned and enslaved, he cries when awakened In the long run, however, his capacity to dream nourishes his hope of gaining freedom, which, in turn, triggers a sequence of actions Eventually, he manipulates Trinculo and Stephano into rioting against Prospero, by promising them the island as well as himself as their slave who will “fish for thee, and get thee wood enough ” (2 2 158) Yet it is a trick - and we know it is because we know that Caliban hates all of it, dreaming himself beyond it in a way that keeps triggering his resistance against Prospero What is more, he ends his false promises by singing: “No more dams I’ll make for fish/ Nor fetch in firing at requiring … Freedom, high-day; high-day freedom ” (2 2 176, 177, 181-182) The dramatic stage direction instructs that these lines be sung “drunkenly,” which has led to the overwhelming interpretation that Caliban is intoxicated by alcohol But what if one reads “drunkenly” as suggesting that Caliban merely feigns intoxication so as to only seemingly conform to the colonialist 250 s usaN a rNdt 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 illusion (as formerly practiced by Prospero and now uttered by Trinculo and Stephano) that the colonies could be won with “fire water,” i.e. liquor? Rather, the other way around, heaving learned his lesson after being manipulated by Prospero’s “water with berries” (1 2 340), it is now Caliban who tricks Trinculo and Stephano into an alliance in pursuit of his own dream*hope of eventually being free(d). He manages to do so by pretending to affirm their imagination that a colonial subject can be tricked into voluntary servitude like this, via liquor, while manipulating them into getting even more drunk Unlike Trinculo and Stephano, Prospero is not to be tricked that easily and ends the rebellion And yet, throughout his time on the island, he has learned his lesson: The colonialist imagination is misleading; Caliban is human and, as such, will never stop dream*hoping (of freedom) and hence cannot be controlled without violence and “crime ” Prospero therefore longs to eventually leave the island behind and to Caliban His epilogue is concluded by saying: “As you from crime would pardoned be,/ Let your indulgence set me free ” (Epilogue 19-20) Ultimately, the coloniser, against his will, might be read as sharing Caliban’s dream of ending colonialism This, however, would allow to position The Tempest as a scrutiny of colonialism At least it displays a warning that colonisation would not to be accomplished except through violence This warning, however, was not heeded by Europe Rather, Europe conquered the world, prospering in the process The futureS thus enabled devoured (possible) futureS of the Global South 4.2 Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival” (1978) 29 As for Maafa, for example, the deportation of millions of Africans devastated social and economic structures in Africa, while providing the labour that paid the bills for the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America Millions of enslaved Africans died, yet, collectively, they survived the trauma and stayed Dispersal grew into Black diasporas in the Americas and beyond, generating futureS for those who “were never meant to survive,” as the lyrical I in Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival” (1978) puts it These futureS, however, did not simply happen; they were made - made by being imagined and by subsequently giving rise to resistant agencies Dream*hopes had a major share in it, as Lorde’s lyrical I suggests It addresses dreams, praising its actors, i e “those of us who cannot indulge/ the passing dreams of choice ” (I 4-5) Stanza I stresses that dreaming is as lonely, 29 Audre Lorde, “A Litany for Survival,” The Black Unicorn (New York: Norton, 1978), 31-33 Subsequent quotations from this work are referenced in parentheses in the text 251 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 P(r)oEthics “alone” (I 3), as it is fragile: Dreams may fade out, “passing” and melting “like bread in our children’s mouths” (I 12), because dreamers lose faith in their hopes Yet due to its virtue of inhabiting what is seemingly impossible, dreams can recycle themselves, against all odds Inasmuch as bread melting in a mouth is also about nourishing (the survival of disillusionment), dreams and dreamers keep (re)emerging like phoenix from the ashes In this vein, Lorde’s lyrical I praises “those of us” who seek “a now that can breed/ futures” (I.10-11), “so” that “their dreams will not reflect the death of ours.” (I 13) Millions of dream(er)s might have died, yet, collectively, they have survived the death of their predecessors This is why dreamers and their dreams “live at the shoreline” (I 1), and “in doorways coming and going/ in the hours between dawns/ looking inward and outward/ at once before and after ” (I-6-9) Lorde’s dream(er)s are as errant as Glissant’s imagination, and as “crucial ” (I 3) After all, dreams are about “decision” (I 2) and “choice” (I 5), and about nothing less than “futures ” Stanzas II and III delve into the consequences of being silenced into an absence of dreams - with the consequence of being afraid to an extent that the cause of the fear is imagined as “illusion of some safety,” thus causing stagnation rather than alternate futureS Stanza IV, however, returns to the tone of empowerment of stanza I, now complementing the agency of dreams with that of memories: “So it is better to speak/ remembering/ we were never meant to survive ” (IV 1-3) The remembering here is a reminder that silence and its suppression of dreams endanger survival, whereas dreams enable survival where it is not meant to grow The interaction between remembering and dreams may also have a further dimension Memory can provide an alternative to what is now, thus becoming the bread that informs and nourishes new dreams This interaction between memory and dreams is at the centre of Martin Luther King’s celebrated 1963 speech “I have a dream,” which insists on dreaming as intervention into history and memory, its resultant NOW and respective futureS 4.3 Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” Speech (1963) and J. Cole’s “Be Free” (2014) 30 At the beginning of his speech, King reminds his addressees of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and 30 In the following I will use in-text quotation from, Martin Luther King, Jr “I Have a Dream,” Great Speeches by African Americans, ed James Daley (Mineola New York: Dover Publications, 2006), 111-115 and J Cole, “Be Free,” (SoundCloud 2014) Web 252 s usaN a rNdt 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 their respective promises and visions, stressing that these “promised” futureS have not yet been fully realised FuturE has remained a monolithic concept, securing white (until 1920, male) privilege only “[O]ne hundred years later,” King says, “the [Black] still is not free ” 31 (111) And yet, as King dreams: “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair ” (113) This take on history transcends the paralysis afflicting Benjamin’s “Angel of History.” “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet ” (257) In due consequence, the angel cannot access the future: “The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward ” (257-258) In contrast to Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” the Akan concept of memory, Sankofa, remembers in order to be able to “meet the future, undeterred ” Just as Sankofa plucks from the past that which is helpful to generate new futureS, King remembers past promises in order to translate them into the “fierce urgency of Now.” (112) Thus, the phrase “Now is the time” is repeated constantly throughout his speech 32 Stressing that the dream is dreamt in the now, due to its urgency, is another way of saying, past promises have not yet been fulfilled, and yet, we do not give up: we keep on dreaming “I still have a dream ” (114) In the little word “still,” a voice of agency proclaims itself, saying: We remember that we were abducted and were not meant to survive, and yet we did and persevered Therefore, we belong in the US, and the “American Dream” is also ours To King, 1963 is not just the historical result of the futureS of 1883 that did not happen, but also a beginning of new futureS Just like Lorde’s “those of us” who seek a “now that can breed/ futures” so that “their dreams will not reflect the death of ours,” King talks about Black lives not as closed narratives but as causal and open ones While Lorde com- 31 King spoke in accordance with the linguistic norms of his own time, hence his usage of the “n-word”; yet, in line with contemporary attempts at talking about racism without reproducing its violent words, I refrain from citing that word in this article and thus replace it with the word “Black ” 32 “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy Now is the time … Now is the time … Now is the time…” (112) King’s dream*hope of a ‘freedom to’ demands unlimited voting rights for Blacks, an end to “For whites only” signs and racist violence as well as equality in education and day-to-day life without discrimination, by police and otherwise Cf “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character ” (113) For police brutality cf also 112 253 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 P(r)oEthics pares dreams with bread that nourishes as it melts, King uses the metaphor of “stone”: “I have a dream today! This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope ” (114) Very much in line with the notion that “hope is a waking dream” King suggests that, although dreams may be imaginary, hopes can be hewed out, thus materialised, turned into faith, becoming as solid as stone in the process This dream*hope*faith’s objective is summarised in the concluding words of King’s speech, which somewhat echo Caliban’s vision of freedom “Freedom, high-day; high-day freedom” (2.2. 181-182): “Free at last! Free at last! … free at last.” (114) As a crucial criterion for his dream being eventually fulfilled, King mentions the end of “the unspeakable horrors of police brutality ” (112) The killing of Michael Brown by a policeman on 9 May 2014 in Ferguson is just one of many other similar incidents that bespeak the fact that King’s dream has not yet come true This is addressed, in an intertextual bow to King’s “I have a dream” speech, by the African American rapper J Cole in his song “Be Free” (2014) It concludes by asking, “A man can DREAM, can’t he? ” (03: 43) Cole’s question mark interrogates the exclamation point that rhetorically guides King’s core credo “I have a dream! ” It may sound less confident, but it insists on staying true to that dream nonetheless Along the texture of King’s dream of the end of police brutality, Cole’s song asks somewhat rhetorically: “Can you tell me why/ every time I step outside I see my people die? ” (00: 57) And he keeps echoing the freedom song: “All we wanna do is take the chains off… All we wanna do is be free ” In what follows after these verses, he mixes his song with a 4-minute excerpt from the official police report that demonstrates that Michael Brown was not a threat to anyone To conclude his song, Cole eventually asks, in reference to King’s conviction that equality can only be gained in solidarity with white people: “Are we all alone, fighting on our own? ” (01: 57) Again, this sounds somewhat rhetorical, thus questioning the availability of white solidarity Consequently, Cole subverts (the love of white leftists for) King’s pacifistic believing in “soul force” rather than “bitterness,” “hatred,” and “physical violence,” claiming: “I’m lettin’ you know that there ain’t no drink out there that can numb my soul ” This echoes Caliban being lured into slavery by Prospero’s “water with berries” (1 2 340), which makes him wary of repeating the mistake when encountering Trinculo and Stephano - thus pretending to be already drunk rather than becoming drunk Moreover, J Cole addresses that not even (police) violence can stop Black resistance: “I’m lettin’ you know that there ain’t no gun they make that can kill my soul ” (01: 01) Ultimately, Cole’s rhetorical 254 s usaN a rNdt 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 question “A man can DREAM, can’t he”? is a promise to do both: keep on remembering lost futureS and dream*hoping and fighting for evenly shared futureS Having discussed the power of dream*hoping with respect to colonialism and racism, in the closing section of my article, I wish to enter, in exemplary fashion, another realm of dream*hopes - that of Afrofuturist, environmentalist feminism as displayed by Wanuri Kahiu’s 2009 YouTube short film Pumzi 4.4 Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi (2009) 33 ‘DREAM DETECTED’… ‘Take your dream suppressant ’ (1: 12-1: 20) This digital voice is the techno-dictatorship speaking, displaying its fear of human dreams In her dream Asha longs to touch a tree, which she appears to not be able to So why is the techno-dictatorship afraid of it? The techno-dictatorship governs over a postapocalyptic settlement subsisting on the power generated through exercise machines transforming free human labour into energy It is called Maituu meaning “(mother) seed ” Yet Maituu is also a wordplay on “our truth”: The Kikuyu word for ‘truth’ is MA, and IITU means ‘OURS ’ “Our truth,” which the techno-dictatorship is pillared on, is that “The outside is dead” - a bone-dry nuclear wasteland Seemingly, all humans have bought that truth, living on their own recycled urine and sweat, which has become their world’s currency Within that system, Asha is privileged, working in the Virtual Natural History Museum It exhibits pictures of trees and artefacts of former life forms such as (dry) branches Although this memory is all that remains of vegetation, it is powerful nonetheless As suggested earlier, memory is the soil that nourishes dream*hopes of alternative futureS Whereas in Lorde’s “Litany for Survival” remembering is all about not forgetting the lingering pains of the now and King’s remembering concerns past promises, Pumzi features the memory of nature and its death Despite the museum’s narration of dead nature, in the museum’s palimpsest, the green nature is alive And it is the imagination thus provided that grants Asha the very knowledge needed to imagine a tree in her very Now Thus equipped, she can dream of and long for it, so that what might seem to be a void (i e that she fails to touch the tree) eventually turns out to be a success inasmuch as the dream is already a thinking beyond the possible Furthermore, her dream triggers a hope that eventually turns into resistance 33 Wanuri Kahiu, Pumzi (2009; YouTube, 2012), www youtube com/ watch? v=IlR7l_B86Fc In the following, the short film is referenced in parentheses in the text. 255 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 P(r)oEthics Shortly after her first dream and her taking the dream suppressants somewhat pain-driven, Asha discovers a soil sample with an “abnormally high water content” (5: 06) and without “radioactivity ” (5: 22) Having touched the soil, Asha embarks upon dreaming again This time, however, the dream starts off nightmarishly, featuring Asha as drowning This may be read as the dream suppressant’s effectivity Likewise, Asha awakens once her nightmarish dream eventually turns into the former dream with a happy Asha reaching out her hand to touch the tree Yet, upon awaking, Asha pursues her dream nevertheless, suppressing the dream suppressants Thus, the soil of memory turns the seed of dream*hope into the bloom of action: Asha waters the soil and adds a seed, which, at the museum, is viewed as a mere artefact of memory In doing so, she turns soil and seed into a hope for futureS Obviously, the dream has finally and irrevocably won Asha over. All hyped and triggered, Asha insists on sharing her dream*hope with the Council and on pursuing it outside Maituu This request, however, is denied on account of Maituu’s constitutive truth: “This is impossible! … The outside is dead! ” (07: 05; 07: 54-07: 56) Nevertheless, that this alleged impossibility is not true is displayed by the seed*soil’s own truth A seedling has sprung, leading Asha to protest: “But the soil is alive! ” (8: 27-8: 38) To convince the Council, Asha casts her dream on the interface screen, which only results in being ordered to take her dream suppressants again. Eventually, she is fired and sentenced to labour at the exercise machines Yet irreversibly energised by the dream*hope, Asha resists and flees, determined to sow the seedling at the soil’s very origin, which turns out to be in the middle of the desert She crosses it, exhausting herself Neither eating nor drinking herself, she waters the seed while herself nourished by her dream*hope Though ending up meeting “her tree” dried up and dead, Asha keeps dream*hoping She plants the seed, nurturing it with water recycled from her body, shading it with her body The happy ending is when a trans*species human*tree eventually becomes a forest “Pumzi” is the Kiswahili word for “breath” and breath it is that Asha is giving to the world Photosynthetically, human exhalation provides trees and plants with CO 2 , while inhaling the O 2 emitted in return Metaphorically, this is the symbiosis that ultimately outwits and outlives the techno-dictatorship, thus reviving futureS declared to be dead. Donating her bodily fluids for the survival of her seedling is a trans*species idea of inhabiting the planet - which seems to be its last chance indeed 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 256 s usaN a rNdt 5 Imaginations in Literatures and Its Studies My paper has walked all the way from literature via imagination to dream*hopes that can undo the ablation of futureS And it did so because of wishing to argue that this is a most precious value of literature: It imagines invention in order to intervene, while displaying the agency of dream*hopes that are nourished by emotions and empathy, while reflecting moralities, p(r)o-Ethically One of the major ingredients of the power of literature is the power of imagination in general and dream*hopes in particular Emancipated from the obsession with any “I know, therefore I am,” imagination and dream*hopes lend literature the capacity to enter the unknown, errantly; to think outside the box and to visit the impossible - and to inhabit such realms is what keeps horizons distant enough to keep us moving - overcoming histories, entering futureS, undeterred There is no end to dream*hoping imaginations in literatures We are what we imagine, dream, hope; and we will be what we will have imagined, dreamed, hoped, imagined Faust’s idea of arriving in a moment you eventually long to “linger on” is not what literature is all about 34 The value of literature, to me, is its being an open book that is true to itself by keeping itself and moralities of being human in motion, thus generating “empathy …which encompasses both affective and cognitive processes” 35 towards change This p(r)oEthics is, in turn, consequently echoed by the study of literature in general and (contextual) narratology in particular “An alliance between narratology and cultural history can,” as Ansgar Nünning puts it, “open up productive new possibilities for the analysis both of the dialogic relationship between novels and their cultural contexts and of the epistemological, historical, and cultural implications of narrative strategies 36 - and, as I wish to add, ethical ones In doing so, contextual narratology does not merely analyse literary imagination, its dream*hoping, and other whereabouts of literature; it scrutinises and multiplies it, thus affecting literature and its impact on the 34 Cf Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie erster Teil (1699-1700; digital edition, Würzburg, 2018), https: / / www uni-wuerzburg de/ aktuelles/ pressemitteilungen/ single/ news/ goethes-faust-als-digitale-edition/ 35 Nünning, “The Ethics of the (Fictional) Form,” 40 36 Nünning, Ansgar, “Surveying Contextualist and Cultural Narratologies: Towards an Outline of Approaches, Concepts and Potentials,” Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research, eds Sandra Heinen/ Roy Sommer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 53 257 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 P(r)oEthics conundrum of becoming human 37 Ultimately, the tools offered by contextual narratology, and literary studies in general, are not only capable of approaching the con/ text*author*reader*discourse polylogue; rather, they are to be acknowledged as another vital agent thereof In other words, literary studies itself affects epistemologies and moralities, thus being a core agent of wor(l)d-making In doing so, “literary narrative theory should foster,” as Ansgar Nünning suggests, “a more sustained dialogue with narrative research in other disciplines ” 38 What is more, self-reflexivity is needed which “not only looks at the cultural variability and historical development of narrative forms and genres, but also considers the historicity, and cultural specificities, of its own approaches, concepts and methods ” 39 Thus tuned, literary studies will have a role in sharing planetary futureS more evenly They do not only scrutinise and amplify the moralities of literatures; they generate their own, p(r)o-Ethically “You may say I am a dreamer, but [I Hope] I am not the only one ” Works Cited Achebe, Chinua Things Fall Apart. New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 2002 Adam, Barbara “Future Matters: Challenge for Social Theory and Social Inquiry ” Cultura e comunicazione 1 (2010), 47-55 Adam, Barbara/ Chris Groves Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics Leiden: Brill, 2007 Arndt, Susan Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen. Rassismus. München: C H Beck, 2012 --- “Rassist Robinson ” Tagesspiegel, 13 February 2017, https: / / www tagesspiegel de/ wissen/ kritische-editionen-von-kolonialromanen-rassist-robinson/ 19381006 html Accessed 26 December 2019 Arndt, Susan/ Shirin Assa “Afrikanische Diasporas zwischen Humanismus, Aufklärung und Transatlantische Modernen ” Literatur und Transnationalität Eds Doerte Bischof/ Susanne Komfort-Hein Handbücher zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Philologie Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019, 351-365 Barthes, Roland Mythologies Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1957 Behn, Aphra Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave (1688) Boston: Bedford/ St Martin’s, 2000 Benjamin, Walter “Über den Begriff der Geschichte ” Walter Benjamin. Allegorien kultureller Erfahrung. Ausgewählte Schriften 1920-1940 Ed Sebastian Kleinschmidt Leipzig: Reclam, 1984, 156-169 --- “Theses on the Philosophy of History ” Illuminations. (1940) By Walter Benjamin Ed Hannah Arendt Trans Harry Zohn New York: Schocken Books, 1969, 253-264 37 Cf Gerald Prince, “On a Postcolonial Narratology,” A Companion to Narrative Theory, eds James Phelan/ Peter J Rabinowitz (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 372-381 38 Nünning, “My Narratology,” 105 39 Ibid , 107 Blake, William “The Little Black Boy ” William Blake’s Songs of Innocence In The Essential Blake. Selected and arranged, with an introduction, by Alfred Kazin London: Chatto Windus, 1946, 86-87 --- “Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses ” Poetry and Prose of William Blake Ed Geoffrey Keynes London: Nonesuch Library, 1961, 770 Brubaker, Rogers “Categories of Analysis and Categories of Practice: A Note on the Study of Muslims in European Countries of Immigration ” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36 1 (2012), 1-8 Brubaker, Roger/ Frederick Cooper “Beyond ‘Identity’ ” Theory and Society 29 1 (2000), 4-6 Cole, J “Be Free ” SoundCloud, 2014 www youtube com/ watch? v=DBPRq4sFqOI Accessed 20 March 2017 Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe. (1719) Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998 D’Aguiar, Fred The Longest Memory London: Vintage Books, 2006 Diogenes Laërtius The Lives of Eminent Philosophers Ed and trans R D Hicks London: W Heinemann, 1925 Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845). 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Digital edition Eds Anne Bohnenkamp/ Silke Henkel/ Fotis Jannidis Würzburg, 2018 www faustedition net/ Goya, Francisco Plate 43, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters ” Los Caprichos, 1799 The Metropolitan Museum of Art https: / / www metmuseum org/ art/ collection/ search/ 338473 Accessed 27 December 2019 Groves, Chris Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics Leiden: Brill, 2007 Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte / Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Stuttgart: Universal Bibliothek, 1961 Jacobs, Harriet A Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. (1861) Ed Lydia Maria Child Edstone, Warwickshire: Coda, 2011 Kahiu, Wanuri Pumzi (2009) YouTube, 07 December 2012 https: / / www youtube com/ watch? v=IlR7l_B86Fc Accessed 26 December 2019 Kayper-Mensah, Albert W “Sankofa ” Sankofa: Adinkra Poems. Ed id Ghana Pub , 1976 King, Martin, Luther, Jr “I Have a Dream ” Great Speeches by African Americans. Ed James Daley Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006, 111-115 Klee, Paul “Angelus Novus ” 1920 Israel Museum, Jerusalem 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 258 s usaN a rNdt 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0012 Letterman, David, dir The Late Show with David Letterman. Prod CBS 10 Dec 2014 Web Accessed 17 March 2017 Li, Victor The Neo-Primitivist Turn: Critical Reflections on Alterity, Culture, and Modernity Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006 Lorde, Audre “A Litany for Survival ” The Black Unicorn. New York: Norton, 1978, 31-33 Mensah, Albert W Sankofa: Adinkra Poems Tema: Ghana Pub , 1976 Milton, John Paradise Lost. (1667) Ed Barbara K Lewalski Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007 Momaday, Scott N The Ancient Child. New York: Doubleday, 1989 --- “The Man Made of Words ” Indian Voices: First Convocation of American Indian Scholars Eds Costo Rupert et al San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1970, 49-63 Morrison, Toni Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992 Nünning, Ansgar “Surveying Contextualist and Cultural Narratologies: Towards an Outline of Approaches, Concepts and Potentials ” Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research Eds Sandra Heinen/ Roy Sommer Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009, 48-70 Nünning, Ansgar “My Narratology: An Interview with Ansgar Nünning ” DIEGESIS. Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research 4 1 (2015), 104-109 Nünning, Vera “The Ethics of Fictional Form: Persuasiveness and Perspective Taking from the Point of View of Cognitive Literary Studies ” Arcadia 50 1 (2015), 37-56 --- “The Affective Value of Fiction: Presenting and Evoking Emotions ” Writing Emotions: Theoretical Concepts and Selected Case Studies in Literature Eds Ingeborg Jandl/ Susanne Knaller/ Sabine Schönfellner/ Gudrun Tockner Bielefeld: Transcript, 2017, 29-54 Prince, Gerald “On a Postcolonial Narratology 2 A Companion to Narrative Theory Eds James Phelan/ Peter J Rabinowitz Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005, 372-381 Said, Edward Culture and Imperialism London: Vintage, 1994 259 P(r)oEthics 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 h ubert z apF Literature, Sustainability, and Survival 1 Literature and Survival It may at first sound counterintuitive to connect literature - often seen as a phenomenon of culture not vitally relevant to the necessities of life - with the question of survival Yet there is evidence from various disciplines that the well-worn stereotype of the basic irrelevance of literature to the serious issues of survival is becoming questionable In the biocultural theory of literature as advocated by Nancy Easterlin, for example, art and narrative enact a significant evolutionary function not only by providing orientation and coordinating group behavior but also by creating polysemic symbolic objects or stories which helped to develop a sense of the complexities and “cognitive ambiguities” that were important for the development of the brain and of higher-order social organisation As she writes in her article “The Functions of Literature and the Evolution of Extended Mind”: Concerned with survival, evolutionary theory focuses on the functional value of species traits, since organisms that have the physical, psychical, and behavioral traits ‘designed’ to help them operate efficiently in their environment will help them endure. Traits that require significant investments of time and physiological effort, such as bipedal locomotion, are ‘expensive’ in evolutionary terms, and the puzzle of their selective advantage is particularly intriguing Art behaviors, such as the production, distribution, and consumption of literary artifacts, are enormously expensive Most evolutionary scholars take the view that, given their costliness, the arts must contribute to human survival 1 And she continues: “If the arts have contributed to human survival over the course of evolution, it is likely that they still do so, and if they have had such a fundamental role in the shaping and continuity of our species, then the marginalisation of literature and other arts today seems grotesquely ill-advised ” 2 1 Nancy Easterlin, “The Functions of Literature and the Evolution of Extended Mind,” New Literary History 44 4 (2013), 662-663 2 Ibid 262 h ubert z apF 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 The neurobiologist Antonio Damasio sees the surplus value of art and of the literary imagination in the “homoeostatic impulse” which propels ahead cultural development by detecting, notably in the form of storytelling, “imbalances in the life process” caused by social and cultural disruptions In transacting these imbalances in narrative conflicts and scenarios of crisis, this homoeostatic sensorium of literature becomes an important force of continual self-correction and self-transformation in culture that makes it possible “to rehearse specific aspects of life and […] to exercise moral judgement and moral action ” 3 In this sense, Damasio contends that “the arts prevailed in evolution because they had survival value and contributed to the development of the notion of well-being ” The notion of well-being here already points to a cultural dimension of survival that exceeds the mere physical survival of individuals and the species, as it invokes the concept of the ‘good life’ that has been centrally discussed in philosophical ethics and has remained an important reference point in contemporary literary ethics and ecology as well in connection with the larger question of cultural sustainability Before I address this cultural dimension of survival in a more sustained way, it is worth mentioning that literature and the arts do seem to have a physical, bodily, and medical survival value as well A recent statistical study at Yale, for instance, indicating that regular reading tends to prolong life significantly, has been seen as a welcome argument for book culture in a time of digital and media cultures 4 In a psychological sense, the survival value of art and literature for concrete individuals is indicated by numerous cases of writing as autotherapeutic practice, with Goethe’s Werther as one famous example. The narrative doubling of the self in a poetics of fictional reinvention seems to liberate the writer’s psyche from its immediate pressures and thus allows what Damasio calls the “extended consciousness” of the imagination to unfold its resilient potential of dealing with crisis and trauma In a collective, sociohistorical sense, this potential has been associated with national literary cultures such as the literature of Canada, which has been explicitly if controversially claimed by Margaret Atwood to be shaped by the defining trope of survival, but also more generally in postcolonial studies has been linked to the literary response to colonisation, slavery, and dispossession, which characteristically combines the living memory of the traumatic 3 Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Mariner Books, 2010), 292 4 Amy Ellis Nutt, “The Best Reason for Reading? Book Lovers Live Longer, Scientists Say,” Washington Post, 09 August 2016, https: / / communications yale edu/ sites/ default/ files/ 08.09.2016_the_best_reason_for_reading_book_lovers_live_longer_scientists_say _the_washington_post pdf, n p Literature, Sustainability, and Survival 263 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 past with a search for new beginnings The resilient potential of art and literature has likewise been discussed in relation to totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, and even in the extreme case of the Shoah, as a desperate form of creative response that aimed at least in writing to survive the annihilating forces of history I cannot go here into the troubled relation between art and the holocaust, which is in itself a vast and multifaceted field of research, but would just point out that, as examples such as Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz or Ruth Klüger’s Weiter leben indicate, the memorising of literary texts from Homer and Dante to Schiller’s ballads seems to have been a remarkable source of spiritual strength, and that even under the extreme circumstances of the camps, artistic creativity, as far as it was possible at all, provided a desperate form of maintaining a residual sense of self and humanity in the midst of its utter negation The vital role of artistic creativity for holocaust victims was officially documented in the 2010 Yad Vashem exhibition Virtues of Memory: Six Decades of Holocaust Survivors’ Creativity, which showcased the “artistic expression of individual survivors” that at the same time served as “a legacy to others,” as the official comment on the exhibition explains. 5 2 Literature and the Ecological Crisis I would however like to focus on a specific contemporary context in which the relation between literature and survival has gained still another dimension, the context of ecology In the face of the environmental crisis that has moved into the public awareness in the early 21st century as a threat to the survival not only of human beings but of life on the planet, it has become more urgent than ever to define what the response of literature to this crisis should be, and what forms and genres of literary narrative appear adequate to this challenge Already in the 1970s, Joseph Meeker addressed this topic in his book The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic, one of the influential works of ecocriticism 6 Meeker argued that a dominant strain of the Western literary tradition, inasmuch as it revolved around the genre of tragedy and the noble actions and heroic deaths of great individuals, was to a significant extent responsible for shaping an anthropocentric ideology of moral superiority that led to the exploitation and degradation of nature - and of other 5 Yad Vashem, “‘Virtues of Memory: Six Decades of Holocaust Survivors’ Creativity’: Hundreds of creative artworks to be displayed in new Yad Vashem Exhibition,” press release, 11 April 2010, www yadvashem org/ press-release/ 06-april-2010-09-24 html, n p 6 Joseph Meeker, The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic (Phoenix: U of Arizona P, 1997) 264 h ubert z apF 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 peoples and cultures - whose disastrous consequences we are confronting today An ethologist and comparatist literary scholar, Meeker contends that the comic mode, often considered as minor in the Western tradition, provides an alternative, more ecologically-inspired vision of the place of humans in life and nature, as it celebrates survival rather than self-sacrifice, improvisational compromise rather than uncompromising conflict, pragmatic tolerance of plurality and imperfection rather than moral perfectionism as its generic features. In this affirmative and basically cooperative attitude towards one’s own life and to life in general, this play ethics of comedy, according to Meeker, corresponds to the principles of ecology and evolution much more than tragedy Tragedy focuses on an individual hero who “suffers and dies for his ideals, while the comic hero survives without them,” because comedy is aware of the multiple dependencies necessary for the sustenance of life Meeker therefore calls for revising the tragic-heroic mode in favor of the comic, life-affirming mode that was prevalent in premodern times and non-Western cultures in trickster tales and narratives of human-animal-metamorphoses, but also in exceptional cases of the Western canon such as Dante’s Divina Commedia or in the picaresque traditions of Western writing: “Picaresque life,” he argues, “is animal existence augmented by the imaginative and adaptive powers of the human mind ” I think that Meeker’s ideas are provocative and persuasive to an extent, but he overstates his point and underestimates the potential of genres and art forms other than comedy likewise to perform the function of a life-adaptive creative self-renewal that he solely attributes to comedy In fact, key texts of the literary archive across different genres can be described from an ecological perspective Shakespeare’s plays, including his tragedies, have been analysed within an ecocritical framework, 7 as has Goethe’s Faust, which has become a frequent reference for ecocritical German Studies A prominent example from my own field of American literature is Melville’s Moby Dick, in which the tragic-heroic mode turns into a critical parable of anthropocentric hybris personified in Captain Ahab, whose self-destructive demonisation of the White Whale is counteracted by the narrator Ishmael’s awareness of the interconnectivity of all life, of what he calls humans’ “Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals ” 8 It is its polyphonic, multigeneric composition that turns the novel into a complex assessment of the precarious place of human civilisation on the planet And it is the narrator who relates the story 7 Randall Martin, Shakespeare and Ecology (Oxford: OUP, 2015) 8 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or, The Whale (1981; Boston: Riverside, 1956), 254 Literature, Sustainability, and Survival 265 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 of his survival of the catastrophe as a cautionary tale to the reader which anticipates contemporary narratives of environmental disaster What is also problematic about Meeker’s approach is that the pragmatic play ethic he advocates lacks one important part of any ethics - the concept of responsibility What Hans Jonas calls Das Prinzip Verantwortung, the ‘principle of responsibility’ as a new categorical imperative in times of environmental crisis, necessitates ongoing reflection on those higher ethical values that Meeker wants to eliminate from his comic literary playworlds 9 This becomes evident when Meeker approvingly quotes a passage from Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 about an old Italian whoremaster who first served the Nazis and later the Americans in occupied Italy in the Second World War, commenting that “I was fanatically for the Germans when they protected us against the Americans, and now that the Americans are protecting us against the Germans, I am fanatically pro-American ” Here, the limits of Meeker’s endorsement of pragmatic muddling through, of the primacy of mere physical versus ethical forms of survival become obvious On the other hand, the uncompromising postulation of responsibility towards planetary life can itself turn into a dogmatic and indeed destructive mindset, as in the case of the bioengineer Crake in Margaret Atwood’s Madd- Addam trilogy of speculative fiction, in which Crake eliminates the existing human species in a pharmaceutical mass murder to replace it with a genetically engineered, environmental-friendly posthuman species in order to save the earth from destruction by a hopelessly greedy and egocentric humanity 10 The ethical challenge of the trilogy consists in the paradox that the consequences of such an apocalyptic ecocentrism are as unsettling as the dystopian scenarios of the future of our civilisation that the novels depict 3 Cultural Ecology and the Sustainability of Texts The ecological dimension of literature, and its potential of contributing to cultural sustainability and survival, is thus not limited to a certain genre but is a general feature of imaginative texts, as I have tried to argue in my work on cultural ecology. I will confine myself here to a few summarising remarks on the relation between cultural ecology and sustainability, which is specifically addressed in my 2016 book on Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts 11 9 Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung: Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1979) 10 Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (London: Virago Press, 2003) 11 Hubert Zapf, Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts (London et al : Bloomsbury, 2016) 266 h ubert z apF 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 A basic assumption of cultural ecology is that imaginative texts are not only a preferred medium of representing the culture-nature relationship but that in their aesthetic transformation of experience, they act like an ecological force in the larger system of cultural discourses Building on Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind and his idea of the ‘patterns which connect’ diverse domains of life and mind beyond their disciplinary separation 12 , and on Peter Finke’s notion of ‘cultural ecosystems’ as an autopoietic sphere of human self-organisation that links external environments to the internal worlds of language, communication, and imagination, 13 literature is conceived as a particularly potent form of cultural ecology, which exhibits a special sensitivity to those connecting patterns across established boundaries of discourse, relating mind to life, cultural to natural ecosystems, human to more-than-human domains in complex forms of embodied interactivity Literary texts provide a transformative site of cultural self-reflection and self-exploration, in which the historically marginalised and excluded is semiotically empowered and activated as a source of artistic creativity and is thus reconnected to the larger cultural system in both deconstructive and reconstructive ways This cultural-ecological function relates, on the one hand, to the historical process of which literature is part and to which it responds Wolfgang Iser has described this process not in terms of a binary opposition between fiction and reality but as a triadic relation between the Real, the Fictive, and the Imaginary, in which the Fictive is a cultural form mediating the institutionalised pressures of the Real with the anarchic and amorphous impulses of the Imaginary 14 This model ascribes to literature the function of critically balancing one-sided developments of the civilisational process and testing out unrealised possibilities in the alternative scenarios of imaginative worlds It is adapted to cultural ecology by extending Iser’s anthropological imaginary, which has its sole basis in the human subject, towards an ecological imaginary, which opens the text-culture relationship to the ‘patterns which connect’ (Bateson) subjective and objective, human and nonhuman worlds in forms of life-sustaining interactivity The cultural-ecological potential of texts also relates, on the other hand, to the deep-time evolutionary function of literature as described in Nancy 12 Gregory Bateson, Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind (London: Paladin, 1973) 13 Peter Finke, “Die evolutionäre Kulturökologie: Hintergründe, Prinzipien und Perspektiven einer neuen Theorie der Kultur,” Anglia 124 1 (2006), 175-217; Peter Finke, “Kulturökologie,” Konzepte der Kulturwissenschaften, eds Ansgar Nünnung/ Vera Nünning (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003), 248-279 14 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993) Literature, Sustainability, and Survival 267 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 Easterlin’s biocultural theory of literature as well as, in different ways, in biosemiotics and eco-phenomenology 15 The response of literature to culture is placed into a deep-historical perspective, in which the archives of literature are sites of the long-term memory of culture-nature coevolution that is inscribed into the generative matrix of imagination and narrative Recurrent motifs from this ‘deep sustainability’ of literature, as Kate Rigby calls it, 16 are the four elements of earth, water, air, and fire as forms of material agency in texts which, as Rigby and Evi Zemanek among others show, are still very much alive in contemporary literature; 17 or also the close symbiotic relation between human and nonhuman life forms in imaginative texts in what Louise Westling describes as the ‘human animal dance,’ which she traces from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf; 18 as well as the motif of metamorphosis, which in its shapeshifting transition between human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate forms assumes no essential separation but an ontological interconnectedness of all beings and as such likewise represents a continuing source of literary creativity from the deep-time literary archive to the present This is perhaps especially visible in the contemporary literature of the Anthropocene - as the recent German poetry collection Lyrik im Anthropozän amply demonstrates, in which hybrid beings, material agencies, and shapeshifting identities are conspicuously present in this experimental poetics of the Anthropocene 19 How, then, can this notion of literature as cultural ecology be related to the wider discourse of sustainability that has gained such prominence in recent years? Since the 1972 Club of Rome report on the Limits of Growth and later the 1987 Brundtland Report of the UN, sustainability has become a key term 15 Nancy Easterlin, A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012); Wendy Wheeler, Expecting the Earth: Life/ Culture/ Biosemiotics (London: Lawrence Wishart, 2016); Louise Westling, “Merleau-Ponty and the Eco-Literary Imaginary,” Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, ed Hubert Zapf (Berlin et al : De Gruyter, 2016), 65-83 16 Kate Rigby, “Deep Sustainability: Ecopoetics, Enjoyment and Ecstatic Hospitality,” Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text and Culture, eds Adeline Johns-Putra/ John Parham/ Louise Squire (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2017), 52-75 17 See Kate Rigby, Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2015); Evi Zemanek, “Elemental Poetics: Material Agency in Contemporary German Poetry,” Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture, eds Gabriele Dürbeck et al (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 281-295 18 Louise Westling, “Darwin in Arcadia: Brute Being and the Human Animal Dance from Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf,” Anglia 124 3 (Winter 2006), 11-43 19 Anja Bayer/ Daniela Seel, eds , All dies, Majestät, ist Deins. Lyrik im Antrhopozän (Berlin: kookbooks, 2016) 268 h ubert z apF 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 in international debates which was still primarily defined in economic and political terms but also included a transgenerational agenda that was intended “to [make development sustainable to ensure that it] meet[s] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” and that vitally involved “the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities ” 20 The awareness of the interdependence of long-term human agency and well-being with the life-sustaining ecosystems of the nonhuman world became the driving force for further differentiations of the concept that increasingly entailed not only a new view of economics but of society as well, including questions of participation, global environmental injustice, gender and diversity issues, and alternative forms of living As a transdisciplinary project, sustainability studies have become a research focus in many academic departments across the world, in which typically disciplines from the natural sciences as well as the social sciences, but rarely from cultural and literary studies, are involved It is one of the aims of the new umbrella term of the Environmental Humanities to redress this asymmetry and explicitly to integrate the contribution of the humanities and of cultural and literary studies into the research and teaching in this emergent interdisciplinary field. Considering the significance of this debate, it is astonishing how long it took before the topic of sustainability found serious attention in the humanities When I started writing the book on Sustainable Texts a couple of years ago, very few articles existed on the subject, which ranged from skepticism towards the concept as an empty managerial slogan to the postulate that “we scholars of literary and cultural studies need to claim our stake in sustainability” 21 - a postulate, however, that was not systematically pursued until very recently A new landmark contribution is the volume Cultural Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences, edited by Torsten Meireis and Gabriele Rippl. It is the first major publication which emphasises the importance of the cultural dimension of sustainability - as distinct from the established official three pillars of sustainability, the economic, ecological, and social pillars - and thereby highlights the inevitable role of ethical values, of environmental justice, of cultural memory, of the sociocultural meanings of what constitutes ‘the good life,’ but also of the potential role of literature and 20 Brundtland Report, “Our Common Future,” Report of the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development, 04 August 1987, http: / / www un-documents net/ wced-ocf htm, n p 21 Stephanie LeMenager/ Stephanie Foote, “The Sustainable Humanities,” PMLA 127 3 (2012), 577 Literature, Sustainability, and Survival 269 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 artistic creativity in the sustainability discourse 22 Another recent hallmark contribution to the field of sustainability studies from an interdisciplinary perspective is Ursula Kluwick’s and Evi Zemanek’s volume of collected essays Nachhaltigkeit interdisziplinär: Konzepte, Diskurse, Praktiken, which contains chapters from twenty-one different disciplines on the subject, including ethics, education, cultural studies, plant studies, literary studies, journalism, and media studies 23 One earlier study in the field of art history that should likewise be mentioned here is Sacha Kagan’s substantive book on Art and Sustainability, which resonates with cultural ecology by employing Bateson’s ecology of mind, together with systems and complexity theory, for an assessment of artistic sustainability primarily in the visual arts Aesthetic forms of communication represent a special potential as a sustainable cultural practice because of their “heightened sensibility” for the connectivity and complexity of the natural as well as the cultural world 24 The relationship between literature and sustainability is specifically addressed in the volume Literature and Sustainability 25 The book takes as its starting point the widespread criticism of the concept in literary and cultural studies - the danger of its economic co-option, or simplified ideas of permanence and stability - and posits the plurality of conflicting approaches as the basis of what the editors call ‘critical sustainability ’ Literature can help undermine entrenched anthropocentric concepts and foster sensitivity for the nonhuman, but also explore moral-ethical options of agency by its playful testing out of possible future scenarios Such contributions substantiate Lynn Keller’s contention that “the arts and the human imagination deployed by the arts have significant roles to play” if, as she puts it, “popular ideas of sustainability are to be reclaimed from the blurry, feel-good realm of corporate advertising and given meaningful, hard edges ” 26 In the volume, John Parham’s reconstruction of the history of literary sustainability, with a special focus on nineteenth-century literature and culture, is of special interest to a cultural-ecological conception of sustainability 27 Build- 22 Torsten Meireis/ Gabriele Rippl, eds , Cultural Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences (London et al : Routledge, 2019) 23 Ursula Kluwick/ Evi Zemanek, eds , Nachhaltigkeit interdisziplinär: Konzepte, Diskurse, Praktiken (Wien et al : UTB Böhlau, 2019) 24 Sacha Kagan, Art and Sustainability: Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity (Bielefeld: transcript, 2011) 25 Adeline Johns-Putra/ John Parham/ Louise Squire, eds , Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text and Culture (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2017) 26 Lynn Keller, “Imagining Beyond, Beyond Imagining,” PMLA 127 3 (2012), 581 27 John Parham, “Sustenance From the Past: Precedents to Sustainability in Nineteenth-century Literature and Culture ” Johns-Putra/ Parham/ Squire, 2017, 33-51 270 h ubert z apF 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 ing on Ulrich Grober’s cultural history of sustainability, Parham traces the emergence of literary sustainability in a transcultural assessment of proto-ecological thought in Herder, Humboldt, and Goethe as well as in Wordsworth, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Hopkins Inspired by Linnaeus’ The Oeconomy of Nature (1749), their conception of sustainability was founded on a paradigm that, “contrary to the ‘death of nature,’ emphasized the energy, complexity, and autonomy (from humans) of nature.” (34) Goethe is a central figure in this history, whose thought and writing illustrate the three characteristic elements in this emergent conception of sustainability. The first is recognition of the independent agency of nonhuman nature as a complex force field of relationships that these writers considered a source of their poetic creativity The second element concerns the ways in which human activity as expressed in economy, society, and culture “answers to a nature unceasingly dynamic and turbulent ” (35) The third element involves anxiety about how the changes brought about by science, industry, and modernity have produced anxieties and a sense of crisis in our relationship to the environment, but also have provoked reflection on “practical solutions by which we might sustain human being” in the face of this crisis (36) These three elements also provide a model from which Parham describes the sustainability of texts, taking as his example Emile Zola’s novel La Terre, in which Zola, in his own words, aims to render the “living poem of the Earth … in human terms” (Zola qtd in Parham 45): [I]n La Terre, Zola acknowledges and explores nature and the environment as an agential living force; translates this into a corresponding examination of how humans could exist and sustain themselves within ceaselessly shifting, emergent environments; and encapsulates anxieties contained within discourses around sustainability (45) As Parham argues, sustainability involves as a crucial component the assumption of an interior dimension, an Innenwelt reminding of Peter Finke’s cultural ecosystems, that accounts not only for the agency of nonhuman nature but for the co-agency of the mind and the imagination in the human relation to the nonhuman world This is expressed in the concept of ambiance, which redefines the environment not as a deterministic milieu but instead reflects a fundamental dialectic of sustainability “between environmental determinism and human agency ” (39) Parham combines historical with formal aspects in the ways he looks at the sustainability of texts, which he sees exemplified in romantic poems or naturalist novels but also in literary experiments such as Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “poetic embodiment, via the deployment of a Subsequent quotations from this work are referenced in parentheses in the text 271 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 Literature, Sustainability, and Survival stress-based ‘sprung rhythm,’ of ecological relations structured by energy exchange ” (35) Contributions like these concur with the argument of cultural ecology that literature and art can significantly contribute to a complex, self-reflexive, and ethically responsive concept of sustainability. This concept of literary sustainability is by no means opposed to innovation and creativity as such, which are often solely ascribed to the natural and technological sciences While it helps to overcome currently prevalent short-term, instrumental, and profit-driven forms of economic and scientific innovation, it involves an alternative notion of creativity oriented on the long-term survival of cultural and natural ecosystems as interdependent realities enabling the continuation of life on the planet Similar ideas are concisely formulated in a short piece by Gillen D’Arcy Wood, his “Foreword” to the volume just mentioned 28 What distinguishes Wood’s from other approaches is that he shifts the argument from the level of theme to the levels of form, language, and the aesthetic Wood considers the text as a linguistic artefact, which is not primarily characterised by the representation of discursive content but by autopoietic, always emergent complexity and which gains the features of what he calls an “idea model” of an ecological system precisely through this aesthetic quality Complexity is what defines the literary and connects it to ecology. “Complexity is an ecological measure, and the measure of literariness in a text ” 29 Literature is self-sustaining and intrinsically ecological by enacting its self-organisation in the precarious tension between order and chaos, emergence and entropy Driven by a biophilic energy, literature “captures essential characteristics of the infinitely complex human-nature dialectic over time ” 30 Wood shows this in a poem by Robert Frost, “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things ” A burnt-down farmhouse, which is meanwhile inhabited by birds and plants, serves as a symbolic site for Frost’s exploration of sustainable knowledge (indicated by “the need to be versed in”), which is transmitted in poetic form (the “verse” of the poem) Avoiding both a harmonic-romanticising and an ironic-nihilistic stance, Frost’s poem captures the complex interactivity of the human and the nonhuman world, of order and chaos, destruction and regeneration, which in its reflexive staging constitutes the ecological structure of the text. The knowledge which the poem supplies is not abstract but concrete, it “enacts life, its own coming-into-being, together with the sense of an ending ” 31 Literature provides a specific form of knowledge of life, which becomes sustainable 28 Gillen D’Arcy Wood, “Foreword,” Johns-Putra/ Parham/ Squire, 2017, xii-xv 29 Ibid , xiii; see also xii 30 Ibid , xiv 31 Ibid , xii 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 272 h ubert z apF through its aesthetic dimension: “[I]t must take on a beautiful shape to be sustainable ” 32 This is no stable, harmonious concept of the aesthetic but includes chaos, contingency, and the “always tenuous resilience of natural forms,” 33 which turns literature itself into a force of cultural survival that continuously reinvents itself in the ever new interpretation of ever new generations of readers It thereby shows the resilience that it stages in its imaginative worlds: “what better model of survival than literature, which enacts the resilience of all life worth the name? ” 34 This concept of literary sustainability therefore also applies to texts which do not primarily follow an environmentalist agenda but which, as aesthetic texts, inhabit their own “niche” in the cultural evolution, a niche cultivating openness to the nonhuman, but also a niche for the survival of the human in a posthuman world - “a niche, not a grave,” as Wood emphasises 35 With this, he argues against a complete dissolution of the human into the posthuman as propagated in some quarters of the Environmental Humanities, since indeed thinking sustainability without the assumption of a conscious, creative, ethically responsive agency of the human is not possible Wood’s “Foreword” is a short but insightful contribution to the debate, even though the emphasis on the single text as an autopoietic ecological system needs to be extended in a cultural-ecological view to the historical-cultural conditions to which the texts respond, as well as to the intertextual field of the literary evolution from whose generative matrix they emerge Let me summarise: The concept of sustainability is intrinsically related to questions of survival, both of the human species and of the global ecosystem Literature is a form of sustainable cultural practice which contributes aesthetic complexity, multiperspectivity, deep-time memory of culture-nature co-evolution, and ethical sensitivity to processes of cultural self-reflection and self-renewal In its radical search for resilient practices and for the traces of what constitutes the ‘good life’ even in the most traumatic conditions, literary texts are an intensely ethical medium of cultural critique and self-reflection, which at the same time becomes a source of renewable creative energy in culture by transforming historical traumas into forms of aesthetic experience that can be shared by ever new generations of readers 32 Ibid , xiv 33 Ibid 34 Ibid , xv 35 Ibid , xiv Works Cited Atwood, Margaret MaddAddam. London/ New York: Bloomsbury, 2013 --- The Year of the Flood. New York: Nan A Talese/ Doubleday, 2009 --- Oryx and Crake. London: Virago Press, 2003 Bateson, Gregory Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind London: Paladin, 1973 Bayer, Anja/ Daniela Seel, eds All dies, Majestät, ist Deins: Lyrik im Anthropozän Berlin: kookbooks, 2016 Brundtland Report “Our Common Future ” Report of the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development 04 August 1987, www un-documents net/ wced-ocf htm Accessed 26 February 2020 Damasio, Antonio The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness New York: Mariner Books, 2010 Easterlin, Nancy A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012 --- “The Functions of Literature and the Evolution of Extended Mind ” New Literary History 44 4 (2013), 661-682 Finke, Peter “Kulturökologie ” Konzepte der Kulturwissenschaften Eds Ansgar Nünning/ Vera Nünning Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003, 248-279 --- “Die evolutionäre Kulturökologie: Hintergründe, Prinzipien und Perspektiven einer neuen Theorie der Kultur ” Anglia 124 1 (2006), 175-217 Iser, Wolfgang The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993 Johns-Putra, Adeline/ John Parham/ Louise Squire, eds Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text and Culture Manchester: Manchester UP, 2017 Jonas, Hans Das Prinzip Verantwortung: Versuch einer Ethik für die technologische Zivilisation Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1979 Kagan, Sacha Art and Sustainability: Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity Bielefeld: transcript, 2011 Keller, Lynn “Imagining Beyond, Beyond Imagining ” PMLA 127 3 (2012), 579-585 Klüger, Ruth Weiter leben: Eine Jugend (1992) München: dtv, 1994 Kluwick, Ursula/ Evi Zemanek, eds Nachhaltigkeit interdisziplinär: Konzepte, Diskurse, Praktiken Wien et al : UTB Böhlau, 2019 LeMenager, Stephanie/ Stephanie Foote “The Sustainable Humanities ” PMLA 127 3 (2012), 572-578 Levi, Primo Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (1958) Trans Stuart Woolf New York: Touchstone, 1995 Martin, Randall Shakespeare and Ecology. Oxford: OUP, 2015 Meeker, Joseph The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic Phoenix: U of Arizona P, 1973 Meireis, Torsten/ Gabriele Rippl, eds Cultural Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences London et al : Routledge, 2019 273 Literature, Sustainability, and Survival 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 Melville, Herman Moby-Dick, or, The Whale (1851) Ed Alfred Kazin Boston: Riverside, 1956 Nutt, Amy Ellis “The Best Reason for Reading? Book Lovers Live Longer, Scientists Say ” Washington Post, 09 August 2016, https: / / communications yale edu/ sites/ default/ files/ 08.09.2016_the_best_reason_for_reading_book_lovers_live_longer_scientists_say._ the_washington_post pdf Accessed 26 February 2020 Parham, John “Sustenance From the Past: Precedents to Sustainability in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture ” Johns-Putra/ Parham/ Squire 2017, 33-51 Rigby, Kate Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2015 --- “Deep Sustainability: Ecopoetics, Enjoyment and Ecstatic Hospitality ” Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text and Culture Johns-Putra/ Parham/ Squire 2017, 52-75 Westling, Louise “Darwin in Arcadia: Brute Being and the Human Animal Dance from Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf ” Anglia 124 3 (Winter 2006), 11-43 --- “Merleau-Ponty and the Eco-Literary Imaginary ” Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology Ed Hubert Zapf Berlin et al : De Gruyter, 2016, 65-83 Wheeler, Wendy Expecting the Earth: Life/ Culture/ Biosemiotics London: Lawrence Wishart, 2016 Wood, Gillen D’Arcy “Foreword ” Johns-Putra/ Parham/ Squire 2017, xii-xv Yad Vashem “‘Virtues of Memory: Six Decades of Holocaust Survivors’ Creativity’: Hundreds of creative artworks to be displayed in new Yad Vashem Exhibition ” Press release, 11 April 2010, www yadvashem org/ press-release/ 06-april-2010-09-24 html Accessed 26 February 2020 Zapf, Hubert Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts London et al : Bloomsbury, 2016 Zemanek, Evi “Elemental Poetics: Material Agency in Contemporary German Poetry ” Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture Eds Gabriele Dürbeck/ Urte Stobbe/ Hubert Zapf/ Evi Zemanek Ecocritical Theory and Practice Series Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017, 281-295 274 h ubert z apF 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0013 t he V alue oF l iterature aNd the r eader iN r eceNt a pproaches iN l iterary s tudies 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 m ichael b asseler The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction Listening to the Ghosts of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo One mass-mind, united in positive intention (Lincoln in the Bardo, 254) 1 Critique/ Postcritique and the Value of (Reading) Literature after Postmodernism The value we ascribe to literature very much depends on how we conceive of the interrelation between writers, texts, and readers Literary value, therefore, must not be misunderstood as our discipline’s holy grail: It is not so much a universal, transhistorical quality inherent in ‘the literary’ (whatever this might be), 1 but subject to constant and sometimes fundamental transformations in our understanding of that dynamic constellation This constellation can be fruitfully conceived of, with Robert Meyer-Lee, as a “network comprising human and nonhuman agents,” whose complex interactions and “activities of mediation” produce and maintain literary value 2 From such vantage point, the study of literature as a discipline hinges on the very notion of literary value, or rather valuing: “to study literature means to study the acts 1 That does not necessarily mean that we cannot talk about the value of literature in broader, transhistorical terms Angela Locatelli, for instance, has argued that the value of literature resides in its “role in enlightening readers, through a specific hermeneutic activity ” See Locatelli, “Literature’s Version of its Own Transmission of Values,” Ethics in Culture: The Dissemination of Values Through Literature and Other Media, eds Astrid Erll/ Herbert Grabes/ Ansgar Nünning (Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2008), 31 2 Robert Meyer-Lee, “Toward a Theory and Practice of Literary Valuing,” New Literary History 46 2 (2015), 344 278 m ichael b asseler 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 of valuing that register a text as literary, which in turn means - in one way or another - to trace mediations of literary value from one agent in the network of literary valuing through some set of other agents ” 3 Following this argument, I propose in this article to think of the value of literature not so much in terms of an (ontological, fixed) quality of literature (as suggested by the noun value), but as an activity in which value is constantly being re-generated in a network of multiple non-/ human agents, comprising writers, texts, and readers (as suggested by the continuous verb form valuing) For many decades now, the primary values and acts of valuing literature as well as other forms of art have been associated with notions of critique, contestation, suspicion, negativity, strangeness, subversion, and so forth This is part and parcel of the well-worn argument about the emergence of modernism and, later, its transformation into postmodernism under the auspices of multinational capitalism and consumer society 4 In a sense, one might say that the value of literature, in the post/ modern conception, is that it teaches us not to trust in, but always maintain a critical distance to, any form of representation, especially those that make claims to reality or ‘realism ’ Irony and metafiction, two of literary postmodernism’s hallmarks, are eventually understood as forms of critique whose purpose is to foster this particular readerly stance 5 Recently, however, post/ modernist versions of the value of literature have come under attack from various sides. In the field of literary production, postmodernism has been, if not substituted, so at least complemented with a new literature of sincerity 6 ‘New sincerity’ is one of the many terms that were suggested in the past few years to signal, if not the end of, so at least the growing discontent with the project of postmodernism, and especially the mood or attitude of ironic distance that accompanies it Preferring sincerity over irony, 3 Ibid , 351 4 See Fredric Jameson’s landmark essays “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (1983) and “Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984) For a detailed account of Post/ modernism as an aesthetic of the strange, see, e g , Herbert Grabes, Making Strange: Beauty, Sublimity, and the (Post)Modern ‘Third Aesthetic’ (Amsterdam/ New York: Rodopi, 2008) 5 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1984); Lee Konstantinou, Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction (Cambridge/ London: Harvard UP, 2016), 173 6 See Jason Gladstone/ Daniel Worden, “Introduction,” Postmodern | Postwar - and After: Rethinking American Literature, eds Gladstone et al (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2016), 1; also see Michael Basseler/ Ansgar Nünning, “The American Novel in the 21st Century: Changing Contexts, Literary Developments, New Modes of Reading,” The American Novel in the 21st Century: Cultural Contexts - Literary Developments - Critical Analyses, eds eid (Trier: WVT, 2019), 19 The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction 279 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 this literature stands for a renewed attempt at speaking the truth, yet one that has learned its lessons from postmodernism and is therefore looking forward rather than backward, new rather than old, as Adam Kelly reminds us 7 While postmodernism seems to be “lapsing […] as a cultural dominant” 8 in contemporary (American) literature, we are simultaneously witnessing a certain perspective shift in the professional study of literature, and this shift likewise takes its main issue with the staples of the postmodern mindset 9 I am mainly referring here to the ‘critique/ postcritique’ debate recently launched by Bruno Latour, Rita Felski, and others For Felski, critique, and especially what she calls the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” have outlived their utility at a time when the once radical epistemological skepticism of modernism and postmodernism pervades our popular culture: “What is the use of demystifying ideology when many people no longer subscribe to coherent ideologies, when there is widespread disillusionment about the motives of politicians and public figures, when ‘everyone knows’ that hidden forces are at work making us think and behave in certain ways? ” 10 Moreover, literature - and particularly the ‘corrosive’ literature that came to characterise literary history for almost the entire 20 th century - had a substantial part in fostering the hermeneutics of suspicion “Suspicious readers are schooled by suspicious writers,” 11 Felski remarks to explain how the prevalence of critique was influenced or foreshadowed by the modernists’ preference for fragmentation, multiperspectivity, unreliable narrators, and so forth She quotes a passage from Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative to make her point: “it may be the function of the most corrosive literature to contribute to making a new kind of reader appear, a reader who is himself suspicious, because reading ceases to be a trusting voyage made in the company of a reliable narrator, becoming instead a struggle with the implied author, a struggle leading the reader back to himself ” 12 In this article I will bring together these two recent phenomena that coemerged over the past two decades: the new sincerity movement as a turn on postmodernism in literary and cultural production, and postcritical approaches in literary criticism and theory As we have already seen, both share a certain fatigue with the staples of postmodernism (such as irony, detach- 7 Adam Kelly, “The New Sincerity,” Postmodern | Postwar - and After: Rethinking American Literature, eds Jason Gladstone et al (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2016), 198 8 Peter Boxall, Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: CUP, 2013), 16 9 See Gladstone/ Worden, “Introduction ” 10 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P, 2015), 46 11 Ibid , 43 12 Paul Ricoeur (1988), 164; qtd in Felski, Limits of Critique, 42-43, emphasis R F ) 280 m ichael b asseler 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 ment, deconstruction, and suspicion) and strive for a replenishment and reimagining of our engagement with, or ‘uses’ of, literary expression 13 One might therefore ask in how far the new sincerity and postcritical reading constitute two occurrences of a broader aesthetic conceptualisation of, as well as ethical engagement with, literature and literary value beyond the post/ modern paradigm As Lee Konstantinou has argued in his discussion of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, the “fate of postmodernism is […] difficult to extricate from the academic humanities and social sciences as well as the recent history of institutions of higher education more generally ” 14 The central question for my article emanates from these provisional observations: If the ‘corrosive literature’ associated with modernism and postmodernism has led to the preeminence of the suspicious reader, as Ricoeur and Felski suggest, then we might ask what kind of reader is currently being produced by contemporary literature ‘after postmodernism ’ To put it the other way around: If it isn’t suspicion, what readerly stance is best suited to approach post-postmodern fiction in the 21 st century? Or, more neutral and less normative: What role does the reader play in our conceptualisation of the project of new literary-aesthetic movements such as the new sincerity? And is it legitimate to understand new sincerity and postcritical reading as two parallel instantiations of a broader aesthetic conceptualisation of the ‘uses’ and ‘value/ values’ of literature beyond the postmodern paradigm? While I will frame my argument within the debates of both of these developments or movements, my focal point will be George Saunders and his “particular brand of new sincerity ” 15 Discussing his acclaimed novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), I will explore Saunders’ position within the new sincerity and discuss how it might serve as a paradigm for novel forms of literary theorising that add “more comprehensive and compelling vocabularies of value” 16 to our field. First, I will briefly reconstruct the hermeneutics of suspicion underlying Rita Felski’s rejection of particular methods of literary criticism and interpretation, which are, as we have already seen, also acts of literary valuing Next, I will connect this debate to the recent discussion around new sincerity and other forms of ‘post-postmodern’ literary production, which have similarly focused on the role of the reader, or more precisely have po- 13 See Rita Felski, “Postcritical Reading,” American Book Review 38 5 (2017), 4-5 14 Konstantinou, Cool Characters, 4 15 Adam Kelly, “Language Between Lyricism and Corporatism: George Saunders’s New Sincerity,” George Saunders: Critical Essays, eds Philip Coleman/ Steve Gronert Ellerhoff (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 42 16 Felski, “Postcritical Reading,” 4 The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction 281 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 sitioned the reader as an “anchor point” 17 in a network of literary aesthetic and meaning production On this basis, my discussion of Lincoln in the Bardo serves as a case in point to show how contemporary literary fiction deploys particular formal aspects and textual strategies to evoke a certain readerly disposition, thus projecting the value of literature essentially as an activity of mediation between (the formal presentation of a) text and (its realisation through the) reader 2 Hermeneutics of Suspicion and the Role of the Reader Paul Ricoeur first coined the term “hermeneutics of suspicion” in Freud and Philosophy (1970), in which he discusses how psychoanalysis - through its strong dependence on language - is always already an interpretation, reflection, and modification of culture. 18 Regarding Freud - among Marx and Nietzsche - as one of the three masters of the “school of suspicion,” Ricoeur discusses how interpretation itself fundamentally changed from a restoration of some sacred meaning to a method for demystification. 19 Instead of mere skepticism or debunking, however, their work points toward a different kind of truth that is attached to the method of critique, which essentially constitutes an exercise of suspicion: “All three clear the horizon for a more authentic word, for a new reign of Truth, not only by means of a ‘destructive’ critique, but by the invention of an art of interpreting ” 20 This art of interpreting is wary of the nature of consciousness itself, insisting on a difference between appearance and reality: For Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the fundamental category of consciousness is the relation hidden-shown or, if you prefer, simulated-manifested […] What all three attempted […] was to make their ‘conscious’ methods of deciphering coincide with the ‘unconscious’ work of ciphering which they attributed to the will of power, to social being, to the unconscious psychism Guile will be met by double guile 21 This short passage not only offers a pointed genealogy of the roots of the intellectual project of ‘critique,’ but in fact provides the key metaphor for what college students since the 1980s have internalised as the only acceptable method of reading (and thus: valuing) literature, i e looking for the ‘deeper’ or ‘hidden’ meanings of a text in order to lay bare its psychological, social, and 17 Meyer-Lee, “Toward a Theory,” 350 18 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (1965; New Haven / London: Yale UP, 1970), 4 19 Ibid , 32 20 Ibid , 33 21 Ibid , 33-34, original emphasis 282 m ichael b asseler 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 ideological implications And while the past three decades have certainly seen the rise of a number of alternative and very productive approaches beyond this sort of critique, the legacy of the hermeneutics of suspicion arguably still exerts a strong influence on how literary studies is understood and practiced today, particularly in the United States Ricoeur’s comments on the interrelation between “corrosive literature” and “suspicious readers” conjured up by Rita Felski in the above quote, however, appear in chapter 7 (“The World of the Text and the World of the Reader”) of the third volume of his magisterial Time and Narrative Against the backdrop of his tripartite model of literary mimesis laid out in volumes 1 and 2 of Time and Narrative, Ricoeur regards the question of “what, on the side of fiction, might be the counterpoint to what, on the side of history, is given as ‘real’ past ” 22 While historians construct their versions of the past in relation to some sort of lived reality of that past (what Ricoeur calls “standing-for”), literary fiction per definition doesn’t seem to allow for such referentiality. Instead, he suggests, “it is only through the mediation of reading that the literary work attains complete significance, which would be to fiction what standing-for is to history ” 23 In this respect, rhetorical elements and narrative strategies such as the unreliable narrator fulfil an important function as they break with prior conventions and readerly expectations, more or less imposing “a newly vigilant stance” 24 on the reader Against the backdrop of the three parts of mimesis, however, literary fiction is not only prefigured by existing symbolic practices and competences (mimesis I) and imaginatively configures them in terms of concrete emplotment (mimesis 2), but it also works to integrate its fictive perspective into lived experience. In the mimetic-hermeneutic cycle, this capacity or power of literary fiction constitutes its value for Ricoeur: If we admit that the cognitive value of a work lies in its power to prefigure an experience to come, then there must be no question of freezing the dialogical relation into an atemporal truth This open character of the history of effects leads us to say that every work is not only an answer provided to an earlier question but a source of new questions, in turn 25 The unreliable narrator is instructive in this context, serving as Ricoeur’s shorthand or node to describe the historical shift from trusting and passive recipient to the co-creative reader of modernist literature: 22 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol 3 (1985; Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003), 57 23 Ibid , 158 24 Felski, Limits of Critique, 43 25 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 172 The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction 283 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 The authors who most respect their readers are not the ones who gratify them in the cheapest way; they are the ones who leave a greater range to their readers to play out the contrast we have just discussed On the one hand, they reach their readers only if, first, they share with them a repertoire of what is familiar with respect to literary genre, theme, and social - even historical - context, and if, on the other hand, they practice a strategy of defamiliarizing in relation to all the norms that any reading can easily recognize and adopt […] The unreliable narrator is one element in the strategy of illusion-breaking that illusion-making requires as its antidote This strategy is one of those more apt to stimulate an active reading, a reading that permits us to say that something is happening in this game in which what is won is of the same magnitude as what is lost The balance of this gain and loss is unknown to readers; this is why they need to talk about it in order to formulate it 26 Following Meyer-Lee’s argument above, it is illuminating to reframe Ricoeur’s unreliable narrator as one particular (nonhuman) agent in the vast network of “activities of mediation” 27 that constantly perform acts of valuing As a textual strategy of the ‘corrosive literature’ meant to stimulate active reading, unreliable narrators (as well as other narrative strategies associated with post/ modern literature) provide an entry point from which the mediations of literary valuing can be traced and analysed Moreover, such a framework of literary valuing projects a kind of literary Jeopardy in which the answer begs the question: “The moment when literature attains its highest degree of efficacity is perhaps the moment when it places its readers in the position of finding a solution for which they themselves must find the appropriate questions, those that constitute the aesthetic and moral problem posed by a work ” 28 This, for Ricoeur, is exactly what the project of literary hermeneutics looks like: “Finding the question to which a text offers a reply, reconstructing the expectations of a text’s first receivers in order to restore to the text its original otherness ” 29 The value of literature resides in its capacity to change or refigure the reality against which it is pitted. For this, the (real, flesh-and-blood) reader must actualise the “role of the reader prestructured in and through the text” and thereby transform it 30 As this brief discussion of Ricoeur in the context of recent theorising about the value of literature already shows, we do not need to think of the hermeneutics of suspicion in terms of a binary opposition between critical and post- 26 Ibid , 169-170 27 Meyer-Lee, “Toward a Theory,” 344 28 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 173 29 Ibid , 174 30 Ibid , 171 284 m ichael b asseler 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 critical reading, or between depth and surface reading In fact, in Ricoeur’s parsing, the hermeneutics of suspicion, to all intents and purposes, seem particularly compatible with what Felski and others have sketched as readerly dispositions which embrace affective hermeneutic reading, treating “texts not as objects to be investigated but as cofactors that make things happen ” 31 Before I exploit this notion of literary texts as cofactors in the creation of meaning for my analysis of Lincoln in the Bardo, in the next section I will briefly turn to discussions of the new sincerity, which provide the larger background for our understanding of the multi-agential network of literary valuing in general and of Saunders’ novel in particular 3 New Sincerity, Postirony, Post-Postmodernism: “Narrative technology for fostering readerly belief” What happens if we take Ricoeur’s notion of the “role of the reader prestructured in and through the text” as our point of departure to apprehend what is happening in contemporary (American) literature beyond postmodernism? And what might be the aesthetic and moral question(s) to which this literature offers its solutions? In his pioneering work that defines the new sincerity movement in contemporary (American) literature, Adam Kelly stresses the importance of the reader for any attempt at understanding the aesthetic and ethical characteristics of this kind of literature: “What happens off the page, outside representation, depends upon the invocation and response of another; this other to whom I respond, and whose response I await, is, for many New Sincerity writers, the actual reader of their text ” 32 For writers subsumed under this category (including David Foster Wallace, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and George Saunders, among others) sincerity can only be understood, however, as an indissoluble tension in that it always harbors the potential of (affective) manipulation - the manipulation of the other/ reader, but also the manipulation of the self This is what Kelly aptly calls the “aesthetically generative undecidability” 33 of new sincerity’s sincerity Note the fundamental shift that this entails with regard to the literary historical situatedness of new sincerity along the parameters of the post/ modern paradigm Whereas for Ricoeur modernism signaled the end of the “trusting voyage” of the reader in company of a reliable narrator, trust here returns as the central condition that enables new sincerity’s aesthetics in the first place: “That sincerity can always 31 Felski, Limits of Critique, 180 32 Kelly, “New Sincerity,” 205, emphasis M B 33 Ibid , 204 The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction 285 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 be taken for manipulation shows us that sincerity depends not on purity but on trust and faith: If I or the other could be certain that I am being sincere, the notion of sincerity would lose its normative charge ” (ibid : 201) 34 By means of this generative undecidability the reader becomes the key agent in the ethic-aesthetic project of new sincerity literature; but it is a particular kind of reader that is required, and this reader is diametrically opposed to Felski’s suspicious reader-as-detective, who would “subject a text to interrogation; diagnose its hidden anxieties; demote recognition to yet another form of misrecognition; lament our incarceration in the form of containment; read a text as a metacommentary on the undecidability of meaning; score points by showing that its categories are socially constructed; brood over the gap that separates word from world ” 35 Instead of distrust and hermeneutic suspicion, then, what new sincerity literature demands of the reader is a general attitude of trust and faith, even and especially where manipulation looms This newly defined readerly position is, it seems to me, where new sincerity and postcritical reading conflate. Beginning with trust and faith rather than suspicion and superiority, yet not risking naiveté and manipulation by the author and text is the attitudinal, “dispositional” 36 challenge for both, played out aesthetically in the new sincerity literature, and with regard to methodology, in the post-critique debate So far, I have only implicitly addressed the larger socio-historical questions to which new sincerity responds by placing the reader at the center of its aesthetic and moral project Lee Konstantinou, in his stimulating monograph with the wonderfully polyvalent title Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction, offers some useful insights into this aspect, also shedding light on the particular network of valuing underlying contemporary American fiction. In the chapter “How to be a believer,” Konstantinou argues that the American public in the 1990s was permeated by “eschatological vision” 37 and a sense of the end of history, to which a number of writers responded with the development of a “narrative technology for fostering readerly belief,” 38 thus trying to instill “a disposition or attitude […] in the reader, often through formal means ” 39 According to him, “postironic” writers such as David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers use specific formal strategies to spur a “general ethos of 34 Ibid , 201 35 Felski, Limits of Critique, 173 36 Christopher Castiglia, “Hope for Critique? ” Critique and Postcritique, eds Elizabeth S Anker/ Rita Felski (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2017), 213 37 Konstantinou, Cool Characters, 167 38 Ibid , 164 39 Ibid , 166 286 m ichael b asseler 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 belief” 40 in the reader, which doesn’t depend on any ontological basis or belief system: “they insist on the necessity of cultivating belief, but without an ontological safety net ” 41 Part and parcel of the literary projects of those writers is to “regenerate a sense of wonder around reading,” while writing “against a culture defined by solipsism, anhedonia, cynicism, snark, and toxic irony.” 42 The cultivation of belief, for Konstantinou, is what Wallace bequeathed to the following generation of writers: “his advocacy of the ethos of belief as a solution to the problem of postmodern irony has had far-reaching consequences, shaping the priorities and concerns of a generation of writers ” 43 Thus influencing the course of literature in a similar way that the post/ modernist, ‘suspicious’ writers did with literary strategies such as the unreliable narrator, one might conclude that postironic writers helped to school the postironic reader that is currently entering the stage of the postcritique debate In the following section, I will finally turn to Saunders’ novel as an example of how contemporary literary fiction actively engages in the redefinition of readerly disposition, producing distinct acts of valuing that rely on sincerity and belief rather than suspicion and distrust 4 Listening to Ghosts: Awakening the Reader(s) in Lincoln in the Bardo Since the publication of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), George Saunders has not made himself a name as a writer who offers his readers instant (or, in Ricoeur’s terms, cheap) gratification. Mainly acknowledged for his (collections of) short stories, Saunders is clearly one of the most original voices in contemporary American literature, earning him, among other prestigious awards, the Man Booker Prize in 2017 for Lincoln in the Bardo The storyworlds 44 of his fiction typically relocate the reader to either the highly idiosyncratic perception of present-day United States through the perspectives of some ‘quirky’ 45 characters (e g “The 400 pound CEO,” “The Falls”) or to outright bizarre scenarios bordering on simulacra (e g the many theme parks in his short fiction), dreams (e.g. “The Semplica Girl Diaries”), science fiction 40 Ibid , 174 41 Ibid , 167 42 Ibid , 169 43 Ibid , 193 44 David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln/ London: U of Nebraska P, 2002) 45 Cf Konstantinou, Cool Characters, 201-213 for a detailed discussion of the ‘quirky aesthetic’ in contemporary American literature and culture The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction 287 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 (e.g. “Escape from Spiderhead”), and other types of genre fiction (e.g. zombie lit in “Sea Oak”) The immediate effect of these storyworlds is often one of disorientation, defamiliarisation, and cognitive dissonance, as Saunders deliberately takes the reader out of their comfort zone At the same time, however, Saunders’ texts transcend this postmodern stance by infusing an aesthetic of sincerity: “What Saunders offers in place of […] intellectual distance and modernist lyricism is an emphasis on sincerity ” 46 Although significantly differing from an author like Dave Eggers in terms of his narrative style and techniques, Saunders ultimately shares with the postironic writers discussed by Konstantinou an “ethos of belief,” which in Saunders plays out in a distinct ethic and aesthetic of compassion, or kindness 47 As Philip Coleman and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff point out, “George Saunders writes with a strong sense of the moral agency of literature ” 48 What characterises his fiction, as I have argued elsewhere, is the way in which it “involves the reader emotionally and engages her in a compassionate relationship with the characters ” 49 He does so, however, by simultaneously deploying many of the same narrative devices associated with postmodern irony, thus utilising what Vera Nünning has aptly described as the “cognitive functions of polyvalence, complexity, and the denial of closure” 50 in order to increase rather than decrease the reader’s empathy The concept of ‘narrative empathy’ is useful to analyse how Saunders’ ethics and aesthetics of compassion play out in his fiction. 51 We may follow Suzanne Keen to describe ‘narrative empathy’ broadly as “the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of another’s situation and condition ” 52 Narratives are crucial for any account of our ability to empathise, 53 since it is only through stories that we can begin to understand the other Empathy is, as Fritz Breithaupt argues, 46 Kelly, “Language,” 43 47 On the correlation between aesthetic and ethical aspects in the work of Saunders, see Michael Basseler, “Narrative Empathy in George Saunders’s Short Fiction,” George Saunders: Critical Essays, eds Philip Coleman/ Steve Gronert Ellerhoff (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 153-172 48 Philip Coleman/ Steve Gronert Ellerhoff, eds George Saunders: Critical Essays (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), cii 49 Basseler, “Narrative Empathy,” 153 50 Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions, Changing Minds - The Cognitive Value of Literature (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), 278 51 See Basseler, “Narrative Empathy ” 52 Suzanne Keen, “Narrative Empathy,” The Living Handbook of Narratology, eds Peter Hühn et al (Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2013) n p http: / / www lhn uni-hamburg de/ node/ 42 html 53 See Vera Nünning, Reading Fictions 288 m ichael b asseler 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 the decision to take sides with somebody (rather than somebody else), and this decision is legitimated emotionally and rationally through narrative 54 Saunders’ work not only employs this potential of narrative to induce empathy on the part of the reader, but he has developed a whole arsenal of narrative and stylistic techniques to create his particular version of narrative empathy Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders’ debut as a novelist, is a novel that, through its subject matter as well as its highly experimental form, poses a considerable challenge to the reader 55 Despite its “repertoire of what is familiar,” which perhaps might best be described along the terms of historiographic fiction and bio fiction, the novel willfully and profoundly disorients the (Western? ) reader through several narrative strategies as well as through its highly idiosyncratic storyworld and story logic 56 Drawing on the historical events around Abraham Lincoln’s mourning of his son Willie who died of typhoid fever in the midst of the Civil War in 1862, Lincoln in the Bardo departs from the familiar modes of historiographic and bio fiction as the bulk of its action is situated in the spiritual realm of the ‘bardo,’ a phenomenon that in Tibetan Buddhism describes the liminal state (or rather states) between death and rebirth: “The subject experiencing these bardos is not an unchanging soul (which concept does not exist in Buddhism) but the constantly changing continuum of consciousness which, according to spiritual advancement, becomes either sharpened or bewildered after disjunction from the body ” 57 The peculiar “modeling and inhabitation” 58 of its storyworld, thus, is not only crucial to any attempt at summarising the novel’s plot, but it shapes “the narrative comprehension” 59 of the novel in fundamental ways Ghosts (roughly defined here as deceased human beings with a retained consciousness and agency) frequently populate Saunders’ fiction to provide perspectives on social relations that usually elude the living: “By haunting 54 Fritz Breithaupt, Kulturen der Empathie (Frankfurt/ M : Suhrkamp, 2009), 175 55 Saunders himself embraces the novel’s bulkiness as a formal necessity for expressing its emotional core: “For me, the nice thing is that the book is hard, and it’s kind of weird and it’s not a traditional novel […] I didn’t do it just to be fancy, but because there was this emotional core I could feel, and that form was the only way I could get to it ” Alexandra Alter, “George Saunders wins the Man Booker Prize for ‘Lincoln in the Bardo,’”The New York Times, 17 October 2017, https: / / www nytimes com/ 2017/ 10/ 17/ books/ george-saunders-wins-man-booker-prize-lincoln-in-the-bardo html, n p 56 Herman, Story Logic 57 John Bowker, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (Oxford: OUP, 2003), n p 58 Erin James, The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives (Lincoln/ London: U of Nebraska P, 2015), xi 59 Ibid The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction 289 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 his artificial settings with ghosts, Saunders gives voice to souls lost among simulacra and offers resistance to the bewildering and dehumanizing forces of late capitalism ” 60 In Lincoln in the Bardo, however, Saunders takes this strategy one step further, as the presence of ghosts becomes the novel’s central structuring device The subjects experiencing the bardo in the novel are, besides the newly deceased Willie Lincoln, innumerable ghosts of people who have passed away yet not entirely left their former lives behind 61 As they linger on, night after night the ghosts step out of their coffins (euphemistically called “sick-boxes” by themselves) to recount their often tragic, sometimes comical and sometimes gruesome experiences while still among the living - experiences that now hinder them from passing over Among them are hans vollman, a middle-aged man whose life abruptly ended when he was hit by a falling beam while sitting at his desk, his “tremendous member” 62 a constant reminder of his unconsummated marriage with his youthful wife; roger bevins iii, a closeted gay who now appears with “numerous eyes, hands, and noses” (176) as to indicate his sense of life’s many wonders and pleasures tragically revealed to him in an epiphany while committing suicide; and the reverend everly thomas, who, unlike vollman, bevins, and “the dozens of other naifs” (187) accepts the fact that he is dead Apart from these three, the novel’s ghostly cast is comprised of people from all walks of life of antebellum America: men and women, young and old, rich and poor, northern and southern, white and black, masters and slaves, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, innocent babies as well as criminals and murderers, rapists and raped, lovers and enemies, gay and straight people, devout believers and atheists, literati and illiterates As they remain in a state between life and death, or rather life and after-life (since death is the one reality they stubbornly refuse to accept), the reader, bit by bit, not only learns about their individual stories, but also witnesses how they gradually come to acknowledge their common fate as they learn to confront death as the great equaliser: “All were in sorrow, or had been, or soon would be” (304), as roger bevins puts it Populating his novel with ghosts allows Saunders to once again address what for him are the most central questions about human relationships: What 60 Dana Del George, “Ghosts and Theme Parks: The Supernatural and the Artificial in George Saunders’s Short Stories,” George Saunders: Critical Essays, eds Philip Coleman/ Steve Gronert Ellerhoff (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 121 61 According to one reviewer, the novel is told by 166 ghosts; Constance Grady, “166 ghosts tell the story of Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders’s fantastic first novel,” Vox, 09 March 2017, www vox com/ culture/ 2017/ 3/ 9/ 14764998/ lincoln-in-the-bardo-george-saunders-review, n p 62 George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (London et al : Bloomsbury, 2017), 176 Subsequent quotations from this novel are referenced in parentheses in the text 290 m ichael b asseler 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 can we really know about others - their intentions, motifs, desires, confines -, and does this knowledge shape our own moral judgements and our behavior? These questions become most explicit in a scene in chapter LXXXI where several ghosts, among them a pedophile, a woman who had killed her husband, a couple who “did away” (270) with their baby, and a British soldier who gave the command to fire at the surrendering enemy reflect on what has led them to commit these cruel, inhuman acts “We were as we were,” one of them concludes, “How could we have been otherwise? Or, being that way, have done otherwise? We were that way, at that time, and had been led to that place, not by any innate evil in ourselves, but by the state of our cognition and our experience up until that moment ” (270) Note how careful Saunders is not to read some deeper meaning into the deeds, but to simply describe The ghosts’ acts of collective self-reflection are a crucial part of their bardo experience as the novel builds toward the mass exodus in which they pass over to another realm, the very act of which the novel describes as “matter-lightblooming phenomenon ” (i a , 300) The implication is that it is only through their communal experience in the bardo that the ghosts are finally able to overcome their spiritual and moral confinements and become whole again. Instead of framing it as a phenomenon of our biological hard-wiring, Saunders regards empathy as an ethical imperative, requiring us to commit ourselves, as Leslie Jamison put it, “to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations: I will listen to his sadness, even when I’m deep in my own ” 63 This ethical dimension of empathy is what also drives Lincoln in the Bardo and demands from the reader that they listen to the ghosts in the same way they listen to each other: An individual’s view of the world is not the only possible one, different perspectives are possible: others attest to them Morality […] starts with one’s perception of the world through perspectives: the perspective of the other and one’s own In this constellation it is necessary that both perspectives can express themselves on equal terms 64 As I have argued before, 65 it is precisely this notion of (narrative) empathy, agency, and morality, which lies at the heart of Saunders’ writing, as it repeatedly and persistently urges us to reflect on our built-in self-centeredness, yet fully aware of the ethical limits of interpersonal understanding 63 Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (London: Granta, 2014), 23 64 Norbert Meuter, “Identity and Empathy: On the Correlation of Narrativity and Morality,” Rethinking Narrative Identity: Persona and Perspective, eds Claudia Holler/ Martin Klepper (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 46 65 Basseler, “Narrative Empathy ” The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction 291 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 Expanding the novel’s philosophical foundation to its refiguration in the process of reading, one might reason that just like the subjects experiencing the bardo, the projected reader of Saunders’ novel is not an “unchanging soul,” but is required to inhabit a changing continuum of consciousness Through its quirky storyworld and radical polyphony and the ensuing lack of any privileged narrative instance, Lincoln in the Bardo not only stimulates an exceptionally active reading (or active listening, in the critically acclaimed audio version), but Saunders uses this strategy to prestructure a particular role, or disposition, for the reader This disposition is schooled by a postmodern aesthetic yet ultimately seeks to transcend it and elicit new acts of valuing in response to a culture of perceived solipsism, snark, and irony Lucas Thompson suggests “method reading” as a ‘postcritical’ metaphor to describe such a readerly disposition 66 Method reading, as derived from “method acting” and the performative embodiment of characters associated with it, “takes literary texts as invitations to engage in a particular kind of activity, wherein the reader does not merely identify with, develop sympathies for, or even recognize herself in a fictional character, but actually performs as someone else ” 67 Reading, in this parsing, is the performative act through which we project ourselves onto different characters, “enjoying the vicarious thrill of certain emotions and actions ” 68 And while he proposes method reading as a general metaphor for postcritique, Thompson regards Lincoln in the Bardo as a paradigmatic text to experience method reading: “it’s hard to think of another text that so neatly demonstrates the fact that certain novels can teach us how they want to be read ” 69 Freely entering and exiting other ghosts as well as human beings through their ability of “co-habitation,” the ghosts - as a textual narrative strategy - resemble or mimic the act of reading: In Saunders’s unmistakable allegory for the act of reading fiction, whatever is most present in the inhabitant’s consciousness is in the foreground, but those occupying the same space have access to broader forms of personal knowledge as well […] There is something inherently ghostly, Saunders tells us, about the second-hand feelings and sensations a novel brings about 70 66 “The postcritique project will necessarily involve developing new metaphors and dusting off overlooked ones in an attempt to find ways of doing greater justice to the felt reality of reading ” Lucas Thompson, “Method Reading,” New Literary History 50 2 (2019), 295 67 Ibid 68 Ibid , 296 69 Ibid , 301 70 Ibid , 300-301 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 292 m ichael b asseler As we read novels, we “are invited to perform the same inhabitations that the ghosts are capable of,” 71 i.e. to “flesh out” various characters by temporarily thinking, experiencing, and feeling what they think, experience, and feel Constructing these rather strange inhabitations as acts of valuing each other’s perspectives on the story level, the novel projects its main structural principle onto the reception process, inviting the reader to join in the ghosts’ communal experience described as “One mass-mind, united in positive intention” (254), as the ghosts simultaneously ‘co-inhabit’ Abraham Lincoln during one of his visits at the graveyard so that Willie may finally pass over to the next life The reader of Lincoln in the Bardo, in other words, is not and ultimately cannot be conceived of as an unchanging soul, but is meant to perform the same “changing continuum of consciousness” that the novel invents through its storyworld, character conception, and multiperspectival structure 5 Conclusion As I have argued, in Lincoln in the Bardo Saunders construes a storyworld that evokes a complex network of literary valuing in which the question of readerly disposition is foregrounded and shaped by the novel’s ghostly aesthetic, implicitly entertaining some connections to the recent critique/ postcritique debate Heather Love, in her much-noted essay “Close But Not Deep,” offers a reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved that refuses to follow the common interpretation of Sethe’s murdered daughter as symbolic placeholder for the ethical lessons of history She urges us to “let ghosts be ghosts,” 72 thus echoing Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’ plea for surface reading, or “just reading” (‘just’ in the sense of ‘only’ and ‘fair’ as well as ‘reasonable’) as opposed to critical or depth hermeneutics: “Just reading sees ghosts as presences, not absences, and lets ghosts be ghosts, instead of saying what they are ghosts of ” 73 In Saunders’ fiction, and especially in Lincoln in the Bardo, it is almost impossible to read the ghosts as anything other than presences on the surface of the narrative: In the novel’s storyworld the ghosts are as real as the living, and they talk to each other and to us as readers, forcing us to listen, and serving as a literary device to transcend the limited views that confine us, the living, to ourselves and our own narrow perspectives If the value of literature is the always provisional, historically and culturally specific product of activities of mediation, or acts of valuing, then it 71 Ibid , 301 72 Heather Love, “Close But Not Deep,” New Literary History, 41 2 (2010), 387 73 Stephen Best/ Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108 1 (2009), 13 293 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction seems worthwhile to take a closer look at the aesthetic forms through which contemporary fiction attempts to shape the value of literature by devising a particular readerly disposition 74 Saunders’ novel, and by extension perhaps the bulk of new sincerity/ postironic literature, suggests a new paradigm for postcritical reading that acknowledges the unfinished business of our ethical models and decisions, yet refuses to let go of hope, kindness, and compassion to counter the omnipresence of suspicion, complacency, and snark in contemporary culture Projecting “texts and readers as cocreators of meaning,” 75 new sincerity literature and postcritique are, just like the ghosts in Saunders’ novel, “united in positive intention” to shape and explore new kinds of social relations in and through literature After all, as Christopher Castiglia reminds us, the “function of critique need not be only the articulation of ‘bad news,’ it might also encourage the risky speculations that would make critics active participants in making the kinds of social relations we nominally seek but rarely ‘find’ […] ‘in’ literature.” 76 In this sense, he suggests to “see literature not only as the object of criticism but as its best model,” so that “we might again have a critique in the service of living value, a self-transforming and adaptable willingness to hold vision above necessity ” 77 In other words, we shouldn’t only let ghosts be ghosts but listen closely to what they have to tell us It is in this sense that Saunders’ novel might serve as a model for a kind of postcritical reading that is not suspicious, superior, or paranoid, but restorative and hopeful, providing us with an opportunity to reclaim the value of literature in the service of living value Works Cited Alter, Alexandra “George Saunders wins the Man Booker Prize for ‘Lincoln in the Bardo ’” The New York Times, 17 October 2017, https: / / www nytimes com/ 2017/ 10/ 17/ books/ george-saunders-wins-man-booker-prize-lincoln-in-the-bardo html Accessed 07 April 2020 Basseler, Michael “Narrative Empathy in George Saunders’s Short Fiction ” George Saunders: Critical Essays Eds Philip Coleman/ Steve Gronert Ellerhoff Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 153-172 74 That strategies of “writing the reader” are all but exclusive to contemporary literature was shown by Dorothee Birke (2016) in her eponymous book, in which she argues that the foregrounding of (obsessive) readers in 18th and 19th century novels served as an instrument of cultural reflection and self-promotion. Birke, Writing the Reader. Figurations of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel (Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2016) 75 Felski, Limits of Critique, 173 76 Castiglia, “Hope for Critique,” 212 77 Ibid , 218 Basseler, Michael/ Ansgar Nünning “The American Novel in the 21 st Century: Changing Contexts, Literary Developments, New Modes of Reading ” The American Novel in the 21st Century: Cultural Contexts - Literary Developments - Critical Analyses Eds eid , in collaboration with Nico Völker Trier: WVT, 2019, 1-36 Best, Stephen/ Sharon Marcus “Surface Reading: An Introduction ” Representations 108 1 (2009), 1-21 Birke, Dorothee Writing the Reader: Figurations of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2016 Bowker, John The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions Oxford: OUP, 2003 Online version Boxall, Peter Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction Cambridge: CUP, 2013 Breithaupt, Fritz Kulturen der Empathie Frankfurt/ M : Suhrkamp, 2009 Castiglia, Christopher “Hope for Critique? ” Critique and Postcritique Eds Elizabeth S Anker/ Rita Felski Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2017, 211-229 Del George, Dana. “Ghosts and Theme Parks: The Supernatural and the Artificial in George Saunders’s Short Stories ” George Saunders: Critical Essays Eds Philip Coleman/ Steve Gronert Ellerhoff Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 121-135 Felski, Rita “Postcritical Reading ” American Book Review 38 5 (2017), 4-5 Felski, Rita The Limits of Critique Chicago/ London: U of Chicago P, 2015 Grabes, Herbert Making Strange: Beauty, Sublimity, and the (Post)Modern ‘Third Aesthetic’ Amsterdam/ New York: Rodopi 2008 Gladstone, Jason/ Daniel Worden “Introduction ” Postmodern | Postwar - and After: Rethinking American Literature Ed Jason Gladstone/ Andrew Hoberek/ Daniel Worden Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2016, 1-26 Grady, Constance “166 ghosts tell the story of Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders’s fantastic first novel.” Vox, 09 March 2017, https: / / www vox com/ culture/ 2017/ 3/ 9/ 14764998/ lincoln-in-the-bardo-george-saunders-review Accessed 07 April 2020 Herman, David Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln/ London: U of Nebraska P, 2002 James, Erin The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives Lincoln/ London: U of Nebraska P, 2015 Jamison, Leslie The Empathy Exams London: Granta, 2014 Keen, Suzanne “Narrative Empathy ” The Living Handbook of Narratology Eds Peter Hühn/ John Pier/ Wolf Schmid/ Jörg Schönert Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2013 www lhn uni-hamburg de/ node/ 42 html Accessed 07 April 2020 Kelly, Adam “The New Sincerity ” Postmodern | Postwar - and After: Rethinking American Literature Eds Jason Gladstone/ Andrew Hoberek/ Daniel Worden Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2016, 197-208 --- “Language Between Lyricism and Corporatism: George Saunders’s New Sincerity ” George Saunders: Critical Essays Eds Philip Coleman/ Steve Gronert Ellerhoff Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 41-58 Konstantinou, Lee Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction Cambridge/ London: Harvard UP, 2016 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 294 m ichael b asseler 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0014 Latour, Bruno “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? ” Critical Inquiry 30 2 (2004), 225-48 Locatelli, Angela “Literature’s Version of its Own Transmission of Values Ethics in Culture: The Dissemination of Values Through Literature and Other Media Eds Astrid Erll/ Herbert Grabes/ Ansgar Nünning Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 2008, 19-34 Love, Heather “Close But Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn ” New Literary History 41 2 (2010), 371-391 Meuter, Norbert “Identity and Empathy: On the Correlation of Narrativity and Morality ” Rethinking Narrative Identity: Persona and Perspective Eds Claudia Holler/ Martin Klepper Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013, 33-48 Meyer-Lee, Robert J “Toward a Theory and Practice of Literary Valuing ” New Literary History 46 2 (2015), 335-355 Nünning, Vera Reading Fictions, Changing Minds - The Cognitive Value of Literature Heidelberg: Winter, 2014 Thompson, Lucas “Method Reading ” New Literary History 50 2 (2019), 293-321 Ricoeur, Paul Freud and Philosophy (1965) New Haven/ London: Yale UP, 1970 Ricoeur, Paul Time and Narrative. Vol 3 (1985) Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003 Saunders, George Lincoln in the Bardo London et al: Boomsbury, 2017 Waugh, Patricia Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction New York: Routledge, 1984 295 The Value of Literature and the Role of the Reader in 21st-Century Fiction 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 a lexaNder s cherr Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the Value of Literature The Proleptic Agency of Texts 1 The Value of Literature and the ‘Postcritical Turn’ Some of the key aspects concerning the value of literature have recently been addressed by literary scholars under the banner of a “postcritical turn ” 1 The idea of ‘postcritique,’ which is strongly associated with Rita Felski’s work, is not to be confused with an uncritical engagement with literary texts, nor does it suggest a return to a naïve belief in the universal value of literature However, attempting a rethinking of “literary value, of the critic’s interpretive labor, and of the public role of the humanities,” 2 postcritique represents a departure from traditions of scholarship that are linked to the established paradigm of critique By ‘critique,’ Felski means both a method of analysis and an institutionalised ethos that scholars of literature have been socialised to adopt, roughly in the past 40 to 50 years, as an interpretive stance on texts Appropriating a phrase by Paul Ricœur, Felski posits that critique is characterised by a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’: a critical reading of a literary work suspects that its ‘true’ meaning lies hidden or repressed under its textual surface, so the critic must read the text against the grain, demystifying the ideological work in which it unknowingly engages 3 Given that literature is suspect in Felski’s rendering of critique, literary value was, for a long time, a somewhat precarious concept within this tradition of scholarship, “spurned as antidemocratic, capricious, clubby, and in the thrall of a mystified notion of aesthetics.” (15) But aesthetics is enjoying a revival in 21st-century literary studies, no matter 1 Elizabeth S Anker/ Rita Felski, “Introduction,” Critique and Postcritique, eds eaed (Durham: Duke UP, 2017), 2 2 Ibid 3 The argument is most comprehensively developed in Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2015) Citations from the study will from here on be given in parentheses in the text 298 a lexaNder s cherr 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 if this reorientation is labelled as ‘postcritical’ or differently As early as 2003, the renewed turn to aesthetics was welcomed as an “exile’s return” by the editors of a volume on Aesthetic Subjects 4 Like Felski, the contributors to the collection express the need for new concepts and vocabularies in our engagement with literary texts and the aesthetic experiences they afford What interests me about the problematic place of aesthetic value within the critique paradigm is that the ethos of critique rests on a particular kind of temporality While it is obvious that, chronologically, any act of academic criticism takes place after the publication of a given text, Felski’s argument implies that critique also trumps the literary text insofar as it claims the final verdict on its value In this sense, the text appears as a fairly passive and anterior object awaiting the very inscription of authoritative meaning that the critic will provide It is the critic who settles the question of a given text’s value (or harm), not the text itself This position is problematic, in particular, for literary texts that exercise what I call a ‘proleptic’ kind of agency Recasting the text-criticism-relationship, I draw attention to the fact that a literary text can steer, constrain, and even perplex criticism in its search for value, thus posing particular challenges for the institutional environments in which it will be received That criticism does not always trump literature was cogently demonstrated by Shoshana Felman - four decades before the debates over critique and postcritique - in an influential (meta-)reading of Henry James’ Gothic novella The Turn of the Screw (1898) and its scholarly reception Taking issue with psychoanalytical readings of James’ work that fell victim to its ambiguity (her example is a Freudian analysis by Edmund Wilson), Felman posits that a text like James’ “constitutes a trap for psychoanalytical interpretation ” 5 Her argument relies on the observation that The Turn of the Screw already negotiates the limitations of a suspicious reading before a Freudian critic like Wilson would seize this interpretive option As Felman shows, Wilson assumes a reader-position that is supposedly external to the text but has, in fact, a blind spot about it: It resembles in striking ways that of James’ text-internal protagonist - a governess “who is equally preoccupied by the desire, above all, not to be made a dupe, by the determination to avoid, detect, demystify, the cleverest of traps set for her credulity ” 6 The lesson to be learned from Felman’s insightful anaylsis of The Turn of the Screw is that the work constitutes 4 Pamela R Matthews/ David McWhirter, “Introduction: Exile’s Return? Aesthetics Now,” Aesthetic Subjects, eds eid (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2003), xiii-xxviii 5 Shoshana Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” Yale French Studies 55/ 56 (1977), 186 6 Ibid , 188 Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the Value of Literature 299 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 an interpretive agency of its own, constraining the critical discourses in which it will be received Instead of understanding its readerly reception only within a linear framework, Felman proposes a different set of questions for coming to terms with the kind of temporality engendered by a text like James’: “What does the text have to say about its own reading? […] In what way does literature authorize […] a discourse about literature, and in what way, having granted its authorization, does literature disqualify that discourse? ” 7 The idea that literature might fashion or ‘authorise’ a discourse about its own reception will continue to inform my discussion of the value of literature in the present contribution Extending the theoretical discussion in section 2, I will first demonstrate how the concept of proleptic agency can be aligned with recent approaches to canonisation - a scholarly field that is closely connected to social debates about the value of literature. By surveying this field, I aim to show that, while established theories of canonisation tie in closely with the paradigm of critique, more recent approaches have made a move towards postcritical thought Building on some of the concepts reviewed in this section, I will then present an analysis of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (section 3) The novel makes for interesting (re)reading in the context of my argument as it is famously linked up with “aesthetic bliss” - the notion Nabokov uses in his afterword to distinguish his own ideal of literature from what he calls “didactic fiction.” 8 The analysis put forward in the present article does not so much aim to dismantle the notion of aesthetics than to show that it needs to be supplemented by a focus on the discursive, historicised, and institutionalised frameworks of aesthetics of which Nabokov’s novel takes advantage While it would be incorrect to claim that the novel participates in only one discourse of modern art, my reading emphasises that its relationship to specific value systems shaped in the legacy of Romanticism are particularly rewarding to consider I will return to the renewed attention to aesthetics in 21st-century criticism in section 4, outlining a number of perspectives and challenges for a postcritical turn in literary studies 2 The Agency of Literature in Canonisation Processes - Contingency Reconsidered In order to better understand how exactly critique has informed the ways in which scholars think about the value of literature, let us turn to a more 7 Ibid , 102 8 Vladimir Nabokov, “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” Lolita (1956; London: Penguin, 2011), 358 300 a lexaNder s cherr 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 specific institution of literary criticism that is directly linked to the making of values and norms: the canon Even though research on canonisation is a highly diverse field, it seems fair to say that certain of its traditions align firmly with the paradigm of critique. A particularly influential position, in this context, is that of Barbara Herrnstein Smith In a much-cited passage from her monograph Contingencies of Value, the making of literary value is rendered as follows: All value is radically contingent, being neither a fixed attribute, an inherent quality, or an objective property of things but, rather, an effect of multiple, continuously changing, and continuously interacting variables or, to put this another way, the product of the dynamics of a system, specifically an economic system 9 We may first wish to acknowledge the merits of this position. By declaring all value as a socially and historically contingent construct, Herrnstein Smith has done much to legitimise the critical revisions of the Western canon as they have been undertaken, for instance, by feminist and postcolonialist scholars Indeed, there are good reasons for literary scholars to be suspicious about pronouncements of the “transcendent universal value” of literary works, 10 especially since such declarations can operate as disguised exercises of power on the part of a hegemonic social class 11 Critics have learned, therefore, to mistrust the spatial metaphor that literary value is ‘in’ the text In keeping with the poststructuralist legacy of our discipline, the contingency-of-value thesis testifies to the anti-essentialist faith that characterises most work in the study of literature today Nevertheless, Herrnstein Smith’s constructivist hypothesis is also problematic, or rather does not go far enough In its questioning of aesthetic value, it excludes literature from the social communicative processes in which values are shaped and thus runs the risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater As Frank Kelleter has explained, positions like Smith’s imply an understanding of literature as a fairly passive object to which values are ‘ascribed’ in the ensuing process of its canonisation 12 In this model, processes of social 9 Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Critical Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988), 30 10 Ibid , 53 11 Matthews and McWhirter give voice to this position when arguing that “taste - recognized as a carrier of prestige or cultural capital - cannot be evaluated properly in isolation from its entanglements with power ” (“Introduction,” xv) The authors’ emphasis on power hints at the legacy of Michel Foucault’s thinking 12 Cf Frank Kelleter, “Populärkultur und Kanonisierung: Wie(so) erinnern wir uns an Tony Soprano? ,” Wertung und Kanon, eds Matthias Freise/ Claudia Stockinger (Heidelberg: Winter, 2010), 57 The full passage in which Kelleter sketches how the logic Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the Value of Literature 301 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 evaluation are considered external to literature - a matter of ‘social context’ - as if literary texts themselves were non-social objects to begin with Moreover, in a temporal sense (though not in a normative one), critical evaluation is secondary to literature This is exactly the point made by Felski, who frames the chronology of the evaluation process within the critique paradigm in a way similar to Kelleter: “Critique comes after another text; it follows or succeeds another piece of writing: a time lag that can span decades, centuries, even millennia Critique, then, looks backward, and in doing so it often presumes to understand the past better than it understood itself ” (123) In section 3, we will see that the logic of looking backward is challenged by a work like Lolita, which, in many ways, ‘looks forward’ to the process of its canonisation and thereby comments on the values that underlie any such process in a given system of literature An alternative to the backwards orientation of critique can be found in recent sociologically informed approaches that insist on the active, worldmaking potential of literary texts in the making of values Kelleter sketches this position in the following way: “If we genuinely ask ourselves what a text does instead of asking what it is or what is going to happen to it, then we are asking about the aesthetic as an activity which does not simply precede social ascriptions in terms of supplied material, but which enables them and is thus actively involved in the making of cultural values ” 13 Building on Kelleter’s ideas, Alexander Starre has submitted a text-context model that recasts the temporal logic underlying canonisation processes According to this model, some literary texts are heavily invested in their own canonisation - a phenomenon for which Starre proposes the felicitous notion of ‘self-canonisation ’ One crucial point made by him is that literary texts do not simply reflect the norms and values of their social context; in many cases, they also reshape the standards of ‘good’ literature, recommending themselves as candidates for subsequent evaluations In this way, they conduct a particular kind of cultural of critique informs certain theories of canonisation reads: “Die Annahme ist: Ein Text liegt vor - und erst hiernach setzt der komplexe Kreislauf sozialer, institutioneller oder alltagspraktischer Zurichtungen und Nutzungen ein Die Vokabel ‘Zuschreibung’ suggeriert dank solcher Chronologisierung, daß der Text selbst relativ wenig zu seiner Bewertung beiträgt, und somit auch dazu, wie man sich an ihn erinnert Zugespitzt gesagt, kommuniziert das kanonisierte Kunstwerk nicht, sondern es existiert als Objekt kommunikativer Praktiken ” 13 Cf ibid , 58, my translation The original passage reads: “Wenn wir uns mit aller Konsequenz fragen, was ein Text tut, anstatt zu fragen, was er ist, oder was mit ihm getan wird, dann fragen wir nach Ästhetik als Aktivität, die sozialen Zuschreibungen nicht einfach als Materiallieferant vorangeht, sondern diese freisetzt und damit selbst kulturelle Werte schafft und aktiviert ” 302 a lexaNder s cherr 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 work of their own 14 In Kelleter’s and Starre’s models of canonisation practices, we encounter a version of Felman’s thesis that literature can authorise a discourse about itself Their conceptualisation of the aesthetic as activity attests to a postcritical rethinking of the value of literature Felski’s, Kelleter’s and Starre’s proposals tie in closely with other recent turns in the study of literature First and foremost, they align with Mark McGurl’s call for a more focused consideration of literature’s ‘reflexive institutionality’ - a concept by which McGurl means the multiple feedback loops that are at work between texts and the institutions that impact their production, dissemination, and reception 15 A crucial idea, in this context, is that the form of a given literary text may bear the traces of its institutional environment, which it not only reflects but actively reshapes. This idea is also put forward in Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s analysis of so-called “novels of commission” - a genre in contemporary literature that is finely attuned to the role of institutional bonds during the production process of a literary text 16 Building partly on McGurl, Buurma and Heffernan show how fictional texts by writers such as Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner actively “reconfigure their imagined relations to literature’s commissioning and canonizing institutions” to problematise their self-understanding as literature and the attendant question of their value 17 What is striking, again, is that the scholars emphasise the cultural work accomplished by literature vis-à-vis institutions while refusing to reduce literary texts to passive objects awaiting their evaluation by external social actors In more general terms, what all of the theoretical approaches reviewed in this section have in common is that they foreground the self-referential or autopoietic role of literature in the generation of cultural values, including its own evaluation Borrowing from systems theory (a framework already evoked by the notion of ‘autopoiesis’), we may think of the ways in which literary texts refigure their place in a broader system of institutions as an example of the ‘re-entry of form.’ Defined as “the self-referential embedding 14 Cf Alexander Starre, “Kontextbezogene Modelle: Bildung, Ökonomie, Nation und Identität als Kanonisierungsfaktoren,” Handbuch Kanon und Wertung: Theorien, Instanzen, Geschichte, eds Gabriele Rippl/ Simone Winko (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2013), 64 15 Cf Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Boston, MA: Harvard UP, 2009); id , “Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies in the Waste Land of the Present,” New Literary History 41 2 (2010), 329-349 16 Cf Rachel Sagner Buurma/ Laura Heffernan, “Notation After ‘The Reality Effect’: Remaking Reference with Roland Barthes and Sheila Heti,” Representations 125 1 (2014), 88 See also Elizabeth Kovach’s contribution to this volume 17 Ibid Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the Value of Literature 303 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 of a form of distinction back into its own indicational space,” 18 re-entry can help us understand that a distinction like the one between ‘literature’ and ‘criticism’ is not simply external to literary texts It can be indicated within the literary work itself, and this textual embedding of the distinction is a crucial way for literature to complicate its relationship to evaluation processes With due reference to concepts such as ‘reflexive institutionality’ and ‘self-canonisation,’ I therefore suggest that literary critics have something to gain from examining the formal strategies employed by literature to premediate its own subjection to the very institutions that have a stake in its evaluation (reviewers, publishing houses, commercial traders, scholars, etc ) By reconstructing the relationship between a literary text and the discourse of criticism in which it actively participates, the next section aims to outline how such an analysis could be conducted 3 Playing the Game of Canonisation: The Value System of Romanticism in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) In order to examine the ways in which literary texts can fashion a discourse for their own future reception, I turn to Vladimir Nabokov’s best-known novel Lolita - a work that, for different reasons, can constitute a challenging presence in institutions where its value is at stake In Living to Tell About It, James Phelan specifies one of these reasons when relating his experiences in teaching the text in higher-education contexts, and the diametrically opposed reactions among his students that it provoked 19 Falling into two camps, Phelan’s students were either delighted or irritated by Nabokov’s work, depending on whether they would speak in favour of its aesthetic charm or denounce its ethical misgivings The denial of ethical value by some of his students that Phelan reports must be taken seriously, especially since the fact that Lolita is a novel about the abuse of a teenage girl rings an all the more uncomfortable bell in the context of the manifold cases of abuse that have, in recent years, been reported online under the hashtag #MeToo While his teaching experiences predate the #MeToo movement, Phelan nevertheless mentions strong reactions to the text by some members of his class, with a few of them pointing out that “what we know about the incidence of sexual abuse makes it likely that one or more 18 Bruce Clarke, Neocybernetics and Narrative (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2014), 90 19 Cf James Phelan, Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2005), 98-131 304 a lexaNder s cherr 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 members of any class would have experienced such abuse ” 20 Personally, I think that such allegations cannot easily be brushed aside, and that scholars who choose to teach Lolita must be wary of reinstating forms of power that dismiss charges of its lack of moral sensitivity by playing them off against an unspecified notion of ‘aesthetic value.’ What strikes me as noteworthy, however, is that one particular accusation levelled by some of Phelan’s women students - “although you [men] talk in class about [the text’s] aesthetic qualities, what you really like is the way Humbert [= the novel’s protagonist] acts out male fantasies” - is an argumentative move of critique. It demystifies aesthetic quality by exposing the sexist reactions that the novel “really” incites in some of its readers 21 In light of the unbroken controversy sparked by the novel, I propose that one of the ways out of the dilemma outlined by Phelan is to explore how Lolita premediates the conflict within the institutions of criticism in which it will be received Analysing the text from the vantage point of postcritique therefore requires us to come to terms with approaches to the aesthetic as an ‘activity’ (see section 2) Using Starre’s term, we gain much by examining the strategies of self-canonisation in Nabokov’s novel, i e the self-referential elements through which the text invites and complicates its own evaluation with reference to specific value systems. Although the significance of self-referentiality and metafictionality have been foregrounded in many readings of Nabokov’s work, less attention has thus far been paid to the question of how the novel’s self-referential form gives way to a play with institutions far beyond the covers of the book In order to show how Lolita participates in its own canonisation, it bears pointing out that the text is, in many regards, a novel about evaluation On the one hand, this concerns the level of ethics, in that the question of the fictional narrator’s guilt is at stake and must be evaluated by the jury that he, writing his memoir in a prison cell, repeatedly addresses But Lolita is also a novel about matters of aesthetic taste such that many evaluative statements articulated in the text are endowed with a double coding Nabokov’s novel constantly foregrounds evaluative practices, and this cultural work begins as early as the “Foreword,” in which the fictitious editor John Ray, Jr. shares his thoughts on the manuscript he has received While the Foreword dates from 5th August 1955, we learn that the manuscript’s author - a man called Humbert Humbert - died in legal captivity on 16th November 1952 As is well known, his narrative is going to detail various episodes from his life in 20 Ibid , 101 21 Ibid Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the Value of Literature 305 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 America, including his sexual encounters with Dolores Haze, a girl who is only twelve years old at the beginning of the novel’s central events and whom Humbert will turn into his “Lolita ” Given its delicate content, the question whether the manuscript ought to be published and thus made accessible to readers is negotiated from the beginning. John Ray, Jr.’s novel-internal evaluation reveals that the fictitious editor is torn between conflicting impulses: “had our demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psychopathologist,” he writes, “there would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this book ” 22 A similar conundrum is invoked only a few lines later: “He [= Humbert] is abnormal He is not a gentleman But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author! ” (3) These early statements introduce a logic which the novel is going to explore again and again: Ethics and aesthetics tend to preclude one another The grim possibility imagined in several of Nabokov’s works is that characters can only ever attain one when sacrificing the other. Proponents of aesthetic taste are therefore often morally deficient in his fictional texts; they are “genius-monster[s],” as Richard Rorty has called them 23 Humbert is no stranger to this worldview At one point in his narrative, he describes himself as a “sensualist” but hastens to specify that this side of him is “a great and insane monster ” (140) Crucially, the tension between aesthetics and ethics is exploited rhetorically by the narrator in various biting comments on the value systems underlying Western canonisation processes Humbert does not miss any opportunity to point out that “Dante fell madly in love with his Beatrice when she was nine,” or that, “when Petrarch fell madly in love with his Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve ” (19) The implicit message of these statements is clear enough: Questionable moral behaviour and great art have sometimes gone hand in hand in the history of great literature, and the same standards of evaluation that have turned Dante and Petrarch into canonical authors should not be held against the present piece of writing 24 In light of such consistent metafictional framing, 22 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955; London: Penguin, 2011 1955), 3 Subsequent citations from the novel will be given in parentheses in the text 23 Richard Rorty, “The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty,” Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), 161 Another prominent of Nabokov’s literary creations which Rorty discusses in the same context is the character of Charles Kinbote from Pale Fire (1962) 24 It should be pointed out that Humbert’s problematic statements about, as well as his ahistorical comparisons to, writers like Dante and Petrarch are his own, not Nabokov’s 306 a lexaNder s cherr 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 many statements in the novel seem to send out a double message and can be read on two different levels When Humbert appeals to the “[l]adies and gentlemen of the jury” time and again (7 et passim), readers have a feeling that not only the jury of his trial on the level of fiction is addressed but also the jury of the novel’s future readership When he trashes the quality of the fast food he consumes - “they call those fries ‘French,’ grand dieu! ” (146) - it appears that the ‘tastelessness’ he attributes to US-American culture might also include its literary products 25 Nabokov’s protagonist employs many references to the history of art, but his self-image as a writer is based on a Romantic framework, or rather a specific tradition of Romanticism. In proposing Romanticism as an important context for understanding how the novel communicates, I ally myself with critics who argue that a “romantic code” is at work in the novel 26 This does not mean that Lolita should be viewed as a period text of the Romantic era but that Humbert’s rhetoric for evaluating (great) art is indebted to key Romantic ideas In Lipovetsky’s words, “the romantic tradition gives Humbert […] a well-developed arsenal of means and ends of transcendence ” 27 Such is the case, for example, when the narrator claims that only an extremely gifted artist (like himself) is capable of espying “nymphets” (15) - the term Humbert uses to describe the teenage girls who allegedly bewitch him and whom he, in fact, abuses Humbert insists that not everyone is able to identify such “demoniac” maidens (15) - on the contrary: “You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy” (16), which evokes the image of the ‘sensitive genius’ in the tradition of John Keats and other Romantic artists Using Christoph Reinfandt’s term, one can therefore see Humbert’s narrative as a form of “Romantic communication,” which is based on tacit assumptions about what constitutes great art and artists 28 What the rhetoric I will return to the significance of distinguishing between the fictional narrator and real author of the novel 25 Cf Ellen Pifer, “Lolita,” The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed Vladimir E Alexandrov (New York: Routledge, 1995), 308 26 Mark Lipovetsky, “A War of Discourses: Lolita and the Failure of a Transcendental Project,” Nabokov: Un’eredità letteraria, eds Alide Cagidemetrio/ Daniela Rizzi (Venice: Cafoscarina, 2006), 53 See also Susanne Rohr, “Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955),” Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed Timo Müller (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 318-319 27 Lipovetsky, “War of Discourses,” 50 28 Christoph Reinfandt, Romantische Kommunikation: Zur Kontinuität der Romantik in der Kultur der Moderne (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003) Reinfandt’s study reconceptualises Romanticism as a ‘discursive formation’ (cf 11-12) and an ‘epistemological paradigm’ (cf 37) that is characteristic of modernity at large and has had a shaping impact on our modern understanding of art Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the Value of Literature 307 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 of Romanticism offers Humbert is that he can distinguish people like himself, who are allegedly “in the know” about art (16), from common people who are unable to appreciate aesthetic value This argument is circular: It posits that great art is what can be appreciated by artists, and Humbert’s virtuoso performance as a writer evidences that he is up there with canonised masters such as Edgar Allan Poe, Prosper Mérimée, Shakespeare, Petrarch, Rimbaud, or Baudelaire All of the latter, who “are in some way linked to romanticism - whether as its forebears, its classics, or its modernist progeny,” are referenced in his narrative 29 Lolita’s self-canonisation into the Romantic tradition goes further As has already been indicated, Romanticism is associated with the idea that works of art transcend their concrete historical situation and, due to the spiritual insights they can manage to convey, participate in the eternal Employing this idea as part of its Romantic coding, the novel initiates its own afterlife This self-serving cultural work is completed at the end of the text, when Humbert decrees that his manuscript should not be published before Lolita’s death In the novel’s final sentence, the narrator addresses the now teenage girl one last time, philosophising that “the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita,” is “the refuge of art ” (352) Ironically enough, Lolita’s death is reported in the novel, but the information is provided in the most inconspicuous of places, namely in John Ray, Jr ’s Foreword, in which the reader learns about the death of a “Mrs. ‘Richard F. Schiller’” (2), which, as we later find out, is Lolita’s marital name The closure that Nabokov’s novel accomplishes in this way is vital to its self-canonisation: Lolita, the character, has effectively been turned into a work of art, and now keeps company with Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” and Georges Bizet’s “Carmen” - two dead literary muses from the Romantic tradition with whom Humbert repeatedly compares Lolita in the course of the novel There are many female ghosts in Lolita, then, which live on as what Elisabeth Bronfen calls “pure immortal textuality ” 30 Nabokov knows how to play the game of canonisation: He knows that women’s death has often been a precondition for beauty and posthumous admiration in the context of Romantic theories of art It is therefore not surprising that John Keats, the great Romantic populariser of the connection between death and beauty, is alluded to in the novel when Humbert states that “my schoolgirl nymphet had me in thrall” (207), thus evoking the canonical example of Keats’ “La Belle Dame 29 Lipovetsky, “War of Discourses,” 50 30 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992), 375 308 a lexaNder s cherr 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 sans Merci” (1819) One might go so far as to argue that the communicative shift in the novel’s final sentence, in which Humbert directly addresses his muse (“my Lolita”) rather than the jury to which he had previously appealed, is in keeping with the communicative structure of a Keatsian ode It completes the work of self-canonisation insofar as the dead muse (Lolita, the character) is now transformed into a beautiful piece of art (Lolita, the novel) and will, as such, forever be immortal 31 By reminding readers of how Romantic theories of beauty operate, the narrative makes itself complicit with a pre-existent value system and bluntly lays claim on its mechanisms of judgment 32 What is the value of Lolita, then, from the vantage point of a reading that emphasises the text’s investment in its canonisation? The analysis that has been presented so far underlines that Nabokov is not the kind of writer who would readily cater to “readers who expect novelists to critique the social order, negotiate its change, or teach the audience how to live ” 33 Nevertheless, it is possible to read Lolita as a novel that conducts ethical work in a more indirect way Understanding how this work is accomplished requires us to come to terms with the idea of the literary text as an “event” in Derek Attridge’s sense, i e an intervention within an institutional environment that the text not only reflects but within which it brings about certain ruptures and disturbances 34 In line with Phelan’s analysis of the complex coding of unreliable narration in the novel, I consider it vital to emphasise that Nabokov’s rhetorical project is ultimately different from Humbert’s, and this also entails differences in their respective relationship to canonising institutions 31 Cf. Philipp Schweighauser, “Metaficition, Transcendence, and Death in Nabokov’s Lolita,” Nabokov Studies 5 (1998/ 1999), 104, who captures this logic in a similar way: “Lolita must die so that Lolita may conform to the rules of the genre ” His focus, however, is on the genre of the confessional narrative, not on the context of Romanticism 32 My present interest is in the connection between women’s death and literary immortality in the Romantic context, but it bears pointing out that similar practices of self-canonisation also take place outside of Romantic frameworks One might think of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus (1979), which examines the comparatively minor place in cultural memory allotted to Antonio Salieri (in comparison to that of his rival, Mozart) In a highly ironic gesture, Salieri’s mediocrity is commented on at the end of the play when, in addition to his limitations as an artist, the protagonist is not even able to commit suicide - the last action that could have instigated a posthumous recognition of his art as ‘great ’ 33 Leona Toker, “Nabokov’s Worldview,” The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov, ed Julian W Connolly (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 232 34 Cf Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004) He understands the event of literature, in a performative sense, as “the singular putting into play of - while also testing and transforming - the set of codes and conventions that make up the institution of literature and the wider cultural formation of which it is part” (105- 106) Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the Value of Literature 309 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 As we saw above, the fictional protagonist is an unreliable narrator who unashamedly exploits certain institutionalised value systems in order to verify the high aesthetic standards of his own writing Yet, Nabokov’s novel, insofar as it exposes Humbert’s rhetoric and ironises his strategies of justification, constitutes an altogether different kind of event and rather provides a meta-comment on the operational logic underlying these value systems By embedding and historicising Humbert’s writing skills within received frameworks of evaluation, the novel represents a departure from the Romantic notion of aesthetic value as ‘transcendent’ and instead acknowledges “the aesthetic’s entanglement in systems of power, repression, and exclusion ” 35 As a thought experiment, the text shows what happens when a Romantic aesthetic is radically embraced Through his great artistic capabilities, Humbert creates Lolita/ Lolita as a Romantic piece of art, but this aestheticisation turns him blind towards Dolores Haze and the cruelty he inflicts upon her: “it is the romantic Humbert, who repeatedly rapes Lolita,” as Lipovetsky remarks 36 For all of Nabokov’s declarations that his interest is in nothing else than the experience of “aesthetic bliss” (see above), his novel makes clear that aesthetics is not only a bodily phenomenon but has a history Romanticism, with its emphasis on the autonomy of art, constitutes a key stage in this history. According to critics like Jerome McGann, it is so influential that it has even informed scholarly traditions of evaluating literary texts 37 Viewed in this broader context, Lolita’s ethical force does not only consist in exposing Humbert as a morally dubious individual but as a representative of a modern framework for evaluating art Readers (including critics) of the novel must therefore be wary of reiterating the logic of his Romantic code, namely that aesthetics can neatly be separated from ethics, and that the former takes place in an altogether different sphere that can only be entered by some. This interpretation can finally also be aligned with Rorty’s thesis that radical autonomy (as is claimed by Romanticism for art) comes with a price: “the pursuit of autonomy is at odds with feelings of solidarity ” 38 From a postcritical vantage point, it is productive to analyse Lolita as a novel that is highly outspoken on the frameworks of evaluation that render 35 Matthews/ McWhirter, “Introduction,” xxvi 36 Lipovetsky, “War of Discourses,” 60-61 37 This is the thesis argued in Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1983), 1: “the scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works are dominated by a Romantic Ideology, by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own self-representations.” As McGann’s study is firmly rooted in the paradigm of critique, I will come back in section 4 to its implications for the postcritical framework outlined in this article 38 Rorty, “Barber,” 159 310 a lexaNder s cherr 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 it as a great work of art These frameworks, including the Romantic context on which the present analysis has focused, are referenced again and again in the text - the damage to Dolores Haze and other Romantic heroines is done At the same time, by canonising itself, the text ‘looks forward’ to the institutions that have a stake in judging it and - provocatively - presents them with a ready-made evaluation of its aesthetic discourse Within the Romantic framework of evaluation in which it wants to be read, Lolita demands that its aesthetic quality be acknowledged This proleptic agency complicates the task of any critic who is used to retranslating aesthetics into ethics, or who assumes that ethical value must be looked for below the aesthetic ‘surface’ of a text - as if aesthetics was a different kind of problem It requires readers to face up to the institutionalised traditions of literary evaluation that inform literary criticism as much as they are at work in the novel This also goes for the specific tradition of Romanticism which is enacted in Nabokov’s text as both an aesthetic and an ethos, if a morally questionable one In light of the re-examination of reading methods that is presently being conducted across literature departments and the renewed engagement with questions of literary value that is closely connected to this development, reading Nabokov’s 1955 novel alongside Felski’s 2015 study is an insightful endeavour. Whereas Felski looks back on the influential role of critique in academic literary criticism, Lolita is a text that premediates critique at a time when this method - especially in its Marxist and feminist variants - was yet to be fully institutionalised By historically framing critique, both texts testify to a (renewed) attention to aesthetics It is therefore tempting to establish a connection between the famous “tip of the tongue” (“Lo Lee Ta ”) at the beginning of Nabokov’s novel (Lolita 7) and the way in which Felski faults critique for its hostility towards aesthetic sensitivity At any rate, the altogether unaesthetic movement of the tongue during the pronunciation of ‘critique,’ to which Felski alludes in a striking passage, resonates with Nabokov’s take on the tongue in an interesting way: “Crrritique! The word flies off the tongue like a weapon, emitting a rapid guttural burst of machine-gun-fire. There is the ominous cawing staccato of the first and final consonants, the terse thud of the short repeated vowel, the throaty underground rumble of the accompanying r ” (Limits 120) Such phonological wordplay notwithstanding, it is important to see that both Nabokov and Felski render questions of aesthetics as more than just a matter of bodily pleasure. In the final section of this article, I will assess some of the implications one can derive from a joint reading of the two texts for the project of a postcritical turn in the study of literature 311 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the Value of Literature 4 Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the (Aesthetic) Value of Literature: Perspectives and Challenges The present contribution has understood the topicality of questions concerning the value of literature in light of recent scholarly debates over ‘critique’ and ‘postcritique,’ and the concomitant attention that scholars have begun to pay again to aspects of aesthetics. The final word on these debates has certainly not yet been spoken, especially since Felski’s rendering of critique is as deliberately provocative as her ideas about postcritique are programmatic Nevertheless, with respect to the criteria that need to be met if the postcritical project is to be successful (regardless of the question of its label), it makes sense to hint at a few perspectives and challenges First, a re-integration of aesthetics into the study of literary value can only be accomplished if critics “resist the temptation to ‘recuperate,’ ‘reclaim,’ or ‘resurrect’ aesthetic discourse as a discourse of purity ” 39 It is one of the merits of critique to have alerted literary scholars to the fact that the discourse of aesthetics is itself a historical phenomenon With regard to the period of Romanticism, for example, which I presented as a significant context for analysing the rhetoric of beauty in Lolita, McGann’s work (already cited above) has shown that the idea that art ‘transcends’ its immediate historical circumstances is, in many regards, an invention of the Romantic age itself Romanticism is, in this sense, as much an institutionalised ethos for evaluating literature as is critique, and its principles of judgment have a considerable legacy of their own in literary criticism One must therefore be careful not to think of aesthetic value as an irreducible ‘fact’ of individual works that only the most gifted critics are capable of seeing, for such a rhetoric would reiterate the kind of self-delusion that is at work when Humbert claims that only a highly sensitive artist like himself can espy “nymphets ” In this sense, Lolita sets up a similar kind of trap for Romantic critics that James’ The Turn of the Screw has in store for psychoanalytical readings If McGurl is right in stating that “literary critics tend to see their existence in institutions as an embarrassment,” 40 a postcritical turn in literary studies would require scholars to develop greater awareness of the frameworks they apply when examining the aesthetic features of a given work Second, instead of viewing aesthetic value as a static feature that literary texts either have or do not have, it is promising to think of the aesthetic as an ‘activity’ in Kelleter’s sense (see section 2) Rather than asking what we can 39 Matthews/ McWhirter, “Introduction,” xv 40 McGurl, “Ordinary Doom,” 337 312 a lexaNder s cherr 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 do with a novel like Lolita, we may wish to refocus our engagement with texts by asking what literary works do with us, especially when we read them in contexts that have a clear self-reflexive dimension. Many literary texts have something to tell us about our scholarly frameworks of evaluation, of which a novel like Nabokov’s takes advantage but which, in so doing, it also shakes up Recognising this potential of literature would make it possible to understand how a given work connects with practices of scholarship and intervenes within academic institutions In Felski’s words, which point at the impact of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory in her thinking, we are invited to move away from an understanding of literary texts as “objects to be investigated” and come to view them as “coactors that make things happen ” (180) In this framework, aesthetics appears as indissolubly connected to ethics I have attempted to foreground this connection in my reading of Lolita as a novel about evaluation which inevitably constitutes an ‘event’ (in Attridge’s sense) for literary criticism Third, a direct implication of the shift towards greater recognition of the agency of literary texts is a development of alternative temporalities to the linear framework of traditional models of evaluation, especially the assumption that critique ‘trumps’ literature In addition to Felski’s work, such an alternative is also envisioned by Wai Chee Dimock in her “theory of resonance”: [W]hy should a text not be interpreted in relation to events outside its temporal vicinity? Does simultaneity necessarily confer analytic pertinence? Is it not possible to think of historicity as a relation less discretely periodized, one that emerges over time between any text and subsequent generations of readers? The preposition in, capturing a literary text only in its pastness, cannot say why this text might still matter in the present, why, distanced from its original period, it nonetheless continues to signify, continues to invite other readings 41 In line with Dimock’s key concept, the present article has made Nabokov’s Lolita ‘resonate’ with some of the recent debates in academic literary criticism and Felski’s work, in particular, in order to cause “unexpected vibrations in unexpected places ” 42 The future-oriented attachments that Dimock sees literary works as capable of forming align with other forms of proleptic agency that have been surveyed in this contribution - from Felman’s idea that literature might ‘authorise’ a discourse about its own reception to Starre’s concept of ‘self-canonisation ’ 41 Wai Chee Dimock, “A Theory of Resonance,” PMLA 112 5 (1997), 1061 42 Ibid 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 With regard to the key objective of a postcritical turn to rethink the relationship between literature and academic literary criticism, I therefore suggest that this endeavour would profit from a study of the proleptic agency of texts Such an activity could focus on a great variety of literary works - from a text like Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism” (1711), which is both a poetics of the new kind of writing envisioned by its author and an execution of this poetics, to Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) For all the differences that surely exist between a work like Morrison’s and Lolita, what both texts have in common is the intervention within the institutions of academic literary criticism they undertake 43 The forms of self-canonisation we find in Beloved, especially the narrator’s repeated emphasis that “[t]his is not a story to pass on,” 44 impact literary criticism in their own way and point at the novel’s fraught relationship to educational and canonising institutions It might be a promising starting point for a postcritical study of literature, then, to analyse how literary works constrain, unsettle, and challenge scholarly systems of value While previous studies of literary value have productively focused on the cultural work of literature “vis-à-vis the norms and values generally accepted by the majority of society,” 45 a postcritical version of this study would attempt to enrich this objective by more systematically considering within its concept of society the eager evaluators of literature who are known as ‘critics ’ Works Cited Anker, Elizabeth S / Rita Felski “Introduction ” Critique and Postcritique Eds eaed Durham: Duke UP, 2017, 1-28 Attridge, Derek The Singularity of Literature London: Routledge, 2004 Baumbach, Sibylle/ Herbert Grabes/ Ansgar Nünning “Values in Literature and the Value of Literature: Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating and Constructing Norms and Values ” Literature and Values: Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating and Constructing Norms and Values Eds eid Trier: WVT, 2009, 1-15 Bronfen, Elisabeth Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992 43 For Morrison’s novel, this is convincingly shown by Mark McGurl, whose analysis of the text departs from the observation that the white villain is an educator named “Schoolteacher ” See the respective chapter in his The Program Era, 346-360 44 Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987; London: Vintage, 2010), 324 45 Sibylle Baumbach/ Herbert Grabes/ Ansgar Nünning, “Values in Literature and the Value of Literature: Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating, and Constructing Norms and Values,” Literature and Values: Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating, and Constructing Norms and Values, eds eid (Trier: WVT, 2009), 8 313 Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the Value of Literature 314 a lexaNder s cherr 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 Buurma, Rachel Sagner/ Laura Heffernan “Notation After ‘The Reality Effect’: Remaking Reference with Roland Barthes and Sheila Heti ” Representations 125 1 (2014), 80-102 Clarke, Bruce Neocybernetics and Narrative Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2014 Dimock, Wai Chee “A Theory of Resonance ” PMLA 112 5 (1997), 1060-1071 Felman, Shoshana “Turning the Screw of Interpretation ” Yale French Studies 55/ 56 (1977), 94-207 Felski, Rita The Limits of Critique Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2015 Herrnstein Smith, Barbara Contingencies of Value: Critical Perspectives for Critical Theory Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988 Kelleter, Frank “Populärkultur und Kanonisierung: Wie(so) erinnern wir uns an Tony Soprano? ” Wertung und Kanon Eds Matthias Freise/ Claudia Stockinger Heidelberg: Winter, 2010, 55-76 Lipovetsky, Mark “A War of Discourses: Lolita and the Failure of a Transcendental Project ” Nabokov: Un’eredità letteraria Eds Alide Cagidemetrio/ Daniela Rizzi Venice: Cafoscarina, 2006, 49-65 Matthews, Pamela R / David McWhirter “Introduction: Exile’s Return? Aesthetics Now ” Aesthetic Subjects Eds eid Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2003, xiii-xxviii McGann, Jerome J The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1983 McGurl, Mark The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing Boston, MA: Harvard UP, 2009 --- “Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies in the Waste Land of the Present ” New Literary History 41 2 (2010), 329-349 Morrison, Toni Beloved (1987) London: Vintage, 2010 Nabokov, Vladimir Lolita (1955) London: Penguin, 2011 --- “On a Book Entitled Lolita” (1956) Lolita London: Penguin, 2011, 353-361 Phelan, James Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2005 Pifer, Ellen “Lolita ” The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov Ed Vladimir E Alexandrov New York: Routledge, 1995, 305-321 Reinfandt, Christoph Romantische Kommunikation: Zur Kontinuität der Romantik in der Kultur der Moderne Heidelberg: Winter, 2003 Rohr, Susanne “Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955) ” Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Ed Timo Müller Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017, 308-321 Rorty, Richard “The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty ” Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Cambridge: CUP, 1989, 141-168 Schweighauser, Philipp. “Metafiction, Transcendence, and Death in Nabokov’s Lolita ” Nabokov Studies 5 (1998/ 1999), 99-116 Starre, Alexander “Kontextbezogene Modelle: Bildung, Ökonomie, Nation und Identität als Kanonisierungsfaktoren ” Handbuch Kanon und Wertung: Theorien, Instanzen, Geschichte Eds Gabriele Rippl/ Simone Winko Stuttgart: Metzler, 2013, 58-66 Toker, Leona “Nabokov’s Worldview ” The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Ed Julian W Connolly Cambridge: CUP, 2005, 232-247 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age Internet-Related Fiction and the Ecology of Attention 1 The Changing Value of Literature in Times of Big Data: The Threat of Literary Depreciation under the Influence of ‘Attention Economy’ No one will doubt the observation that “there have been far-reaching changes in the life-worlds and dominant hierarchies of values that have emerged in the 21st century” 1 : in the digital age, even the ways in which literature is authored, distributed, read, and evaluated radically differ from those in the days in which print and analogousness characterised cultures The French literary theorist Yves Citton discusses this radical cultural shift in great detail, pointing out the effects of big data on the arts and the literary market He also focuses on the overabundance of literature digitally produced or/ and compiled and seemingly accessible to anyone at any time: With the progressive development of communication media and technologies […] the number of discourses [among them literary ones], images and spectacles offered to human attention has grown exponentially […] Not long ago, the economy of access to cultural goods was very tightly bound up with the production economy of material goods […] [Now, for] the (increasingly modest) price of a computer, or even a simple mobile phone, and an internet connection, billions of humans will soon have millions of books, images, songs, films, and television series at their disposal for a marginal cost of zero 2 1 Vera Nünning/ Ansgar Nünning, “Cultural Concerns, Literary Developments, Critical Debates: Contextualising the Dynamics of Generic Change and Trajectories of the British Novel in the Twenty-First Century,” The British Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Cultural Concerns - Literary Developments - Model Interpretations, eds Vera Nünning/ Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2018), 25 2 Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 3 On the “Facebook society” and its consequence of “nonstop neoliberal capitalism 24/ 7” see also Nünning/ Nünning, “Cultural Concerns,” esp 21-25 316 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 The consequences of the sudden shift in culture and the literary market, that is, the aforementioned exponentially growing abundance of literature, which can be found online, are huge, in at least two respects According to Citton, a new “attention economy” 3 is on the rise, which revolves around a decisive reversal in the relationship of two interdependent economic levels: the levels of cultural production and reception On the level of reception, the value of literature seems to be decreasing Existing in a quantity impossible to process for an individual, particular novels become superfluous to the reader (or, consumer); they increasingly turn from desirable goods to objects of irritation Even though they can be bought or downloaded for free in large quantities, they can, in their entirety, never be read: “cultural frustrations arise […] from a lack of available time to read, listen or watch all the treasures hastily downloaded onto our hard drives or recklessly accumulated on our shelves ” 4 As the appeal of the single, special book is on the decline, the attention of the consumer becomes, on the level of production, a desired good Authors, publishers, and other commercial or/ and cultural agents compete to win the favour of possible consumers, to capture the attention and “time of available brains ” 5 Surrounding the literary market, its objects, and its agents, a special kind of economy is forming: an “attention economy ” It is not an economy that, in the traditional sense, revolves around material goods, the physical substance of literary artefacts, but around the immaterial good of a reader’s attention and time In a market like this, literature, the individual novel, and its special content seem to lose their worth over the rising importance and value of potential recipients and their attention As seismographic media, a plethora of novels since the 2000s have sensed, traced, and reflected this development. Reflecting literature’s contemporary environment rather than submitting the novel to the dictates of economy, many authors have started to counter the prevalent economisation of the arts These novelists, thus, similar to Yves Citton’s demand, 6 turn their focus to the ‘ecology’ of contemporary literature In their works, they concentrate on the 3 Citton, Ecology, 3 et passim 4 Ibid , 4 5 Bernard Stiegler, Économie de l’hypermarériel et psychopouvoir (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2008), 117, 222; qtd in Citton, Ecology, 17 6 Even though the term “attention economy” can capture what he calls “the formal reconfiguration of our lives” (Citton, Ecology, 20), Yves Citton doubts that people’s attention is and should be really framed in economic terms On the backdrop of Aurélien Gambony and Félix Guattari’s philosophies, he discusses terms which seem more appropriate, e g “attention ecology” (ibid ) or attention “ecosophy” (ibid , 22), as “the activity of paying attention belongs to a genuine environmental wisdom - an ecosophy” (ibid , original emphasis) Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age 317 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 context in which literature is currently being produced and read as well as on the current patterns and (im-)balances shaping the literary environment They thematically and discursively track, for instance, the relationship between literature (esp its qualities, value, and economisation), literary practices (e g , the simultaneity of deep attention and hyper-attention or old and new ways of reading), and practitioners - among them producers and receivers, the latter of whom have morphed into “high-bandwidth consumers rather than meditative thinkers ” 7 In addition, writers who, in their novels, consider the status and value of literature in the digital age seem to try to answer and counter the provocative questions posed by Jeremy Green, who even hints at a possible ‘death’ of literature. “What place is there for the novel, for the specific form of inquiry, representation, and narration that late twentieth-century novels [and early twenty-first-century novels] […] still have to offer? ” 8 Using the adverb ‘still,’ Green, too, points to a ‘before’ and an ‘after’; a before and after the digitalisation of everyday lives and the arts, a before and after the advent of digital culture, which seems not only to devalue literature but also to initiate its extinction He asks whether the novel as traditionally known and in its printed form will be outpaced in an environment of ever newly developing digital technologies, media formats, and e-genres, and by emergent, highly mutable textual forms, such as flickering flash poems 9 or hypertextual novels on the internet 10 - ‘outpaced’ in terms of relevance or even existence Initiating a movement countering the current environment of literature and the alarming shifts in the literary landscape (as described by Citton and Green), several novelists, among them writers of nanonovels and other internet-related fiction, are increasingly innovating the genre they write in. Not only do they produce experimentally fascinating fiction; they also partake in a revalorisation process of literature In creative ways, these writers assess the qualitative and quantitative status given to literature in times of big data They critically reflect and use the new channels and practices of human interaction as well as the technical means and media formats the internet age 7 Teddy Wayne, “Our (Bare) Shelves, Our Selves,” The New York Times, 12 June 2015, www nytimes com/ 2015/ 12/ 06/ fashion/ our-bare-shelves-our-selves html, n p 8 Jeremy Green, “The Novel and the Death of Literature,” Late Postmodernism, ed id (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 46 9 For instance, poems like William Poundstone’s “Project for Tachistoscope (Bottomless Pit),” Electronic Literature Collection, 2005, http: / / collection eliterature org/ 1/ works/ poundstone__project_for_tachistoscope_bottomless_pit html 10 Mark Z Danielewski’s bestselling House of Leaves (New York: Random House, 2000) is a case in point, which was first published on the internet. 318 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 has provided them with 11 In doing so, they tend to revalorise literature as a medium that both demands and deserves immersion and deep attention To show how this is accomplished, I will look at three internet-related and/ or -based forms of fiction, which make use of new techniques and media formats digitalisation has provided them with With the means at hand, they counter the negative effects that digitalisation has on the ecology of literature; they dare the recipient-related withdrawal of deep attention and the critically prognosticated threat of literature’s decrease in value or extinction in the economy of attention To show the broad generic range of fiction that displays a remarkable playfulness, inventiveness, and generic versatility within this new digital reality, I will look at three different forms of fiction that, in different ways, interact with, and reflect the realm of the digital. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) is an intermedial novel that exists in print form but imitates digital hypertexts; Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (2007) is a transmedial novel, narrated across print and digital media; and Stephanie Hutton’s internet-based “Geology of a Girl” (2017) belongs to the emergent genre of micro-fiction. Even though very different in form, they all test the novel’s formal, aesthetical, and cultural potential in the digital age and, at the same time, under the influence of the digital In their formal and semantic complexity, they challenge their audience to consolidate old and new forms of reception, to reconsider their current media usage, to face their degradation to mere consumers by the digital industry, and to resist their and literature’s devaluation by the big data economy In the following, I will ask with which strategies these novels counter the current attention economy, revalorise literature, and demand a new degree of their recipients’ deep attention 2 David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as an Internet-Related Intermedial Novel Revalorising Literature, Print Media, and the Reader in the Digital Age The trends sketched above - of people being increasingly frustrated with the overabundance of literature and the lack of time to immerse themselves into 11 Among recent studies which discuss the ways in which novelists make use of digital technologies and formats to reflect matters of digitalisation, the internet, and the status of the novel are Regina Schober’s “Between Nostalgic Resistance and Critical Appropriation: Contemporary Fiction on/ of the Information Age and the Potentials of (Post)Humanist Narrative,” AmerikaStudien 61 (2017), 359-379, and Anna Weigel-Heller’s monograph Fictions of the Internet: From Intermediality to Transmedia Storytelling in 21st-Century Novels (Trier: WVT, 2018) Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age 319 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 the demanding process of literary reception - do not seem to apply to David Mitchell’s oeuvre The novelist seems a remarkable exception in the time of attention economy in that, to him and his works, attention seems certain Since the publication of his first novel in 1999, he has repeatedly broken sales record after sales record; he “has been favourite to critics and a wide readership alike” and his novels manage the balancing act of being “extremely popular while simultaneously being considered ‘high-brow ’” 12 Even in the attention economy, his novels are being valued and read By looking at his most successful novel so far, Cloud Atlas (2004), 13 I will ask which strategies he applies in his innovative work to secure a wide readership’s attention and appreciation His bestseller features a highly innovative and complex structure, which relates to the internet and digital presentation strategies He draws on the ubiquitous hypertext, a network of linked data - in textual, pictorial, or other form - in which users can move ad libitum, and further develops it for the complex medium of the novel The latter becomes a gigantic hybrid masterpiece that blows up the traditional boundaries that have characterised printed texts so far With its network of data and stories, Cloud Atlas records cultural history and people’s lives across several continents from the nineteenth-century to a post-apocalyptic future, interconnecting different media, genres, and stories In Cloud Atlas, whose title not only refers to a fictional piece of music but also indicates the novel’s medial hybridity as it juxtaposes old and new ways of archiving, 14 six people tell their stories in six independent, but interrelated episodes Tied together in a quasi-hypertextual manner, these narratives become a chronicle of mankind’s successes and deficiencies as well as a history of medial and generic change. In the part entitled “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” a nineteenth-century lawyer is on a sea passage from New Zealand back to the US and writes a diary In 1931, this diary is read in an edited version by the young composer Robert Frobisher Frobisher’s story is 12 Birgit Breidenbach, “Hybridisation and Globalisation as Catalysts of Generic Change: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and The Bone Clocks (2014),” The British Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Cultural Concerns - Literary Developments - Model Interpretations, eds Vera Nünning/ Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2018), 312 13 As Birgit Breidenbach specifies, it “sold more than 500,000 copies and was adapted into a major Hollywood film starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry; at the same time, it was hailed by critics and earned a spot on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize ” (Ibid ) 14 The traditional ‘atlas,’ a monumental print archive to store geographical data, is combined with a ‘cloud,’ reminiscent of ‘cloud computing,’ in which services and data are not locally but centrally stored, often on huge computer networks based in the US or Russia These data and services are only accessible from afar and provided the internet is working 320 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 recounted in “Letters from Zedelghem,” which consists of a series of letters he writes to a friend in England to tell him of his life in Belgium The episode “Half-Lives - The First Luisa Rey Mystery” is set in the 1970s and refers back to Frobisher’s letters, which are read by the main character of the present episode, a young female journalist, Luisa Rey, who puts her life at risk to uncover a hushed up nuclear scandal “Half-Lives,” in turn, crops up as an unedited manuscript in the episode entitled “The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish,” which is set in present-day Britain The ‘Luisa Rey’-manuscript is read and assessed by publisher Timothy Cavendish, who, after having fled the gangster family of an angry author of his, is now trapped in a nursing home, which he first believed to be a hotel. Cavendish’s story is then referenced in the next episode In “An Orison of Sonmi~451,” set in a dystopian, futuristic Korea, the clone Sonmi~451 tells an ‘archivist’ of her life He records the clone’s story in an audio-visual, holographic storing device called ‘orison ’ Part of Sonmi~451’s story is the outrageous incident that she has dared to watch a film (The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish) from before what must have been a major global disaster, destroying most of the world The sixth and last episode, “Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After,” is set on a post-apocalyptic island called Hawaii and it refers back to Sonmi~451’s episode The survivors of the apocalypse, living as primitive folk and farmers, worship a goddess called ‘Sonmi’ and commemorate a “Fall,” after which the civilised inhabitants of the earth, the “Old Uns,” were destroyed Besides, an old man, Zachery, finds Sonmi~451’s orison. As the outline of the novel’s structure shows, the characters of all episodes are interrelated by reading, watching, or touching something that was produced in another time by another person. Every fictional material text introduced in one episode and presented in its specific medial format - a diary or an orison - is used by Mitchell as a simulated hyperlink. Although these fictional texts mentioned are no ‘real’ hyperlinks on which a reader could actually click to move to another document, they at least imitate the character and mechanisms of digital hyperlinks in the novel’s print form Mentioned in one episode and taken up in another context, the titles of the fictional texts serve as phrases that are quasi-hyperlinked, moving the readers to a separate part of the novel, a different but semantically related textual document or episode Cloud Atlas’ intermedial referencing, its reproduction of a hypertext’s network structure, however, does not end with the imitation of the hyperlinks: It is enriched by a numeric construction Each episode revolves around an axis of reflection (Fig. 1), situated in episode six, the only episode that is presented without interruption All other stories are interrupted in their middle and followed by a temporally succeeding story (first part) or a temporally preceding Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age 321 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 story (second part) In the novel’s second part, after the sixth and last story set in a post-apocalyptic time, the sequence is reverted: All stories are, one after the other and in reverse order, continued and ended Fig 1: The hyperlink and mirror structure of the six episodes in Cloud Atlas (red arrows symbolise quasi-hyperlinks; blue line symbolises axis of reflection). The effect of this structural arrangement, in which chapters are even interrupted in mid-sentence, 15 is one that heightens the impression that readers are less faced with an analogous print novel but with a novel that makes experimental use of virtual presentation formats and digital reading experiences, moving readers from one hypertextually linked document to another and back again One that evokes the discontinuous, disrupted nature of hypertextual networks and readings At the end of each episode, there is one turn of the page, and with it, similar to the ‘click’ on a hyperlink, the readers are suddenly brought to another ‘ontological level,’ i e to a completely different episode, geographical space, century, and cultural reality It seems that, with this strategy, the novel spells out, even performs, that, in an age which invites fast-forward reading and impedes immersion, both analogous and digital reception strategies need to be combined While digital genres, with their hyperlinks, not only invite distraction, they also, as Cloud Atlas’ structure shows, enable the concurrent reception of different documents and help semantically relate contents At the same time, analogous genres, like the novel, especially if they are formally as complex as Cloud Atlas, demand their recipients’ deep attention They structurally trigger people’s engagement by calling their attention to different reading strategies and forcing them to apply them in combination With this, literature is one step ahead of literary criticism and cognitive studies What Maryanne Wolf demands for future literary education, David Mitchell is already schooling his readers in: in the combination of old and new reading strategies Wolf emphasises that today’s - ‘good’ - reader needs to be able to combine the skills digital media nowadays foster (getting access to knowledge and entertainment) with those the age of print has equipped 15 For instance, the first part of “The Pacific Journal” ends with a sentence fragment. David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (London: Sceptre, 2004), 39 322 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 humankind with, foremost the ability to contemplate 16 Cloud Atlas’ complex structure illustrates: Only if digital, numeric, zigzag-style reading strategies, as invited by digital media, are combined with analogous, deep, and literary ones, as demanded by novels, will readers be able to meet the task of decoding the challenging texts of the present Acknowledging and making use of digital formats, Mitchell thus revalorises literature as a medium that is able to combine digital and analogous traditions in various and seminal ways 17 Performatively, his novel convinces readers of the formal and semantic productivity and worth of the coexistence of new media formats and traditional ones In addition, he proves that the genre of the novel, in a metareferential vein and via its complex structure, is a highly flexible one. Cloud Atlas makes intermedial use of new, digital formats of the internet while, at the same time, showing that with hyper reading strategies alone, which include “skimming, scanning, [and] fragmenting” and aim to “conserve attention,” 18 a novel’s complex structure and semantics can never be sufficiently processed. Cloud Atlas’ complex structure challenges its recipients The novel is likely to be more readily understood if readers succeed in combining their proficiency of the hypertext and their close reading as well as deep concentration faculties Forcing them to apply both old and new reading strategies, it helps readers to adjust their brains to the challenges of the digital age; it schools them in Wolf’s proposed new way of decoding highly complex textual structures and of dissecting interlaced topics as well as entwined contents While the dichotomy between the old and the new is discursively ‘performed’ and synthesised by way of Cloud Atlas’ structure, generic and medial innovation as well as the change in literary value, which the arising economi- 16 Maryanne Wolf bases her ideas of the ‘good reader’ on Aristotle’s concept of the “three lives” of good society (the “life of knowledge and productivity,” the “life of entertainment,” and the “life of contemplation”) See Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), 13 Nancy Katherine Hayles, too, argues for a synthesis of old and new media practices She believes in “contemporary technogenesis,” the idea that humans and technology co-evolve On this basis, she advocates “comparative media studies,” an innovative approach that situates digital work in print traditions and vice versa See Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012), 1-18 17 Besides the structure of the novel, its formatting combines techniques of the digital with traditional print formats: The current possibilities of digital editing and formatting inspire typographical experiments, e g the integration of alleged handwriting (Cloud Atlas, 1 et passim, or 247), newspaper clips (ibid , 115), and interview formatting (ibid , 187-245) Thus, the possibilities of the digital age are discursively put to use to explore and test the print genre’s boundaries as well as to celebrate the haptic, visual realities of older media formats, print forms, and techniques 18 Hayles, How We Think, 12 Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age 323 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 sation of attention might have caused, are themselves thematised in the novel Through the hypertextual interconnectedness of the episodes, their characters, and fictional material objects like diaries and manuscripts, the characteristics of media and their distribution as well as people’s media usage are explored - in their historical specifics and their universal, timeless qualities. To show this, I will zoom in on the fifth story, the story of clone Sonmi~451. While chapters one to four cover the medial evolution from the nineteenth century to the present time, from diary via the letter to the telegraph and film, the fifth chapter, “An Orison of Sonmi~451,” imagines new media, thus raising the question of what will happen to traditional media in the future In Sonmi’s future, media products like books and genres like the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, handed down the generations in print, have become extremely rare; and so have films. In addition, the cultural techniques of making sense of these media products have not been passed down to post-human generations and the technical devices which give access to them have fallen into a state of technical decay People live in an age of new media, for instance, ‘sonis,’ devices that seem similar to tablets, and so-called ‘orisons,’ three dimensional, holographic fictive media, which are probably inspired by video game aesthetics and projectors Crucial to this future is, however, that not everybody is allowed to use these media - just the privileged purebloods or ‘consumers’ (genomically enhanced individuals), not sub-human slaves like the clone Sonmi~451 Slaves will be killed on being found using them; and, anyway, they lack the interest in and the knowledge of how to use them In this dystopian setting, media usage is restricted to those who have the ‘right’ class and the economic means to use, to ‘consume’ media As the sketched contents indicate, this episode reinforces the value of literary messages anthologised in print and the worth of traditional reading strategies, which need to be preserved alongside new ones and acquired by future generations so as not to be lost (as in Sonmi’s future) Older and current media are considered in a nostalgic, loving manner; at the same time, the cultural-historical dependency of media and genres is stressed The possible loss of objects of cultural value, like Andersen’s fairy tales, and of cultural practices, like watching movies, are bemoaned What is more, however, Sonmi’s story not only revalorises traditional narrative genres It confers greater value to the readers themselves, who, in the economy of attention, have become interesting to the literary market for their capital (money, time, and attention) rather than their minds Sonmi’s story makes the reader aware of the impending and existing dangers of digitalisation and new economies: Technological devices like e-readers or tablets, and with them, the education and knowledge they mediate, are commodified. 324 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 They belong only to those who are willing and able to pay for them and who know how to use them Cloud Atlas imagines the consequences of an environment that makes people “consumers” and “clones” instead of “readers” and “citizens”: An ecologised environment like Sonmi’s is likely to rob people of their personality and political agency; it makes them slaves to the market and the world Finally, the episode makes clear that Mitchell intends to re-assign value to both the cultural technique of ‘reading’ and the institution of libraries Both are celebrated as practices and tools of democracy When Sonmi~451, the clone, for the first time steps outside the diner in which she lives and serves and gets a glimpse of the outside world, she says: I didn’t even know what I needed in order to understand such a limitless place. │ Wing [another clone] replied I needed intelligence: ascension would provide this I needed time: Boom-Sook Kim’s own idleness would give me time But I also needed knowledge. │ I asked, how is knowledge found? │ ‘You must learn how to read, little sister,’ he said 19 This passage discusses education, democratisation, and their relation to future media (and by implication, current digital media) Literature and libraries open worlds of knowledge; they can educate in egalitarian and democratic ways However, one needs resources, which, in the digital age, seem to dwindle and even vanish, but should be available to everyone: time and the familiarity with traditional cultural techniques so that anyone can become and/ or stay an individual and reader, rather than a clone and consumer Cloud Atlas can thus be read as a warning against the attention economy in which readers become dehumanised consumers At the same time, it re-introduces literature, printed texts, and handwriting as traditional genres, media formats, and cultural techniques which, in all circumstances and environments, are precious and worthy of saving Their Benjaminean ‘aura’ does not at all seem lost in the ages of mechanical (and digital) reproduction Accordingly, one passage reads: In his hotel room […], Dr Rufus Sixsmith reads a sheaf of letters written to him nearly half a century ago by his friend Robert Frobisher Sixsmith knows them by heart, but their texture, rustle and his friend’s faded handwriting calm his nerves These letters are what he would save from a burning building 20 19 Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, 216 20 Ibid , 112 Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age 325 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 Both the character Sixsmith and Cloud Atlas revere the haptic, the tactile, the aural quality of the material object, of paper, of ink, and handwriting With this, they disseminate an environmental rather than economic wisdom As much as the novel uses digital strategies for innovation purposes, as much does it celebrate the pre-digital aura of ‘the material ’ Despite its formally and generically excessive use of intermedial references, Cloud Atlas displays a strong thematic appreciation for analogous times and for the printed and hand-written object; that which exists beyond the digital realm and which is - literally - handed down the generations and materially distributed across cultures 3 Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts as an Internet-Related and Partially Internet-Based Transmedial Novel Countering the Imbalance between Data-base and Narrative Similar to Cloud Atlas, Steven Hall’s debut novel, The Raw Shark Texts (2007), reacts to the challenges of digitalisation and transforms them into generic innovations In contrast to the former, the latter goes discursively one step further; it is truly transmedial It not only intermedially refers to digital text formats but also stretches across various media: firstly, parts of it have appeared in print, others on the internet; secondly, it expands the traditional confines of the novel, playing with print and formatting, incorporating pictures and even a flipbook. Beyond its structural finesse, Hall’s novel has also been lauded for its content and regarded as a “useful site of study for considering how the contemporary novel imagines its role within an increasingly variegated media ecology ” 21 The thus structured novel explores yet another aspect of the ecology of attention in the digital age: the power of hidden databases Scholars such as Lev Manovich have argued that these “structured collections of data” 22 seem to be the dominant form of cultural expression in the information age They are the centre of contemporary people’s attention, compete with, and (partially) replace the form of cultural expression that used to be hegemonic in the modern age, namely, narrative (primarily, the novel and the fiction film). 23 Steven Hall’s novel contests the seeming dominance of the database, points 21 Julia Panko, “‘Memory Pressed Flat into Text’: The Importance of Print in Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts,” Contemporary Literature 52 2 (2011), 264 22 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 219 23 Ibid , 218 Nancy Katherine Hayles contests this strong statement At the same time, she agrees “with the obvious fact that databases are now pervasive in contemporary society, their growth greatly facilitated by digital media ” Hayles, How We Think, 171 326 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 to its dangers, and revalorises narrative literature by drawing attention to the affordances of what has been called “the aesthetic of bookishness ” 24 The characteristics of big data and the effects that the hidden structures of databases can have on people are summarised in a poem in The Raw Shark Texts: The dark shape glides up into the flow │ of conversations and stories, swims │ through the word-hum of packed Saturday night bars, circles the loops and │ edges of exchanged mobile numbers. ││ A telephone call is misdialled and, miles │ away, my unconscious self shifts in sleep, │ disturbed by a ringing bell. ││ From four degrees of separation, the shadow │ under the water catches the scent. A curved, │ rising signifier, a black idea fin of momentum │ and intent cuts through the distance between │ us in a spray of memes. 25 This dark poem describes the attack of the eponymous shark It is not a real one, but a conceptual shark and, instead of swimming in water, it swims in data, in ‘memes.’ These memes are the streams of ideas and flows of conversations which spread from person to person within a culture, and which, in the digital age and with the growing dominance of information technologies, have exponentially grown. The conceptual shark is, thus, a personification of databases and their potential dangers Databases are as invisible as sharks underwater: As Katherine Hayles points out, “[e]ven as the data stored in databases has exploded exponentially, the percentage accessible (or indeed even known) to the public has shrunk ” 26 Just like the predators at sea, databases, their structures, and contents are hard to spot and process They are uncanny because they gather large quantities of personal information in the dark They are at the same time deeply personal and, with it, become potentially dangerous, once one comes too close Both sharks and databases are surveillance entities While sharks track their victims down by way of their scent, databases gather material and data of their users, without them realising it until it is too late Sharks surface to attack, as in the poem; databases strip people of their identities and sell them out to companies and, even worse, governments and/ or intelligence services - hence, the uncanny feeling of internet users who are 24 Jessica Pressman, “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 48 4 (2009), 465-482 25 Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts, ‘Unspace Edition’ (Edinburgh/ New York: Canongate, 2007), 33 26 Hayles, How We Think, 200 Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age 327 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 aware of the “creepiness of knowing that one’s everyday transactions depend on invisible databases”; 27 hence the situation of Eric The shark’s victim, Eric Sanderson, is someone who personally experiences the threat of databases, their characteristics of decontextualising personal information and atomising individuality. He wakes up after a first shark attack, with no memory of who he is or of any past experiences Eric is thus an individual who experiences the dominance of the digital and the diminishing importance of narrative. His engagement with the former, personified as the conceptual shark, seems to have fragmented his self, stripped him of the holistic view of his self the latter would provide After all, “[w]hereas data elements must be atomized for databases to function efficiently, narrative fiction embeds ‘data elements’ […] in richly contextualized environments of the phrase, sentence, […] and story as a whole ” 28 Due to his contact with the shark, the amnesic protagonist is literally stripped of narrative contextualisation, of his life story He even feels this due to big data From his former self, who has written letters to his amnesic future self, he learns that, when his girlfriend died, he has activated a conceptual shark, which uses memes and information flows as well as the virally spreading disembodied texts of telecommunication technologies, like the internet, to “[feed] on human memories and the intrinsic sense of self ” 29 Eric learns that the conceptual shark wants to feed on his data and his personality; and he enters upon a quest to destroy the shark and regain his memory and, with it, narrative agency Yet, the conceptual shark is not only a metaphor for the uncanniness of databases in the digital age, it is, again, also a source of discursive inspiration The novel consists of 36 print chapters; for each chapter, there is also an ‘un-chapter ’ These ‘un-chapters’ are outside of the main printed text and they have been found sporadically since the novel’s publication, either in the virtual world, i e , online, or in the actual world, in special editions Some of these un-chapters have a short lifespan and have been only temporarily online, such as the “Aquarium Fragment,” 30 which, at least at the moment, cannot be accessed anymore With a discursive move like this, Hall expands the novel’s boundaries as a print medium. In a transmedial manner, he, firstly, distributes one narrative across several media, print and digital ones The reception process is, secondly, individualised - resembling those individ- 27 Nancy Katherine Hayles, “Material Entanglements: Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts as Slipstream Novel,” Science Fiction Studies 38 1 (2011), 115 28 Ibid , 117 29 Hall, Raw Shark, 64 30 Steven Hall, “The Aquarium Fragment: Negative 1/ 36,” Canongate, 2007, www canongate tv/ media/ pdf/ Aquarium_Fragment_Prologue pdf 328 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 ual reading processes of hypertexts, whose links users can either click on or ignore Thirdly, in terms of access, the narrative becomes as unstable as internet data, which can be easily altered (e g , Wikipedia entries) and sometimes even get lost as links become obsolete, passwords expire, or websites are deleted (e g , Hall’s un-chapters) The text is in constant motion, there is no ultimate version, and it is never fixed. And, fourthly, like databases, the novel is (at least partly) hidden; especially the digital parts of it remain, at times, invisible to readers. Thus, the novel’s data flows and un-chapters are made to appear as enigmatic and dark as databases; the disembodied texts and meanings are perceived just as evanescent, uncontrollable, and therefore potentially threatening After all, on a story level, they are used by predators like the conceptual shark The past Eric says to his future, amnesic self: “And the internet, remember there is no safe procedure for electronic information Avoid it at all costs ” 31 While one strategy of The Raw Shark Texts’ transmedialisation is its outsourcing of parts into the digital realm to make the threat of the latter imaginable to the readers and to serve as a warning of the dangers of the internet, other transmedia strategies serve as enhancement of the readers’ esteem of the databases’ devalued other: namely, narrative As typographic experiments in The Raw Shark Texts and story elements show, print media serve, within this story world, as alternatives to the digital, as worlds that offer safety, security, and a certain kind of felicity The typographic elements in the novel are manifold: There is a shark attack simulated by way of a flipbook (cf. Fig. 2); there is a postcard, a map, a film still, and concrete poetry. And all of these elements extend the boundaries of the genre novel as they stretch The Raw Shark Texts’ narrative beyond words In this innovative way, Hall’s work becomes part of a body of novels that commit themselves to an “aesthetics of bookishness,” 32 which “exploit the power of the print page in ways that draw attention to the book as a multimedia format, one informed by and connected to digital technologies ” 33 At the same time, these bookish novels emanate a particular fondness for the printed page and convey a certain esteem for the possibilities of the genre ‘novel’ and its adaptation qualities to new environments, such as the current attention ecology 31 Hall, Raw Shark, 81 32 Pressman, “Aesthetic of Bookishness,” 465-482 33 Ibid , 465 329 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age Fig 2: Elements of The Raw Shark Texts’ flipbook, ‘The conceptual shark, attacking’ (Raw Shark Texts 357, 375) On the story level, print media are staged as opposition to the digital, too Print and digital forms are compared regarding their character and contrasted to each other in their respective assessment In contrast to the threat of the digital, which atomises and de-contextualises data, printed texts and narrative fiction, which link data to each other and to their contexts in specific ways, provide safety. This is why, on his quest to kill the predator, Eric finds shelter in embodied, materially fixed and stable texts: He travels through underground labyrinths of paper tunnels, which are entirely built of books and in which “everything, everything has been covered in words, words in so many languages ” 34 These print safe houses are even sacralised. On his flight from the shark, Eric encounters a “chamber with a yellow domed roof made of what looked to be telephone directories […] The walls themselves had been built from […] hardback books mainly, with the odd thick softback dictionaries, thesauruses, textbooks […] and had been constructed with careful bricklaying techniques ” And he and his companion realise, “‘Wow […] It’s like a church ’” 35 With this sacralisation of the haptic and embodied textual realities, the novel self-referentially endows worth to itself, as a print medium, as a genre, and as a narrative With its transmedia strategies, The Raw Shark Texts, in consequence, challenge the alleged dominance of databases in the digital era in favour of showing the strengths of narrative They both stage and revere the novel’s generic flexibility as well as narrative’s ability 34 Hall, Raw Shark, 227 35 Ibid , 229 330 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 to heal people, who can either escape to literary texts as safe havens or make use of narrative’s potential to historicise and contextualise individual lives, so people can feel healthy and whole again 4 Internet-Based Micro-Fiction as ‘Aesthetic Laboratory’ and Means to Regain Readers’ Deep Attention In the digital age, there has been a flood of very short fiction, which is referred to with various expressions: there is the “nanonovel,” 36 “micro-fiction,” 37 “short-short fiction,” 38 or “flash-fiction.” 39 And although, as Michael Basseler in his literary-historiographical sketch states, the literary fragment and the short story have had a long tradition, 40 it is notable that the surge in digitalisation seems to correlate with a proliferation of fiction that is marked by an extreme brevity These works tend to be of even ‘shorter shortness’ than conventional short stories; hence the various aforementioned prefixes. Of course, ‘brevity’ and ‘shortness’ are relative categories, and there are historical predecessors of, for instance, even stories as short as six words 41 This is why I would refrain from calling it a “new narrative genre ” 42 What is new, however, is that the genre has, in the last decades, proliferated on the internet, as Fishelov illustrates by his choice of examples Even though there are a couple of print anthologies of micro-fiction, 43 the genre has become intricately tied to and evolved with digitalisation Nanonovels have become mainly ‘inter- 36 Jules Horne, Nanonovels: Five-Minute Flash Fiction (Selkirik: Texthouse, 2015) 37 See the arts and culture blog HeadStuff, especially Bart Van Goethem’s posting “20 Micro-Fiction Stories,” HeadStuff, 29 May 2014, www headstuff org/ culture/ literature/ 20-micro-fiction-stories/ , n.p. 38 Michael Basseler, “Short-Short Fiction,” The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English, eds Paul Delaney/ Adrian Hunter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019), 147-159 39 National Flash Fiction Day, https: / / nationalflashfictionday.co.uk/ . 40 Basseler, “Short-Short Fiction,” 147-148 41 The apocryphal story “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” attributed to Hemmingway is a case in point; see David Fishelov, “The Poetics of Six-Word Stories,” Narrative 27 1 (2019), 31-33 42 Cf. ibid., 31. See also Ashley Chantler on the difficulty of “pinning down” the genre’s origin; Chantler, “Notes towards the Definition of the Short-Short Story,” The Short Story, ed Ailsa Cox (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 39 43 For instance, James Thomas/ Robert Shapard/ Christopher Merrill, eds, Flash Fiction International: Very Short Stories from Around the World (New York: W W Norton Co , 2015); Tom Hazuka/ Denise Thomas/ James Thomas, eds, Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (New York: W W Norton Co , 1992) Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age 331 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 net-based: ’ They are produced with the help of the internet, 44 they are mainly published there, they are dominantly received there 45 The ‘economic’ genre, at least at a first glance, seems to fit the needs and constraints of the current attention economy perfectly because it is a genre less defined by certain qualities than by quantity Authors like Jules Horne advertise their nanonovels with the fact that they have written them in five minutes each, 46 and collectors promote their digital anthologies by referring to the shortness of time a reader needs to spend on reading their selections: “You can probably power through all of these great short-short stories in one long bathroom break ” 47 Due to this, critics have attributed the genre’s popularity to contemporary people’s tendency of being either easily distracted or hyper-attentive They state that short-short stories seem to fit the reading habits of the “emailing, texting, abbreviating ADD generation ” 48 However, the obviously wide-spread notion that nanonovels can be processed in a brief time span and with such minimal effort that even people with attention deficits manage to pay attention to them seems to be misleading. Of course, there is flash fiction which might be processed rather quickly, such as “21st Century Man - A Study” (“‘I post, therefore I am ’”), or “The Abused Dancer” (“After everyone left, she did endless pirouettes on his grave ”) 49 More often than not, however, there is internet-based fiction that requires its readers’ deep attention If one refrains from focusing on the genre’s brevity alone, one realises its preeminent quality of being rather poorly contextualised This can be seen when one looks at Stephanie Hutton’s “Geology of a Girl” (2017), second 44 There are online tutorials on how to write micro-fiction, see David Gaffney’s “Stories in your pocket: how to write flash fiction,” The Guardian, 14 May 2012, https: / / www theguardian.com/ books/ 2012/ may/ 14/ how-to-write-flash-fiction, n.p., and writers like Jules Horne report how they get inspiration for their nanonovels by browsing the internet: “Insert the word or phrase you find into Google. This is the title of your story. │ Open the first non-sponsored page that appears. Something on this page is your stimulus │ Set a timer and write for five minutes. │ Stop.” Horne, Nanonovels, xi 45 There are websites such as Six Word Stories, www sixwordstories net/ ; and National Flash-Fiction Day, https: / / www.nationalflashfictionday.co.uk/ , which anthologise the best brief fiction; there are also blogs on which individuals post their own work or collect others’ micro-fiction. 46 Horne, Nanonovels, xi 47 Nataf, Emmanuel, “7 Flash Fiction Stories That Are Worth (a Tiny Amount of) Your Time,” Electric Lit: Reading into Everything, 12 October 2018, https: / / electricliterature com/ 7-flash-fiction-stories-that-are-worth-a-tiny-amount-of-your-time/ , n.p. 48 Chantler, “Notes,” 40 49 Both short-shorts, “21st Century Man - A Study” and “The Abused Dancer,” have been posted by Barth von Goethem in “20 Micro-Fiction Stories,” HeadStuff, 29 May 2014, www.headstuff.org/ culture/ literature/ 20-micro-fiction-stories/ , n.p. 332 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 place winner of the National Flash-Fiction Day’s micro-fiction competition 2017, which will be quoted in its entirety below: Ella kept one pebble in her pocket and rubbed it down to sand, running the grains through her fingers. Stones sneaked in through holes in her shoes. Her legs turned to rocks She leant against the sisterhood of brick on the playground and watched girls skip together like lambs A boulder weighed heavily in her stomach She curled forwards by habit. Her head filled with the detritus of life. A new girl started school in May with fire in her eyes. She whispered to Ella with aniseed breath ‘lava is liquid rock,’ the girl took her hand and ran 50 Nanonovels like the “Geology of a Girl” firstly often keep their filling out of essential content narremes, such as ‘character,’ ‘time,’ or ‘space,’ at a minimum The author does not give us any extensive information about Ella’s character, her history, or her socio-cultural provenance She does not specify if the protagonist encounters the other girls in school or private contexts She does not enlighten us whether Ella is generally an unhappy girl, as suggested by the title (‘geology’ is the study of the earth’s structure, surface, and origin; the ‘geology’ of Ella indicates that her general character must be considered similar to the earth’s inanimate surface), or just in this particular playground situation, which is not further specified or narrativised. Concerning her current situation, the readers can merely assume that the protagonist feels either different or isolated from her peers, as they are contrasted to each other: the other girls are described as cheerfully bouncing, animate beings, as lambs, whereas Ella is associated with inanimate objects, stones and rock, and therefore with a certain gravitas Additionally, and in contrast to the moving girls, the reader witnesses how Ella is gradually getting petrified, her organism metaphorically morphing into a fossilised form, as her legs become like solid rock, a boulder blocks her stomach, and detritus fills her brains. Secondly, flash fictions’ quality of being rather poorly contextualised becomes also manifest in their beginnings and endings, which tend to be rather open They present readers only with the “tip of the iceberg,” thus making them “more active participant[s] in the reading process ” 51 In the particular case of Stephanie Hutton’s nanonovel, we do not know why exactly the protagonist feels excluded, why she feels closer to a brick wall than to her peers Has something extraordinary happened to her prior to the short-short story’s beginning, isolating her from the others? Or is there a history of her being bul- 50 Hutton, Stephanie, “Geology of a Girl,” National Flash Fiction Day, 2017, https: / / www nationalflashfictionday co uk/ index php/ competition/ 2017-microfiction-results/ #Hutton, n p 51 Fishelov, “Six-Word Stories,” 37 Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age 333 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 lied by the other children for no reason, because of her character, or because she has been made victim of racial discrimination or social othering (maybe she is less well-off than the other girls, as there are holes in her shoes)? What happens when the new girl takes Ella’s hand and runs with her? Is Ella finally rescued from her isolation, as the ending suggests? Has she gained a friend who not only knows of melting lava stone but also that and how Ella must be cured from a state of petrification? Thirdly, micro-fiction like “Geology of a Girl” usually displays plenty of disnarrated elements Ella “curls forward by habit”: What does this phrase suggest, which information does it withhold? Is she ill? Does she have a tick? Is it important that a “girl” and not a “boy” rescues Ella; why does the girl have “fire in her eyes”? Are these implications of Ella’s homosexuality? Do these qualities imply that the other girls are cold and dismissive towards her? What has the new girl’s smell to do with anything and the fact that she appears in May? Fourthly and finally, micro-fiction’s elliptic quality tends to both draw on and subvert readers’ previous literary knowledge “Geology of a Girl,” with its topic, reminds one of classical narratives, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses With Ella being petrified, it also triggers genre knowledge of ‘magic realism.’ In addition, the micro-narrative draws on the ‘poem’ due to its ultra-complex structure and its metaphorical density referring to all kinds of minerals While “Geology of a Girl,” with its topics and form, potentially triggers previous genre knowledge and expectations, it never matches them completely; the reader is more dazzled than enlightened by the competing allusions to other narratives and genres Trying to make sense of them (or their combination) in the micro-fiction’s context is a further challenge. As these examples of “Geology of a Girl”’s reduced narrativisation show, there is sometimes fairly little that would enable a reader of micro-fiction to construct its meaning in an instant To understand works like Hutton’s, readers are likely to need to invest more time and attention than authors and publishers commonly suggest 52 Therefore nanonovels like “Geology of a Girl” do actually not bend to the rules of the attention economy Rather, they serve as “aesthetic laboratories” that aim at regaining readers’ curiosity, deep attention, and regard for narrative literature in what is supposedly an Attention Deficit Disorder generation. 52 See also Fishelov’s emphasis of short fiction’s stimulation of cognitive processes. Like the six-word stories he examines, nanonovels like Hutton’s decidedly “assign [an] active role to the reader in constructing the missing parts of the story ” (ibid , 38) 334 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 Hutton’s flash fiction shows in at least three respects that internet-based short-short fiction fulfils the tasks of aesthetic laboratories, as Yves Citton defines them, in which readers’ reflexive attention is demanded and rewarded with a renewed esteem of what both “an artist can do and a spectator [or, reader] experience ” 53 Firstly, in the reception of very short stories like Hutton’s, recipients are provided with a “space that is temporarily isolated from the daily world [and] becomes a place of investigation, where […] [they] can test certain limits of what can be done, felt, discovered, thought or justified.” 54 Secondly, if one etymologically looks at the word ‘laboratory,’ a kind of ‘labour’ has to be done upon receiving micro-fiction; readers have to work hard to fill narrative gaps and process competing allusions to traditional genres. All of this poses “a certain challenge” to people’s “attention capabilities (a challenge to […] [their] tolerance of classification delay).” 55 And thirdly, due to nanonovels’ challenging nature, the aesthetic laboratory in which they are experienced demands readers’ deep attention to be prioritised over the principle of economy 56 Nanonovels do not allow for economic, quick processing and swift generic classifications; rather, they call for concentration, meditation, and reflexion. Despite flourishing in a digital environment, internet-based micro-fiction as aesthetic laboratory therefore counters the economised principles of the digital age, the economy of attention, and the hyper reading strategies of an alleged ADD generation As aesthetic laboratory, it rather re-gains readers’ deep attention and, in consequence, renews their regard for literature, writers, and their own labour of close reading and contemplating the meanings of very short fiction. 5 Digitalisation Spurring Genre Innovation - Internet- Based and -Related Fictions Revalorising Literature in the Framework of an Ecology of Attention If one takes the time to reflect the variety of the internet-based and internet-related fictions that have proliferated in the digital age, it becomes clear that digitalisation does not really pose a lethal threat to literature or the “literary brain,” the extinction of which is feared by Yves Citton 57 Although the age of 53 Citton, Ecology, 152 54 Ibid , 151 55 Ibid , 152 56 Ibid 57 Ibid , 144-148 335 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age information-overload, non-stop consumption, data oversupply, and hyper attention economises people’s everyday lives and the realm of literature, which is in danger of being devalued, contemporary fiction has the power to counter these developments With Jessica Pressman, even in the digital age, the novel does what the novel has always done: it challenges expectations of what the novel does and can do The novel is a genre concerned with newness and novelty, and digital technologies enable new ways of exploring novelty across literary content, form, and format as well as across production, distribution, and reception processes 58 Authors make use of the rich variety of digital technologies, practices, and realities to develop new kinds of novels; and the resulting generic variety and innovation is impressive (Fig 3) The works analysed above illustrate the broad spectrum of how fiction in the information age communicates and mediates between print tradition and the realm of the digital. There are, firstly, conventional print novels, like Cloud Atlas, which relate to the internet by intermedially referring to or imitating digital media, formats, and genres, and, at the same time, show their appreciation for print and deep attention; with the combination of these strategies, they revalorise literature, print media, and the reader in the digital age There are, secondly, transmedial novels, like The Raw Shark Texts, which narrativise their stories across different media, the printed book and the internet and which experiment with ‘bookish aesthetics ’ They serve as a warning of the dangers of databases, which seem to have supplanted narrative in the digital age In addition, they not only enhance the general value of narrative, they also self-reflexively pay tribute to the novel’s generic flexibility. Thirdly, there is a genre which, at a first glance, seems to bend to the rules of attention economy: the highly economised, mainly digital micro-fiction. However, it is this genre, which radically counters the mechanisms of the digital age by staging literature as an ‘aesthetic laboratory,’ that places literary ecology before economy, encourages recipients’ immersion, labour, and reflection, and, in doing so, renews their esteem for novelists, themselves, and the merits of deep attention Even though all the analysed works heavily draw on digitalisation for inspiration and genre innovation, they subvert the attention economy nowadays prevalent, revalorising literature and stressing the importance of placing literature in an ecology of attention One can thus conclude, with Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning, that contemporary fiction is “not only alive and kicking, it has even continued to flourish by engaging with a host of current issues, generating new forms and 58 Pressman, “The Novel in the Digital Age,” 254 336 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 sub-genres, enjoying great popularity and cultural prestige” 59 - and successfully reinforcing its own worth in the digital age Tradition of Print Realm of the Digital Cloud Atlas The Raw Shark Texts “Geology of a Girl” Generic Forms • in print • internet-related • partly in print, partly digital, • internet-related, partly internet-based • micro-fiction • dominantly digital1 • mainly internet-based Styles • intermedial referencing imitation of hypertextual network structure • mirror structure • thematic exploration of universal and specific media histories • transmedial storytelling • thematic comparison of databases and narrative • thematic opposition of print and digital media • aesthetics of ‘bookishness’ in story, format, and layout • radical quantification, economisation of signs, production, and (allegedly) reception • quality of reduced narrativisation and contextualisation Functions • demands both its recipients’ proficiency of the hypertext and their close reading faculties • literary education (school of being a ‘good reader,’ sensu M. Wolf) • re-assignment of value to print materialities, the cultural technique of ‘deep reading’, libraries, and the reader • warning of hidden databases • enhancement of narrative value • tribute to the novel’s generic flexibility • aesthetic laboratory • enabling immersion, labour, and reflection • renewal of esteem for novelists and readers as well as deep attention 1 The fact that this particular flash fiction has been anthologised in print is an exception, rather than the rule. Fig 3: Fictions’ Generic Spectrum between Print Tradition and Digital Realms: Overview of Forms, Styles, and Functions of Genre Innovation in the Digital Age Works Cited Primary Literature Danielewski, Mark Z House of Leaves New York: Random House, 2000 Hall, Steven “The Aquarium Fragment: Negative 1/ 36 ” Canongate, 2007, www canongate tv/ media/ pdf/ Aquarium_Fragment_Prologue pdf Accessed 19 July 2015 Hall, Steven The Raw Shark Texts. ‘Unspace Edition.’ Edinburgh/ New York: Canongate, 2007 Horne, Jules Nanonovels: Five-Minute Flash Fiction Selkirik: Texthouse, 2015 59 Vera Nünning/ Ansgar Nünning “An Outline of the Objectives, Features and Challenges of the British Novel in the Twenty-First Century,” The British Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Cultural Concerns - Literary Developments - Model Interpretations, eds Vera Nünning/ Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2018), 3 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 Hutton, Stephanie “Geology of a Girl ” National Flash Fiction Day, 2017, https: / / www nationalflashfictionday.co.uk/ index.php/ competition/ 2017-microfiction-results/ #Hutton. Accessed 05 May 2020 Mitchell, David Cloud Atlas London: Sceptre, 2004 Poundstone, William “Project for Tachistoscope (Bottomless Pit) ” Electronic Literature Collection, 2005, https: / / collection eliterature org/ 1/ works/ poundstone__project_for_ tachistoscope_bottomless_pit html Accessed 05 May 2020 Secondary Literature Basseler, Michael “Short-Short Fiction ” The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English Eds Paul Delaney/ Adrian Hunter Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2019, 147-159 Breidenbach, Birgit “Hybridisation and Globalisation as Catalysts of Generic Change: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and The Bone Clocks (2014) ” The British Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Cultural Concerns - Literary Developments - Model Interpretations Eds Vera Nünning/ Ansgar Nünning Trier: WVT, 2018, 311-326 Chantler, Ashley. “Notes Towards the Definition of the Short-Short Story.” The Short Story Ed Ailsa Cox Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008, 38-52 Citton, Yves The Ecology of Attention Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017 Dimovitz, Scott “The Sound of Silence: Eschatology and the Limits of the Word in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas ” SubStance 44 1 (2015), 71-91 Fishelov, David “The Poetics of Six-Word Stories ” Narrative 27 1 (2019), 30-46 Gaffney, David. “Stories in your pocket: how to write flash fiction.” The Guardian, 14 May 2012, www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2012/ may/ 14/ how-to-write-flash-fiction#comment-16126871 Accessed 05 May 2020 Green, Jeremy “The Novel and the Death of Literature ” Late Postmodernism. Ed id New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 45-225 Hayles, Nancy Katherine “Material Entanglements: Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts as Slipstream Novel ” Science Fiction Studies 38 1 (2011), 115-133 --- How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012 Hazuka, Tom/ Denise Thomas/ James Thomas, eds Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories New York: W W Norton & Co , 1992 Manovich, Lev The Language of New Media Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001 Mezey, Jason H “‘A Multitude of Drops: ’ Recursion and Globalization in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas ” Modern Language Studies 40 2 (2011), 10-37 Nataf, Emmanuel “7 Flash Fiction Stories That Are Worth (a Tiny Amount of) Your Time ” Electric Lit: Reading into Everything, 12 October 2018, https: / / electricliterature com/ 7flash-fiction-stories-that-are-worth-a-tiny-amount-of-your-time/ . Accessed 05 May 2020. Nünning, Ansgar/ Jan Rupp, eds Medialisierung des Erzählens im englischsprachigen Roman der Gegenwart: Theoretischer Bezugsrahmen, Genres und Modellinterpretationen Trier: WVT, 2011 Nünning, Vera/ Ansgar Nünning “An Outline of the Objectives, Features and Challenges of the British Novel in the Twenty-First Century ” The British Novel in the Twenty-First Revalorising Literature in the Digital Age 337 338 c hristiNe s chwaNecKe 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0016 Century: Cultural Concerns - Literary Developments - Model Interpretations Eds eid Trier: WVT, 2018, 3-20 --- “Cultural Concerns, Literary Developments, Critical Debates: Contextualising the Dynamics of Generic Change and Trajectories of the British Novel in the Twenty-First Century ” The British Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Cultural Concerns - Literary Developments - Model Interpretations Eds eid Trier: WVT, 2018, 21-52 Panko, Julia “‘Memory Pressed Flat into the Text: ’ The Importance of Print in Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts ” Contemporary Literature 52 2 (2009), 264-297 Pressman, Jessica “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in Twenty-First-Century Literature ” Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age, special issue of Michigan Quarterly Review 48 4 (2009), 465-482 --- “The Novel in the Digital Age ” The Cambridge Companion to the Novel Ed Eric Bulson Cambridge: CUP, 2018, 254-267 Schober, Regina “Between Nostalgic Resistance and Critical Appropriation: Contemporary Fiction on/ of the Information Age and the Potentials of (Post)Humanist Narrative ” AmerikaStudien 61 (2017), 359-379 Thomas, James/ Robert Shapard/ Christopher Merrill, eds Flash Fiction International: Very Short Stories from Around the World New York: W W Norton & Co , 2015 Wayne, Teddy “Our (Bare) Shelves, Our Selves ” The New York Times, 12 June 2015, www nytimes com/ 2015/ 12/ 06/ fashion/ our-bare-shelves-our-selves html Accessed 05 May 2020 Weigel-Heller, Anna Fictions of the Internet: From Intermediality to Transmedia Storytelling in 21st-Century Novels Trier: WVT, 2018 Wolf, Maryanne Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World New York: Harper- Collins, 2018 Websites National Flash-Fiction Day Calum Kerr/ Santino Prinzi/ Ingrid Jendrzejewski/ Diane Simmons, 2011, www.nationalflashfictionday.co.uk/ . Accessed 05 May 2020. Six Word Stories Pete Berg, 2008, www sixwordstories net/ Accessed 05 May 2020 Van Goethem, Bart “20 Micro-Fiction Stories ” HeadStuff, 29 May 2014, https: / / www headstuff.org/ culture/ literature/ 20-micro-fiction-stories/ . Accessed 05 May 2020. 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 J ürgeN s chlaeger Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? “It’s time to put happiness and wellbeing on the political agenda,” Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore recently demanded, 1 thus giving new urgency to a debate which Richard Layard’s bestselling Happiness: Lessons from a New Science had started in 2005 and David Cameron, when Prime Minister, had picked up after the financial melt-down in 2007, in order to shift the benchmark for his government’s performance from GDP to GWP (General Wellbeing Product) It is obvious now, that by such a misappropriation of the concept of wellbeing, he was only trying to camouflage the further dramatic changes in social services and provisions he and his Chancellor of the Exchequer had been pushing through parliament as one of the most radical and damaging austerity programmes ever imposed upon the country Fortunately, the concept of general wellbeing as an important guideline for evaluating the quality of life in a society does not lose its legitimacy by such a single cynical misapplication 2 This is why some scholars might now have perfectly respectable reasons when they are calling for a ‘eudaimonic turn’ in literary studies, a turn which proposes to discuss the value of literature in terms of its effects on human wellbeing For, with such an agenda, they seem to do no more than to ask us as literary critics to accept a new urgency for such an issue and to join in with the effort to promote what very much looks like the time-honoured concern with human happiness If, however, we respond positively to such an invitation, it will inescapably fall upon us to probe into the deeper motivations for and benefits of such a new focus now, at this moment in time, and also into the impact of such a shift on our own teaching and research Furthermore, we have to consider what it is going to do to the standing of our field in the academic community And, last but not least, how it will change our grasp of ‘the value of literature ’ It is questions like these that I would like to ventilate in the following 1 Suzanne Moore, “It’s time to put happiness and wellbeing on the political agenda,” The Guardian, 8 February 2020, https: / / www theguardian com/ commentisfree/ 2020/ feb/ 08/ happiness-wellbeing-political-agenda-tories-optimism-labour, n p 2 Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (New York: Penguin, 2005) 340 J ürgeN s chlaeger 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 At first sight, the topic of this volume: ‘The Value of Literature’ seems to be very much in line with such a eudaimonic approach, because it proposes to discuss aspects of literary functions and effects that have the potential of generating or revitalising wellbeing in its readers One might add that ‘wellbeing’ has been somewhat neglected or underrated by the critical mainstream and, as a consequence, has remained by and large not only under-appreciated but also under-theorised - in other words, that a readjustment of our critical focus, as outlined above, is not only overdue, but will also help us understand more fully the benefits literature has on offer for students, readers, and (contemporary) human culture as a whole 3 Such an optimistic prediction would, however, raise a number of problems that have to be tackled before we can get more fully involved or pass judgement on the promises associated with the proposed turn The most general of these problems has also a bearing on the list of the four operative words at stake in our project: ‘attention,’ ‘empathy,’ ‘mindfulness,’ and ‘wellbeing,’ concepts that are to stand for essential aspects of human wellbeing, are incommensurate and therefore difficult to be analysed as on a level playing-field of mental activities and attitudes Attention is different from mindfulness but can also be seen as a mutually indispensable factor, if not a precondition of it Mindfulness is in some sense different from empathy but could also be seen as a mental disposition necessary for the existence of empathy; whereas an increase in wellbeing could be the overall effect of mastering the other three, but not necessarily or exclusively so There are, after all, a great many other aspects, among them social and cultural activities, that can contribute to raising the level of human wellbeing 4 3 In ancient Greek philosophy, the concept of “Eudaimonia” describes a successful life led according to the injunctions of philosophical ethics It designated a balanced, peaceful state of mind In the Christian Middle Ages, the idea was integrated into the vita contemplative-concept, so essential to the rise and expansion of monasticism The notion of a “eudaimonic turn” was recently used as the book-title for a collection of papers on The Eudaimonic Turn: Wellbeing in Literary Studies, eds. James O Pawelski/ D J Moores (Madison: Fairleigh Dickensen UP, 2013) Tellingly, Pawelski is Director of Education in Positive Psychology and Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies in the University of Pennsylvania; Moores is Professor of English at Kean University in New Jersey and an expert in ecstatic poetry 4 Wellbeing and the road to human happiness have been ‘hot topics’ of philosophical ethics throughout history but have also become a particularly attractive field of research for empirically working psychologists in the last three decades We now have Ed Diener’s notion of a ‘tripartite model’ of subjective wellbeing; there is a six-factor model of psychological wellbeing, developed by Carol Ryff, and there is a host of studies that each propose variants of these models or produce their own list of factors and data, not to speak of the still growing comet tail of guidebooks and manuals about how Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? 341 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 Moreover, notions and conditions of human wellbeing vary so immensely from culture to culture, epoch to epoch, and individual to individual that any attempt to restrict its condition to the importance of just three or four aspects of literary effect, in themselves difficult to measure and define, and differently weighted by different cultures and at different times, runs the risk of being considered unreasonably limiting or, in the worst case, motivated by a specific, ethically one-sided agenda. Moreover, the overarching concept of ‘wellbeing’ is in itself such a slippery, subjective, and imprecise concept for a general state of the human mind that it does not seem to lend itself very well as a starting base and reference point for a general investigation of literary effects On a less sceptical note, concentration on the beneficial impact of literature, in terms of attention, empathy, and mindfulness, if the case for their selection can be plausibly made, promises to deliver new and possibly fascinating insights into the ways literature works with and on its readers’ minds and even more generally, why human minds have made use of literature throughout history Crucial for answering the questions raised above is whether we will be able to ground our reasoning on a theory of ‘mind-work’ broad, sophisticated, flexible, and reliable enough to serve as a conceptually precise framework for specific literary investigations. And the construction of such a framework is, as we shall see, in spite of the astonishing advances in brain research, the neurosciences, and cognitive linguistics in the last decades, still full of pitfalls and altogether still a very challenging hurdle to take Furthermore, a short but careful look backwards, so sadly out of fashion these days, will show that the beneficial effects of literature in general have hardly ever been completely out of sight or disputed Exceptions existed but they always had and still have to do with religious, ideological, or political interests, which gave, and in some countries still give, the powers that be reasons for fighting literature and writers as very unwelcome thorns in their flesh. to improve one’s physical and mental wellbeing Equally, the three other operative words in our project: Attention, Empathy, Mindfulness have recently attracted interest as aspects of human behaviour that are under threat by neoliberalism and the lifestyles it has engendered Altogether, in most of these psychological studies, literature and its effects on the human mind have played no prominent role It was obviously not considered relevant or testable enough to deserve special attention In the face of literature’s undoubted importance, the challenge here is also to find out whether such neglect by empirically working psychologists is justified or not. 342 J ürgeN s chlaeger 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 These hesitations and considerations take my argument to the question, what are the specific reasons for another re-focussing of our interests in the effects of literature, without doubt still one of the big, if not the biggest and most important force on the playing-fields of culture? And why restrict our investigations to attention, empathy, mindfulness, if there are so many other aspects of literary effect that one could also consider important or beneficial to the human mind, to the overall wellbeing of society, and to cultures in general? In short, is the proposed paradigm shift solely inspired by the interest to know more, or are there other motivations operating under the surface of the discourses on which we are invited to exert our critical acumen? As a consequence, if we take the bait of literary eudaimonism, we would have to tread very carefully not to be influenced by an undercurrent of contemporary pressures, needs, and preferences that will clash with our much broader cognitive remit ‘Eudaimonically’ inclined literary scholars seem to have no problem with the fact that their approach rests on a ‘positive psychology’ as a major consideration in the critical practice of the future They would admit that yes, literature has also been beneficial as long as and wherever it existed, but they might go on to claim that the ways in which literature’s character and impact has been described, analysed, and appreciated by academic criticism in the last half-century has been unduly academic, brainy, or top-heavy, i e cognitively biased and too much concerned with proving critical perspicuity and objectivity in critiquing texts, an attitude that more often than not suppresses or stifles their beneficial effects. My guess is, the questions and hesitations listed above underscore the impression that such an agenda is part and parcel of a revisionary project which is designed to show how literature can help contemporary readers and present-day cultures as a whole to better cope with the cognitively and emotionally disembedding forces shaping life in advanced societies today In this, such a project does not primarily seem to call for just another effort to analyse rationally particular aspects of literary effect from a new systematic angle, but for a fundamental re-modelling of the relationship between academic literary studies and literature in such a way that texts are selected and taught for their capacity to open up new roads for increasing or restoring wellbeing in their readers That a growing number of universities in the US and elsewhere require their teaching staff to attach a warning to the courses they offer if they think that something in the texts proposed for analysis and discussion may hurt the sensibilities of the students and may cause discomfort, is a case in point for the type of problems that could arise from such an agenda Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? 343 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 So, whatever the motivations behind the call for a eudaimonic turn in approach, it will find it difficult to succeed if it fails to base its analyses on convincing models of the ways human minds develop and work: in other words, on a theory of mind-work in conjunction with a historically informed psychology that would allow us to show how literature has contributed and still does contribute to solving or, at least, mitigating a particular set of problems which impair our mind’s health and its desire for wellbeing As a strategy for a literary analysis dominated by mental health issues, it is, however, bound to get into serious trouble with some of the most cherished cornerstones of academic research: objectivity, critical distance, and a toolkit of terms and concepts that are rationally construed and intersubjectively valid Because of that, work done under the remit of a eudaimonic turn is likely to increase the risk of being slighted as not sufficiently academic or ideologically blinkered, maybe even seen as an attempt to turn academic critics into wellness-gurus or literary shrinks, a transformation, that would ultimately transform the teaching of literature into (merely) celebrating and preaching its healing power In order to achieve the desired results, i e to highlight as well as strengthen the beneficial character of particular literary texts, practising eudaimonic critics have demanded that in order to reduce the unduly limiting influence of cognitive control with its emphasis on reasoning and self-reflexive distance, the analytical focus will have to let go of the customary top-down interpretations of texts - i e of mining and retrieving, situating, categorising, sorting, structuring, explaining, and generalising the meaning-making strategies of literary texts from ‘above’ - and go for a bottom-up approach, i e for investing the literary texts under consideration with meanings and effectiveness that will allow them to more fully release their ‘eudaimonic’ potential Only in this way, it is implicitly argued, will they be able to direct and sharpen the readers’ capacity for attention, to fine-tune their ability for empathy, and to foster and strengthen their mindfulness, all of which or each separately can help to restore the health and wellbeing of their readers’ minds In such a ‘critical’ scenario, readers are configurated as victims of circumstances and patients rather than as players on fields on which texts can act out their sophisticated imaginative and intellectual training-programmes As an antidote to the over-academisation of literary studies, eudaimonic critics have also proposed a new ‘praxeological hermeneutics,’ an approach which is meant to substitute the traditional literary hermeneutics with a pragmatic approach to texts that takes them much closer to what readers and the general public really need for their own wellbeing ecology That is to say, critics who adopt such an approach are implicitly encouraged to choose lit- 344 J ürgeN s chlaeger 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 erary texts and offer interpretations that will train, improve, and raise their readers’ sensibility and capacity for attention, empathy, and mindfulness, so that they are able to re-balance their minds and raise their level of comfort and happiness. I suppose, other texts that do not fit the bill or make it too difficult to elicit such an effect will just have to bide their time - probably until the next ‘turn’ appears on the horizon which will give them another critical life-line At this point in my argument about the benefits and dangers of a eudaimonic turn in understanding and analysing literature, two further questions arise that will have to be dealt with before we can dare to pass judgement on this new critical agenda: 1 Is it really true that the traditional reading practices and literary studies as a whole have missed or failed to see the power of literature to do all sorts of wonderful things to the human mind, including the ones listed in the title? Has literary studies in recent decades really been hampered by insisting too persistently that its important role within and for cultures as a whole does lie in its capacity to expose and criticise the systems of prejudices underlying literary texts, their implicit or explicit dependence or ‘take’ on some all-encompassing discourse regime, on certain aspects of the ideologically impregnated mentalities and types of behaviour which shape and govern the times and cultures out of which they arose? Has the ‘investigative slant’ of the bulk of modern criticism up till now been counter-productive for any attempt to understand the real power of literature? In short, has literary criticism, roughly from the end of World War II until today, unduly privileged literature’s position outside the life-worlds of its readers, thus accruing from it academic credentials at the expense of literature’s positive, mind-enhancing, and therapeutic potentials? 5 2 On the other hand, if we adopt the ‘praxeological agenda’ proposed by some critics, will we not inevitably run the risk of damaging the field’s standing in the academy? Might it not be that redefining the duty of literary studies as finding, identifying, or reading into literary works what we think is beneficial, therapeutic, and generally comforting will expose us to the charge that we are changing the rules of the game for a whole academic discipline whose critical efforts and academic standing has, as I have pointed out above, so far been firmly based on rational principles of analysis and analytical critiquing (critical in the sense of Kant’s first Critique, i e logical and cognitively enlightening)? After all, so the sceptics might argue, a praxeological agenda presents itself as no less than yet another effort to re-focus critical attention away from 5 For the investigative slant of much of traditional literary criticism see Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2015) Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? 345 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 analysing texts systematically to using them for specific, time-bound, and as such limited and limiting purposes? Of course, one could see such objections and fears as yet another instance of the perennial minor squabbles in the academy if the proposed shift in angle didn’t chime in with a larger contemporary movement that is already undermining the complex systems of tests and criteria which science and scholarship have built as bulwarks against the human mind’s tendency to process information as opportunistically as possible This opportunism is an evolutionary heirloom that has programmed human minds to prefer processing information along well-trodden, familiar, commonly accepted, and as such pleasurable tracks rather than devoting time and energy to painstakingly sift and sort incoming information in accordance with scientific and rational principles of analysis. Our ability to resist this opportunism had to be developed systematically against customs and beliefs that had served the purpose of information processing and meaning-making well enough for most of human history This is also why the demands for more, or complaints about the lack of, ‘usefulness of academic studies’ are so problematic They promise to get more out of studying literary texts by making their understanding and analysis easier and more pleasurable So, ultimately, such a turn to ‘eudaimonism’ as the guiding principle of literary analysis plays into the hands of the inherited opportunism of our minds and risks what has been achieved Rather than teaching young minds that rational thinking, collecting and weighing the evidence, science and scholarship take years of training and took human society many hundreds of years to develop, the pedagogic mantra is now: find out what your mind likes and what gives you a good feeling - one could simply say, what promises to contribute to your wellbeing But mental activities that come easy are not what science and scholarship are about! And the pleasures they promise are of an entirely different kind In this context, the investigative slant of much of modern literary criticism is an integral part of what academic studies should do, and to question that or discard it completely raises the spectre of a discipline writing itself out of existence. We all know that finding out things and finding the right words and concepts to communicate what we have discovered can be an inexhaustible source of intellectual pleasure It’s simple: if you haven’t built the intellectual muscle it is difficult to enjoy the wonderful things it can do. For an academically problematic, eudaimonically inspired agenda, however, academic critics and their students might no longer feel the obligation to work very hard and remain sceptical until the end in order to produce interpretations that are based on evidence and verifiable general principles, be 346 J ürgeN s chlaeger 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 they historical, structural, psychological, aesthetic, sociological, or linguistic And, ultimately even more problematic, yet another general assumption, up until now constitutive of much of the established literary studies in general, is in danger of being thrown overboard in the process: namely, that the representational strategies literary texts use as well as the effects they have on their readers’ minds are categorically distinct from effects triggered by other, non-literary cultural practices and amenities, now more varied and more easily available than ever before The distinctiveness of literature in terms of language usage and the activities of the imagination it triggers, of the way in which literature represents character, perception, feeling, and thought aesthetically, has deservedly had a solid standing in academic studies and has been a reliable litmus test for quality and seriousness A eudaimonic turn in literary studies, on the other hand, seems to plead for no less than a complete replacement of these scholarly corner stones by putting wellbeing-generating content and effects first and relegating any aspect of form and structure as their major effects on shaping and developing the mind’s (and a culture’s) capacity for perpetually revising and reshaping our imaginaries to second place Ultimately, therefore, the success of a ‘eudaimonic turn’ will depend on its ability to prove by rational analysis its claim to offer an innovative and insightful take on literary effects Again, how that can be achieved without a viable model of that mind, in other words, without a fully developed ‘theory of mind-work,’ remains an open question The outcome of any evaluation of the pros and cons of eudaimonism will naturally also depend on our understanding of the word ‘value ’ If it means evaluating in the sense of judging whether a work of literature is beneficial or not for specific cultures and readers, then an analysis of literary value can easily amount to an exercise in parading and enforcing one’s own preferences, needs, hopes, and convictions If, however, ‘The Value of Literature’ is meant to say that we have to re-double our efforts to appreciate and understand how literary texts affect the reader’s mind, its capacity for imagining, thinking, feeling, of sorting and ordering our experiences, and to make explicit and more accessible in which way specific texts have contributed and may still contribute to the general level of emotional and intellectual wellbeing within a culture, then we may be right on course to gaining a renewed and deeper appreciation of what is at stake here: creativity, open-mindedness towards a constant reconfiguration of our cultural imaginaries. In such a broad research scenario, attention, empathy, mindfulness, and wellbeing will, no doubt, play a role if they are used as relevant sign-posts and examples for our investigative focus on what really happens when we Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? 347 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 write or read literary texts or when we talk to our students about literary value For effects span the whole width of mental operations, including those that texts may be able to trigger, even generations after the time and circumstances in which and for which they were written Such a project, so my guess, can only be successful if one is prepared to use the insights provided by reader response and reception theory or, if these theories are deemed insufficient and out-dated, by re-designing them with the help and on the basis of theoretical foundations that are sophisticated and plausible enough to make us see how the encounters with literary creativity in all its forms can have and have had beneficial effects on the operations of human minds, past and present. Here, unfortunately, we are confronted again with what I have already hinted at above: the still gaping lacunae in our understanding of how human brains work However rapid the advances of research into the physiology and chemistry of brain activities have been, experts we can really trust agree that we are still a long way away from fully understanding how the physiological make-up and the chemical processes underlying them can give our minds consciousness and all the other wonderful capacities needed for literature to be written and appreciated 6 As long as this problem continues to exist, we will probably gain more by reversing the direction of our own specific research interests. If we do this, there might eventually be some light at the end of the tunnel of ignorance we are still in As literary scholars, we should make full use of what has been given into our care: a priceless treasure-house of evidence for what the imagination and human creativity in general can do, what they have done, and are still doing with our language and symbol-based modelling of external and internal worlds For if we question this storehouse with its endless variations of plots and stories, rhymes and rhythms, structures and patterns, and the almost unlimited spectrum of affects it has modelled, stimulated, explored, and modified, we can use literature as a sounding board and echo chamber of what human minds need and can do, and, by implication, understand more precisely than any brain scan or imaging exercise what human minds can do and literature has done 6 A good example of the exaggerated claims about how the human mind will eventually be replaced by Artificial Intelligence is Ray Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (New York: Viking Penguin, 2012) Kurzweil, after all Google’s director of engineering since 2012, happily announces there, that “[u]ltimately our brains, combined with the technologies they have fostered, will permit us to create a synthetic neocortex that will contain well beyond a mere 300 million pattern processors [as in humans] Why not a billion? Or a trillion? ” (ibid , 41) 348 J ürgeN s chlaeger 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 So far, this opportunity has not been fully exploited for developing approaches that would work like intellectual ‘reverse engineering’ operations, i e for deductively constructing from the welter of historical and systematic evidence we have in hand a plausible theoretical framework and terminological toolkit for understanding how human minds work as well as for identifying, understanding, and explaining the special place the production and reception of literature fills in the overall scheme of mental operations and cultural developments So far, more often than not, conceptual work has focused on ‘the powers of the imagination,’ on defining the place of aesthetics between epistemology and ethics, on linguistic creativity, on the established categorisations of feelings and emotions, on mental models adapted from the latest developments in experimental psychology, and, most prominently, on explanatory strategies that stayed within the precincts constituted by academic studies in general, precincts that privileged reflexivity, causality, and rational reasoning, abilities on which they based their critical precision and rational reasoning Any remaining gaps were all too often filled with rhetorical acrobatics, more or less precisely understood but well-established concepts, and intelligent speculation This situation, being what it is, has frequently tempted scholars to replace rationality with ingenuity, to read into literary texts effects as the interaction of mental operations and causalities which they have not really understood and are unwilling or unqualified to explain precisely. In the eighties of the last century, with the advancement of the neurosciences, in cognitive linguistics and in empirical research methods such as imaging and computer screening, hope had grown that our understanding of how the human mind operates will soon give us a much clearer and more sophisticated theory of mind-work And there are now, indeed, aspects and developments that have brought some progress But altogether we are still a long way away from understanding what is actually going on, cognitively, emotionally, and imaginatively, in our heads when we read a piece of literature 7 7 I use ‘theory of mind’ here in a general sense as a theory of ‘how the human mind works’ rather than as the way children’s or adults’ minds imagine the minds of others There have been attempts by experimental psychologists to apply an evidence-based theory of mental operations to the reading of literary works, but the results are too basic or simplistic to make them useful for a sophisticated critical appreciation of literary works and their effects See, for instance, David Comer Kidd/ Emanuele Castano, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” Science 342 6156 (2013), 377: “Theory of Mind is the human capacity to comprehend that other people hold beliefs and desires and that these may differ from one’s own beliefs and desires The currently predominant view is that literary fiction - often described as narratives that focus on Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? 349 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 As it is, I would personally prefer to put my money on progress in the modelling of how the human mind works rather than on any colourful blurb on the computer screen But maybe one day they will help us to better understand and to present more precisely what kinds of effects literary texts can have and why Only then would it also be possible to decide responsibly in which way the reading and interpreting of literary texts can contribute to human wellbeing, to attention, empathy, and mindfulness, and much else In the meantime, there is, however, another corpus of evidence and reasoning that could help us to fine-tune our bearings in what is at stake here. This corpus consists in the history of what earlier thinkers had to say about the effects literature can have on human minds and culture in general Looking back over more than 2500 years, not only of literature performed and/ or written, but also of comments on the character and role of literary works, it becomes obvious that right from the beginning philosophers and writers have been interested in understanding what literature was doing and what kind of effects its various forms and genres were having or should have Of course, not any sort of text, but texts that they thought to be outstanding, rule-changing, and exemplary in their lasting impact on the culture and the symbol systems and ideologies their societies had adopted; texts that had demonstrably made a difference to how audiences, listeners, or, much later, educated readers saw the world and imagined themselves and their relationships with other humans in it The few statements that have come down to us from antiquity show clearly that writers and thinkers were only marginally interested in literary effects in the sense of bringing about or safeguarding wellbeing in the feel-good, narrow sense of ‘wellness’ so popular these days They were more interested in identifying the epistemological status of literary representation (mimesis or imitation) If they looked at effects at all, they were, like Aristotle, thinking in-depth portrayals of subjects’ inner feelings and thoughts - can be linked to theory of mind processes, especially those that are involved in the understanding or simulation of the affective characteristics of the subjects ” Kidd and Castano provide experimental evidence that reading passages of literary fiction, in comparison to nonfiction or popular fiction, does indeed enhance the reader’s performance on theory of mind tasks. More promising has been the work done by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier See Mark Turner, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (Oxford: OUP, 1996); Gilles Fauconnier/ Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002) For a discussion of Turner’s concept of the ‘literariness of the mind’ see: Jürgen Schlaeger/ Gesa Stedman, eds , The Literary Mind (Tübingen: Narr, 2008) Recently, Terence Cave has explored the opportunities the neuro-sciences and cognitive theory offer to our understanding of literature and what it does to the readers’ minds in his Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: OUP, 2016) 350 J ürgeN s chlaeger 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 about the ‘therapeutic character’ of certain literary forms such as tragedy and, maybe, about aspects of enjoyable entertainment, but not wellbeing in terms of attention, empathy, and mindfulness For Aristotle, Horace, and others, literature’s beneficial effects were socially and cognitively relevant, not a recipe for raising or strengthening individual happiness More generally, considering the range and variety of what literature has done for cultures and human minds in oral or literate cultures over more than 3000 years, what it has done to and with language and the creative potential of the human imagination, and - most relevant for our debate - how diversified the mind-changing strategies have been that literary works invented and made available, it is clear that the concern encapsulated in the eudaimonic project, if too narrowly conceived or misunderstood as a happiness remit, could easily fall into the trap of putting judgment and predilection before analysis and proof, thus seriously running the risk of ending up in an unproductive, self-serving intellectual parochialism that adds nothing of lasting importance to our understanding of what literary texts can do, but shuts out many things that literature has done and will continue to achieve Even if the eudaimonic criticial agenda of the Pawelski and Moores type would succeed in offering convincing arguments against any suspicion that it operates a narrow-minded or arbitrarily limiting notion of ‘beneficial effects’ by including some of the most disturbing and discomforting effects of literary works in their reasoning - as, for instance, Aristotle did, when he tried to define the psychological attractions of tragedy as shocking as well as ‘cathartic’ - a promising agenda for eudaimonic studies would have to be vastly broader than the list of key concepts in the title of our endeavour Maybe it would eventually have to replace the concept of wellbeing with the much broader concept of literature-specific ‘usefulness’ to do justice to the full range of what literature does with and gives to human minds To prioritise literary effects we think of as urgently needed and welcome now, at this particular moment in time and place, would then have to be specifically justified. Otherwise, literary criticism could find itself unnecessarily restricted to a regrettably narrow, time-serving way of understanding the effects of literary texts From my life-long experience as a scholar and theoretician who has seen many new critical paradigms and turns with their various claims of having broken new theoretical, ethical and/ or political-correctness-ground come and go, I am naturally sceptical towards any new approach claiming the moment has now arrived in which we are able to clearly see a way out of the confusing mess of conflicting approaches, priorities, and evaluations because we have, so the implicit promise, now a position in sight that will finally get it right and do equal justice to the hitherto irreconcilable claims between rational analysis Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? 351 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 and social as well as emotional needs, individual aspirations and experiential pressures, historical facts and historicising interpretations, economic necessities and imaginative freedom, work and leisure, reason and desire Recently, the reading of longer texts such as novels has been said to be an efficient antidote against the short-termism, reduction of attention-span, and informational overload of the digital age and against the damage it is doing to attention, mindfulness, and ultimately empathy, too, because novels are able to help our over-stressed minds and narcissistic egos to retrieve their bearings and strengthen their capacity for building and fortifying barriers against the multiplying opportunities and challenges of life in our times How eudaimonic criticism can play a successful part in such an effort to cool down, appease, and manage today’s often over-heated mental conditions without losing too many other equally important aspects of literary value and effect remains to be seen 8 In this context, it does not seem too far-fetched to argue that our project’s agenda is obviously inspired, though indirectly, by the present-day popularity of ecological ways of thinking, arguing, and reacting to the deplorable state of our planet and of human affairs Such thinking with its fascinating imaginative transfer from the state of nature to the state of the human mind is driven by the conviction that the human mind is just as over-exploited, fundamentally disturbed, and out of balance as our natural habitat, and is, therefore, like the natural surroundings we live in and of, in urgent need of regaining its sustainability In this, our project is clearly in line with one of the signature tunes of our times It seems to presuppose that, just as nature and its bio-topical equilibria have been upset beyond repair by our mindless exploitation, so the human mind and its ‘natural’ balance is said to be now under a similar threat by man’s own doing The ‘doing’ is, in our case and academically speaking, holding desperately fast to critiquing standards in which our minds can no longer find the regenerating qualities so desperately needed now For all this, the world-wide popularity of the term ‘human resources’ for human beings underscores how derailed human society is and how wonderfully revealing language can be In an ecological scenario our minds will, if we are not careful, suffer the same sort of lasting damage as nature It is therefore high time and, maybe, nearly too late to prevent the worst This may well be the case, but before one can turn a conceptual parallelism into a plausible basis for action or a 8 S Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2012); Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer (London: Atlantic Books, 2015); Susan Greenfield, Mind Change: How Digital Technologies are Leaving their Mark on our Brains (London: Rider, 2014) 352 J ürgeN s chlaeger 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 new approach to interpret literary texts, more work is needed For, however revealing such a parallelism may be, it should not be taken as a fact or an answer, but merely as a door-opener for investigating what is at stake for the role of literature and literary criticism in today’s world More specific and relevant to our topic here and even more pertinent to the questions it asks, much of the ecologically inspired criticism, with all its acumen and self-reflexivity, so far seems to have by-passed the fact that literature has, as long as it has existed, provided humans with an ever larger range of experimental laboratories for testing and improving their mind’s capacity and willingness to adapt to and accommodate new experiences and challenges Among the abilities needed for such an adaptability are, it is true, a healthy capacity for attention, mindfulness, and empathy But it is also important to realise that our over-stressed cultures, in reaction to this situation, have also been developing an ever more varied and all-encompassing array of non-literary therapeutic practices for dealing with the problems so typical of our post-industrial societies The enormous increase in the number of people working as psychotherapists, mentors, coaches, and similar professions, an increase paralleled by a rapidly widening range of available programmes and offers for mental support, speaks volumes So, the question is more urgent than ever before: What does literature and literary criticism have to offer today that these practices cannot do? To repeat, in view of these problems, there is a real danger that literature, its reading, interpreting, and understanding, will, in the hands of eudaimonically inclined critics, be instrumentalised to become a supposedly easily available means for a do-it-yourself literature-based therapy that is designed to teach readers and students how one can, by reading and digesting particular works of literature in particular ways, live a more peaceful, stress-free, and well-balanced, in short, happier life With such a remit it is unavoidable to ask: What would that do to the legitimacy of the claim that analysing and understanding literature has earned a permanent place in academic institutions? And what will happen if it turns out that what our imbalanced minds now need most urgently is not a return to a supposedly balanced natural state with the help of a eudaimonic approach to literature but entirely new ways of managing our often worrying as well as exhilarating, culture-specific dysfunctionalities? The answer to these questions must surely be ambivalent Some works of literature can indeed be said to elicit specific therapeutic effects, but unless we can say how exactly they achieve that and what we as responsible scholars and teachers can contribute to promote such therapeutic readings without distorting or contaminating what the texts actually are designed for or do, Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? 353 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 we have to tread very carefully not to lord the text’s ingenuity over with our own desires and critical acumen 9 In the end, the general optimistic expectation behind a wellbeing agenda sounds almost too good to be true, and it may not be long before the academic community realises that they have yet another critical fashion with a very limited sell-by date on their hands A utopian vision is always nice to have and even psychologically helpful for a future-directed optimism, but a dream is a dream, and wishful thinking is wishful thinking Any interpretative strategy that tends to functionalise literary works for ‘eudaimonic’ purposes, against their main drift or message, is likely to suffer the fate of many of its predecessors For, in the process of carefully reading and commenting on literary works, it will soon become obvious that most of them do not lend themselves at all easily to any reductionist functionalisation of their effect-spectrum, however urgent the desire may be for extracting from them the desperately needed dose of comfort And again, without a plausible theory of mind, such a project is bound to operate in a theoretical void with a concept of reader response and effect that will have serious problems when it comes to accommodating individual differences in character, needs, cultural backgrounds, and reading habits To put literature to good use, i e show how it is able to teach us what we don’t know or are in need of in a particular historical situation, at any particular time and moment of cultural development, is, no doubt, an honourable mission, but whether a choice of a eudaimonic angle can do justice to the immense range of what literary texts have done and are still doing to minds is more than questionable and might, moreover, in some cases encourage selections of texts that do not represent the best ever written After all, analysing, understanding, and appreciating all types of literature as objectively as we can has rightly earned us a place as a recognised university discipline and that should remain so To put the issues discussed here once more in a broader historical context, another short look back may also help to further clarify what the opportuni- 9 There are literary genres that are designed to stimulate attention but lack the mindfulness and empathy side of literary effects, as, for instance, cloak and dagger or horror novels There are also types of literature that are built around empathy as, for instance, the sentimental novels of the late 18th century (with Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, pubished 1771, as a typical example) But whether this type of literature is particularly suited to produce or increase wellbeing in its readers is debatable, not to speak of its effect on attention There are characters in novels that show a high degree of mindfulness but are experienced by other characters as oppressive and meddling Again, it is doubtful whether any long narrative can be read as an encouragement to be mindful all the time. Oblomovs do not only occur in fiction but also among readers! 354 J ürgeN s chlaeger 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 ties and risks of a eudaimonic turn are, and whether such a turn is likely to open up truly new enlightening avenues for our understanding of literature or, more broadly, the human mind Until the ‘Romantic revolution,’ the Horatian dictum that it was literature’s task to be useful and to give pleasure (prodesse aut delectare) was widely accepted and neither of these two conceptual pillars referred in any precise therapeutic sense to literature as a source of mental health or balance Thinking about literature was rather dominated by interest in the nature of the realities represented - one would say today, by ethical and ontological issues, rather than by considerations of effect In the Middle Ages and for a considerable time afterwards, ontological issues were inextricably bound up with moral and religious issues, and effects, if they were mentioned at all, tended to be seen as emotional and, therefore, dangerous or in a merely ancillary function As the natural, ‘fallen’ world was “brazen,” poetry was expected to give humans an idea of a perfect world by delivering a “golden” version of it, so Philip Sidney in his An Apology for Poetry, published posthumously in 1595 To create images of an idealised reality, a world liberated from the contaminations of sin, and in line with God’s moral injunctions and promises, was considered the task and duty of poets well into the 18th century Usefulness in this sense was seen as the master function of literary texts, and the pleasure they caused as secondary Helping readers or listeners to image a reality and human existence that Christian belief promised for life after death was considered its main concern Against this background, today’s eudaimonism seems to be somehow also a contemporary secularised version of this time-honoured concept The Romantic revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries marked a radical break-away from representation (mimesis) and usefulness as explanatory hubs of traditional poetics by radically relocating the focus of attention to the feelings and intuitions of particularly sensitive human individuals 18th century epistemological empiricism and aesthetics (Locke, Shaftesbury, Lord Kames, and others) had prepared the ground by replacing the principles defining and justifying the traditional hierarchy of genres through levels of styles, with a realignment of the hierarchy of themes and genres according to their emotional effects. They redefined, for instance, the category of the beautiful in art and poetry as causing pleasurable, enjoyable emotions, and, by adopting Longinus’ definition, the Sublime as a category that defined objects and actions with the capacity to disturb and shock the human mind into awe and visionary revelation The romantics radicalised this new approach by making the inner self of the creative individual the main stage for how poetry could help human minds Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? 355 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 to find their way back to their natural state of innocence. Wordsworth, one of the founding fathers of English Romanticism, saw the value of poetry in its capacity to grasp and express poetically the inner reactions to experience in natural surroundings and set it off against a self that was alienated from its true natural condition by civilisation In this way, romantic poetry was designed to heal the rift between the natural self and a self distorted by the pressures of change and accelerated social upheaval in the run-up to the industrial revolution. True poetry, defined by him as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling recollected in tranquillity,” 10 was also deliberately set off against the neo-classicist obsession with rules that had still been strongly defended by Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, the critical lawmakers of the 18th century Wordsworth criticised the traditional cannon of rules as a terrible mistake distracting attention from what was natural and really needed For him, poetry had to play a decisive role in enacting what Rousseau’s “retour à la nature” had demanded: a return to a supposedly innocent, natural state as a bulwark against the soul-destroying forces of modernisation. For the first time in history, poetry was thus recruited for therapeutic purposes It was designed to heal the chasm progress had opened up between the natural state of the human mind and the disrupting demands and pressures of modern life It would, however, be naive to believe that what the Romantics did was initiating ‘a return to nature’ as a state of affairs that had really existed before civilisation destroyed it, just as it seems to have been naive to believe that the task of poetry lies in presenting an idealised world free of sin But if we had to choose between these two venerable historical models as blueprints for a contemporary approach with a eudaimonic agenda, we would find it difficult to decide What speaks, however, in favour of the romantics as models for it, is their fundamental belief that there is a natural state, a state of innocence, of balance and happiness, to which the world and human affairs have to be brought back with the help of literature The romantics produced astonishingly moving and beautiful poems to make their point, but they also pamphleteered insistently to win over a sceptical readership Talent, devotion to the cause, and hard 10 In his seminal Preface to the Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads, published in 1800, William Wordsworth defined “all good poetry” as “the spontaneous outflow of powerful feelings […] recollected in tranquillity” thus deliberately setting off his own and S T Coleridge’s contributions to their experimental collection of ballads and poems against the prevailing styles and themes In: Wordsworth’s Prefaces and Essays on Poetry: With a Letter to Lady Beaumont (1798-1845), ed A J George (Boston: DC Heath, 1892), 25 See also Jürgen Schlaeger, Imitatio und Realisatio: Funktionen poetischer Sprache im Klassizismus und in der Romantik (München: Fink 1974), 93-109 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 356 J ürgeN s chlaeger work eventually fulfilled the prophecy. Later in life, Wordsworth achieved prominence as the “Great Healer; ” Shelley, Keats, and Lord Byron all died young as legendary martyrs to the cause and were accorded in literary history the status of self-sacrificing geniuses, or, in the case of Wordsworth, who lived to the age of 80, the accolade of a visionary sage So, however faked the claims of the Romantics that they had recovered the true shape and character of innocent humanity might sound now, the movement has left indelible and very valuable traces in the European imaginary Its legacy still has something important to offer to us in terms of attitudes, emotions, self-perception as well as of modes of expression and experience of nature With it, it added something irreplaceable to Europe’s medicine cabinet of spiritual relief and comfort 11 The spirit of the ecological movement today seems to pick up the Romantic impulse of setting what is considered natural and original against their opposites, and of promising relief and an escape route from the increasing alienation of humanity from its natural condition, demanding again some sort of return to a natural state, which, of course, never existed in the way the Romantics imagined it and is probably just another utopian projection rather than a guideline for our future now Again, an intellectual movement seems to be on the rise as a reaction to developments that have seriously upset the ecological balance within nature and in the human mind Whether, in view of this situation, a eudaimonic approach, fuelled by a positive psychology, will play a prominent role in the efforts to stem the disrupting forces of the modern world, remains to be seen After all, the Romantics did not stop the developments they revolted against, but nevertheless offered the imagination of their contemporaries and of future generations something to draw lasting pleasure and comfort from They have not made the world a better place, but the minds of men immensely richer ones Their efforts did not heal the rifts caused by industrialisation and modernisation They did not turn the world into the humane and well-balanced natural habitat they had imagined, but they left Western, increasingly individualised cultures a valuable legacy which readers can still use and fall back on if they feel the need to imagine a world they could love and live in, content and at peace with themselves, their natural surroundings and their fellow human beings Sadly, cultural anthropology has made it all 11 “Every great and original writer […] must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished,” Wordsworth, Letter to Lady Beaumont, May 21, 1807, Wordsworth’s Prefaces and Essays on Poetry: With a Letter to Lady Beaumont (1798-1845), ed A J George (Boston: DC Heath, 1892), 99 See also Brittany Pladek, The Poetics of Palliation: Romantic Literary Theory 1790-1850, (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2019) Do We Need a ‘Eudaimonic Turn’ in Literary Studies? 357 too obvious that there is no point of origin or innocence to which advanced societies can return if they feel they are about to lose their bearings But, in view of the high stakes eudaimonic criticism is claiming now for its own efforts, one has to realise that two hundred years ago, the achievements of the romantics took a handful of very talented and determined young poets and revolutionary thinkers “to create the taste by which” 12 a large readership eventually came to take in and enjoy what they had on offer Compared with this scenario, the call for a eudaimonic critical agenda, as part of a ‘positive psychology’ seems to be only a feeble postscript to what the Romantics were determined to do and what they achieved Compared with their enthusiasm, the chances that the expectations and promises that come with a new approach to understanding and using literary texts as sources of wellbeing, are, it seems, not overwhelming Its claims would be much stronger in substance and impact, if the project would have the support of a new generation of writers and original thinkers who would not just tell their readers and students how they have to interpret literary works, but would produce creative work that can open up their readers’ imagination to new dimensions of thought and feelings, expressions and attitudes Without such support, the effects academically identified and extracted from literary texts by eudaimonic critics will not make much of a difference Altogether, whether literary texts, with the help of academic criticism, can do now more for us than the Romantics achieved with their poetic talent and their personal enthusiasm: i e actually stop, revert, or at least slow down and compensate imaginatively the dis-embedding effects of rapid technological and social change, is questionable After all, the romantics left us beautiful poems of lasting value and influence, fought for their convictions as thinkers, pamphleteers and revolutionaries, whereas 21st century critical eudaimonism seems to do little more than hold out the promise of rebalancing our minds and increase our wellbeing by teasing out some of the invigorating and healing powers of literature Maybe it is worth trying, but if the trying involves throwing the baby - our baby - out with a bathwater, we better hedge our bets 12 Wordsworth, Letter, 99 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 Works Cited Cave, Terence Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism Oxford: OUP, 2016 Fauconnier, Gilles/ Mark Turner The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities New York: Basic Books, 2002 Felski, Rita The Limits of Critique Chicago: Chicago UP, 2015 Greenfield, Susan. Mind Change: How Digital Technologies are Leaving their Mark on our Brains London: Rider, 2014 Keen, Andrew The Internet Is Not the Answer London: Atlantic Books, 2015 Kidd, David Comer/ Emanuele Castano “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind ” Science 342 6156 (2013), 377-380, https: / / science sciencemag org/ content/ 342/ 6156/ 377 Accessed 10 May 2020 Kurzweil, Ray How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed New York: Viking Penguin, 2012 Layard, Richard Happiness: Lessons from a New Science New York: Penguin, 2005 Moore, Suzanne “It’s time to put happiness and wellbeing on the political agenda ” The Guardian, 8 February 2020, https: / / www theguardian com/ commentisfree/ 2020/ feb/ 08/ happiness-wellbeing-political-agenda-tories-optimism-labour Accessed 10 May 2020 Pawelski, James O / D J Moores, eds The Eudaimonic Turn: Wellbeing in Literary Studies Madison: Fairleigh Dickensen UP, 2013 Pladek, Brittany The Poetics of Palliation: Romantic Literary Theory 1790-1850 Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2019 Schlaeger, Jürgen Imitatio und Realisatio: Funktionen poetischer Sprache im Klassizismus und in der Romantik. München: Fink, 1974 Schlaeger, Jürgen/ Gesa Stedman, eds The Literary Mind Tübingen: Narr, 2008 REAL 24 Sidney, Philip An Apology for Poetry (1595) University of Michigan, 1965 Turkle, Sherry S Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2012 Turner, Mark The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language Oxford: OUP, 1996 Wordsworth, William Letter to Lady Beaumont. May 21, 1807 In: Wordsworth’s Prefaces and Essays on Poetry: With a Letter to Lady Beaumont (1798-1845). Ed A J George Boston: DC Heath, 1892 --- “Preface, 1800-1845 ” In: Wordsworth’s Prefaces and Essays on Poetry: With a Letter to Lady Beaumont (1798-1845). Ed A J George Boston: DC Heath, 1892, 95-100 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0017 358 J ürgeN s chlaeger e pilogue 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0018 h eta p yrhöNeN Literature as a Lifeline The Value of Literature for a Cognitively Non-Typical Reader In the latter half of the 2010s the Finnish Government cut university funding My colleague retired and his professorship was not filled. For a good while, I managed the workload of two professors Eventually this situation took its toll, and I had a pacemaker implemented Alas, that routine operation failed, leading to what is called pericardium effusion, that is, my heart pouch filled with blood the removal of which necessitated an emergency operation This procedure, in turn, led to a new complication One morning in early July 2017 my head ached terribly, and my vision was blurred by what looked like dancing Northern lights By chance, the previous day I had written a neurologist friend of mine who worked in the hospital, and that morning he came to visit me We chatted for a while The next thing I remember is that these lines from John Donne’s poem started persistently echoing in my head: “send not to know/ For whom the bell tolls/ it tolls for thee ” These lines were coupled with the sensation of a cold wave starting from my neck and working its way up from the back of my head to the crown and forehead “I am dying now” is the last thought I recall having before I sank into total, immovable darkness This wave-like sensation is my memory of suffering a stroke that leads to various degrees of brain injury, resulting in different degrees of cognitive difficulty and hemiparesis. My friend’s visit saved my life, for he recognised what was happening and arranged for help In this chapter, I write about the role literature played in my fight to recuperate from brain injury My account is purely practical, not medical, cognitive, or neurological, because recovery requires a practical approach This essay conveys a survivor’s experience Each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main In my case, the stroke lead to what is called left-neglect Left-neglect is an attention deficit, a condition in which it is difficult to see, observe, and feel the 362 h eta p yrhöNeN 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0018 left-side of one’s body, field of vision, and surroundings. For example, when asked to follow with my gaze a doctor’s hand, moving from the right to the left, my eyes stopped in the middle As I did not see beyond the middle point, I could not even cheat by moving my head to the left I was alive, yet everything had changed When previously I had been similar to Donne’s everyman who is “a part of the main,” a “piece of the continent,” I had lost the sense of being an integral part of any world In my previous cognitive state, I had inserted myself into the space and place wherever I happened to be I would not say that I owned these spaces, but at least I had the sense of occupying them, of being securely in them Now I no longer had the feeling that I was an independently acting agent of what I could observe as a whole, manageable world Missing as it were a side of the world resulted in highly uncomfortable experiences of utter disorientation, displacement, and bewilderment Even today, it still can occur that I am somewhere in Helsinki, my birth city I know intimately, and if I cut a corner in an unfamiliar way, suddenly even familiar places may appear unfamiliar In such situations it takes some stretches of time before I can say where I am and how to locate myself in space and how to navigate in it It is helpful to illustrate left neglect with a few pictures drawn by stroke survivors These are not drawn by me, but mine were similar to them Fig 1: Image drawn by stroke patient, reprinted with kind permission by Prof Dr Olaf Blanke and Dr Isabella Pasqualini As the drawing on the right side illustrates, the patient clearly knows she is drawing a house. The result, however, is lopsided, thanks to difficulties of perception A similar exercise deals with drawing points of time on a clock face: Literature as a Lifeline 363 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0018 Fig 2: Image drawn by stroke patient, reprinted with kind permission by Prof Dr Olaf Blanke and Dr Isabella Pasqualini I found these clock exercises exceedingly vexing, as it was difficult to mark the left side I tried smoothing the left side although the paper was perfectly even Moreover, once permitted to go outside, left neglect led to dangerous situations, for noticing cars coming from the left requires even today concentrated and conscious effort I am involved in mankind The obvious and immediate conclusion resulting from left neglect is that one has to think of ways to start rebuilding the left side to one’s world experience As Donne puts it, “I am involved in mankind”; “mankind” typically shares a sense of a life world that has a rounded wholeness People usually experience themselves as agents capable of acting in a manageable environment Another pressing task addresses the shattering of the illusion of invulnerability that is necessary to our sense of being alive This illusion ensures us that we can trustingly rely on our personal continuity Once this illusion shatters, it means that one lives under the consciousness and fear of death It takes a lot of mental and psychic work to build this illusion again After the immediate danger was over, I was transferred to another hospital with a rehabilitation center The assessment of damages begins soon after a stroke This evaluation includes drawing tasks, basic calculation problems, memory exercises as well as physical tests and various practical tasks Rehabilitation involved meetings with neuropsychologists I met with two neuropsychologists whom I uncharitably - but only in my mind - called the 364 h eta p yrhöNeN 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0018 Squirrel and Miss Piggy These meetings largely consisted of exercises, involving memory tasks, usually retelling either a short narrative or trying to remember a longish list of words randomly strung together Interestingly, rehabilitation never involved any talk about strategies of memorisation, so I devised my own Memorising random words is much harder than impressing short narratives on one’s mind I fared well with both tasks With lists, I found it helpful to treat them as poems I remembered Marie-Laure Ryan’s claim that “poetry is essentially metaphorical…figural language does not display a foreign world for its own sake ” 1 I found, however, that projecting a world where I could, as it were, hang up the words helped a great deal I imagined a “hazy” and empty world and then pictured each word, sometimes adding something to them, for example, to the word “wind” I added a sweeping motion. If I deemed a word difficult in some way, I tried attaching some emotion to it Sometimes I coupled words, for example, with the string “chair,” “umbrella,” and “ball,” I set the chair upright, placed the umbrella on it, while putting the ball underneath Imaging a world, treating words as parts of a strange piece of poetry helped me to concentrate on what is rather a dull task I think that this strategy worked well because it involves a modicum of aesthetic and creative pleasure Short narratives are much easier to remember than word lists and, in order to provide a few examples, I recount three stories They illustrate the types of narrative neuropsychologists have chosen for patients to work with 1st It is a lovely summer day and a young boy and his dog go fishing. They go up onto a high rock It is very windy, and suddenly, a gust of wind tussles the boy into the lake The dog jumps after the boy and grabbing him with his teeth by the collar is able to save him 2nd A woman works in a school cafeteria It is payday and she has her salary in her handbag There are bills to pay, electricity and such She is the single mother of two children 250 meters to her home door, a man attacks her, stealing her handbag The anguished woman reports the robbery to the police The police direct her to social welfare services with whose help she manages the distressing situation 3rd A farmer has a barn It is midsummer After going to bed, he wakes up, smelling smoke Looking out the window, he sees the barn burning There is a valuable tractor in there that he is able to save Even though the fire brigade arrives quickly, the barn burns to the ground. Luckily, the insurance company compensates the damages to the full 1 Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1991), 86-87 Literature as a Lifeline 365 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0018 I first identified the problem or conflict the story dealt with, keeping in mind the notion that the end may frequently be thought of as a transformation of the beginning All narratives adhered to these principles Also, I determined whether the stories consisted of happenings or events Most stories built on happenings caused by unpredictable natural forces Only the story about the robbery had a character whose criminal act involved some premeditation and planning Unexpectedly, the rehabilitation exercises became a cause of contention During one session I remarked to the Squirrel that I thought the stories mocked us patients, because they present difficult situations as primarily addressing financial issues. Most stroke survivors had suffered various damages that no money could fix. The Squirrel took offence and told me I was overly critical. I was surprised to find out that it was undesirable for patients to discuss the nature of the exercises Consequently, the relationship to the neuropsychologists became uncomfortable Therefore, I had to think of ways of getting the rehabilitation I needed Enter Kim Philby Luckily, I remembered reading about Kim Philby, the famous British double spy, who worked both for Great Britain and the Soviet Union In my mind, I adopted the role of Kim Philby I started writing messages to my doctor friend with the title “Kim Philby reports ” In these messages I recorded uncensored accounts of my experiences as a patient Being a stroke survivor is a terrible ordeal: One is constantly aware of one’s former and current self The former self is the familiar and dear one The current self is largely a mystery, and one gets to know her through trepidation: what skills and abilities has this current self-retained—or has she altogether new traits? A stroke, after all, can cause, for example, personality changes such as becoming ill-tempered and belligerent Being Kim Philby provided a temporary vantage point outside this anxiety-filled dynamic. I think of Kim Philby as a transitional self, a role with whose help I could endure the slow process of getting to know who I had become and what I had lost Adopting the role of Kim Philby helped me find viable working strategies with the neuropsychologists One exercise had me write a story, underlining at least ten words in it that I had to remember in retelling the story during a session In a book of mine, Bluebeard Gothic, I had analysed Angela Carter’s Bluebeard stories I chose “The Fall-River Axe Murders,” for loose adaptation, and very subtly gave the victim of my story the Squirrel’s features Thanks to 366 h eta p yrhöNeN 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0018 the fact that the story and the underlined words were coupled with emotions, remembering was much easier I had a skirmish with Miss Piggy She showed me pictures and I had to identify what was missing from them We looked at a picture of a hand with a bunch of roses I told her that what was missing was the recipient of the bunch My answer was wrong, but I remarked that the concept of a gift includes three things, a giver, a gift, and the recipient I turned the pages, analysing all pictures conceptually I remarked to Miss Piggy that she should give me some credit for showing a side of the exercise that she had not previously thought of “But your brain is so damaged,” she retorted (What was missing was a glove, because the rose stems had thorns) From then on, I was in the role of Kim Philby during sessions with Miss Piggy whom I mostly met We did various exercises on the computer during our meetings Kim Philby always laughed about her mistakes, proceeding then to dissect them Miss Piggy never gave Philby any credit for rising to a meta-level in doing these exercises My earlier reading provided me with a working strategy to deal with distressing situations Looking back, although I have devoured crime and spy stories in abundance, this strategy, did not have to do with these genres The idea of Philby sprang from the pages of children’s and girl’s books I had read in my childhood and adolescence So many of these books have a heroine who lands in difficult and distressing situations and is not met with understanding and encouragement. She has to find ways of managing; she treats this challenge as one of creativity For these heroines, retaining dignity and remaining courteous in the face of hardship are of key importance Kim Philby helped me deal with anger and disappointment in not being treated in a professional manner Moreover, having a secret double life in a hospital has a humorous and entertaining side Enjoying Literature Experiencing space in the hospital is modified by the fact that the only space a patient can call her own is the bed that is assigned to her Here is a picture of my personal space for the 120 days I spent in the hospital Literature as a Lifeline 367 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0018 Fig 3: Personal photograph of hospital bed Thinking positively, the constricted size of the hospital bed provides the experience of mastering the space one is given I had my iPad with a Kindle in the hospital Soon after the stroke, I began reading for hours a day Luckily, in the West, we read from left to right Sometimes I just stared at the page, at the letters lined up on the left, thinking of them as toy soldiers ready to march onward I was really fortunate in that I was able to see the whole left side of the page, and I cannot but think that the movement from left to right in reading is so deeply ingrained in the brain that this habit was there all along to enable reading whole lines Kindle allows for a seamless transition from one book to the next In choosing reading matter, I consulted various compiled lists of reading recommen- 368 h eta p yrhöNeN 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0018 dations I only read in English, because I wanted eventually to return to work Here is a list of the books I read: - Barba, Andrés Such Small Hands - Babbit, Natalie Tuck Everlasting - Beckett, Samuel: Waiting for Godot - Burnett, Frances A Little Princess - Fowler, Karen Joy We Are all Completely Beside Ourselves - Gappah, Bettina Rotten Row - Honeyman, Gail Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine - Kalanithi, Paul When Breath Becomes Air - Lacey, Catherine Certain American States: Stories - Lee, Min Jin Free Food for Millionaires - Mendelsohn, Daniel An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic - Ng, Celeste: Everything I Never Told You - Penny, Louise The Chief Inspector Gamache Series: Books 1-3 Still Life; Fatal Grace; The Cruelest Month - Pym, Barbara Some Tame Gazelle - --- Jane and Prudence - Robinson, Joan When Marnie Was There - Saunders, George: Lincoln in the Bardo - Shaffer, Mary Ann/ Annie Barrows The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peal Society - Smith, Zadie Swing Time - Stead, Rebecca When You Reach Me - Thien, Madeleine Do Not Say We Have Nothing - Towles, Amor A Gentleman in Moscow - Whitehead, Colson The Underground Railroad - Willis, Jane Tea at the Opalco and Other Stories This list still is, for me, an important document, because I remember what these books were about I would like to point out two books in particular The first book I read was Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow, and I found it on President Barack Obama’s summer reading list It provided perfect reading, for the events take place in a hotel in Moscow Thus, it invites the reader to enter a manageable space and place; I enjoyed visiting all the levels and nooks of this hotel, getting a sense of the surroundings Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was a really powerful read, because it made me think that the author may have experienced some sort of cognitive impairment himself It reproduced my experiences of bewilderment, disorientation, utter emptiness, and Literature as a Lifeline 369 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0018 existence with difficulties of owning a space and orienting in it. 2 Some books proved difficult, however. Madeleine Thien’s novel was confusing, for it had too many characters, and too many points of time, while George Saunders’ Lincoln was too sad to read. It is the only book I did not finish. Many of the reasons I binge read are easy to name Obviously, reading safeguards privacy There is very little privacy in the hospital so the bed is practically the only place where one can seal oneself off from others Reading provides entertainment and escape which is precious, for there is so little to do One becomes institutionalised quickly and days are structured by mealtimes and rehabilitation sessions Visiting a Moscow hotel, spending time with characters in different places and situations make a reader at least temporarily focus on other things than present pain, misery, and uncertainty That in itself is a great consolation I purposefully reread some books that I had liked in my childhood, for I thought they would provide special solace Indeed, rereading Frances Burnett’s Little Princess, for example, was like receiving a pep talk and reassurance that things will eventually get better There were, however, other, much more significant reasons for reading. For the first time in my adult life, I simply read. Reading was a lifeline, because one can just read - one can just be with literature Reading was wonderful, for I realised that I did not have to understand, interpret anything, or impress anyone, or scan the books for examples to use to in research or classes One way of conveying this experience is to say I breathed with literature At one point of time, I had nine intravenous needles stuck on my arms, and I thought of reading as streaming from the page in a steady flow of letters, words, sentences into my body Also, every now and then reading lulled me to sleep; it is nice to glide smoothly from a fictional world to a dream one. Literature is a lifeline, because it is a loving, accepting, and friendly dialogic other: language, form, and object relations with characters are there It provides shape and form in situations where it is difficult to perceive any shape and provide forms for experience Literature simply is, and that is its best quality 2 Later on, I was delighted to read in Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts about her assignment to her students She made “everyone read Beckett, along with an essay about brain damage ” Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial, (London: Vintage, 2007), 154 370 h eta p yrhöNeN 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0018 Works Cited Barba, Andrés Such Small Hands. (2008) Trans Lisa Dillman Oakland, CA: Transit Books, 2017 Babbit, Natalie Tuck Everlasting (1975) New York: Square Fish, 2007 Beckett, Samuel: Waiting for Godot (1954) New York: Grove Press, 2011 Burnett, Frances A Little Princess (1905) New York: Penguin, 2002 Carter, Angela Bluebeard (1977) London: Penguin, 2011 Donne, John “Meditation 17 [For Whom the Bell Tolls] ” The Works of John Donne, vol 3 Ed Henry Alford London: John W Parker, 1839, 574-575 Fowler, Karen Joy We Are all Completely Beside Ourselves New York: Plume/ Penguin, 2013 Gappah, Bettina Rotten Row London: Faber & Faber, 2017 Honeyman, Gail Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine New York: Penguin, 2017 Kalanithi, Paul When Breath Becomes Air New York: Random House, 2016 Lacey, Catherine Certain American States: Stories New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018 Lee, Min Jin Free Food for Millionaires New York: grand Central Publishing/ Hachette, 2007 Mendelsohn, Daniel An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic New York: Penguin, 2017 Nelson, Maggie The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial London: Vintage, 2007 Ng, Celeste: Everything I Never Told You New York: Penguin, 2014 Penny, Louise Still Life (2005) The Chief Inspector Gamache Series: Books 1-3 New York, Mintaur Books, 2014 --- Fatal Grace (2006) The Chief Inspector Gamache Series: Books 1-3 New York, Mintaur Books, 2014 --- The Cruelest Month (2007) The Chief Inspector Gamache Series: Books 1-3 New York, Mintaur Books, 2014 Pym, Barbara Some Tame Gazelle (1950) Boston, MA: Little Brown & Company, 2014 --- Jane and Prudence (1953) Boston, MA: Little Brown & Company, 2014 Pyrhönen, Heta Bluebeard Gothic: Jane Eyre and Its Progeny Toronto: Toronto UP, 2010 Robinson, Joan When Marnie Was There (1967) London: HarperCollins, 2002 Ryan, Marie-Laure Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1991 Saunders, George: Lincoln in the Bardo London: Penguin, 2016 Shaffer, Mary Ann/ Annie Barrows The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peal Society New York: Random House, 2009 Smith, Zadie Swing Time New York: Penguin, 2017 Stead, Rebecca When You Reach Me New York: Penguin Random House, 2009 Thien, Madeleine Do Not Say We Have Nothing Toronto: Knopf, 2016 Towles, Amor A Gentleman in Moscow New York: Viking, 2016 Whitehead, Colson The Underground Railroad New York: Doubleday, 2016 Willis, Jane Tea at the Opalco and Other Stories Rickmansworth: TSL Publications, 2016 Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature ISBN 978-3-8233-8366-6 In the wake of the ‘ethical turn,’ there have been intense debates about the ethical dimension of literary works and the ways in which they serve to represent and disseminate values and norms. Against the backdrop of the current legitimation crisis of the humanities in an increasingly digital age, the present volume puts the value of literature itself onto the agenda of literary studies. The articles in this volume explore the cognitive, ethical, and cultural value of literature, demonstrating why literature matters and why it is worthwhile to read literary texts. The collection shows that literary fictions serve as important ways of meaning-, senseand world-making, and that they are powerful laboratories for revalorising our hierarchies of values and for fostering cultural resources of resilience. 36 Volume 36 (2020) The Value of Literature Edited by Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning