Over the last decades the role of literature has diminished increasingly in public and cultural life as well as in the lives of children and adolescents. The change in the status of literature, however, is not reflected in the curriculum of neither mother tongue teaching nor the foreign language teachings where literature continues to hold a privileged position. This is especially surprising since many of the arguments traditionally given for this position have lost their value and have not sufficiently been replaced with new ones. In addition, in the language and literature departments at university literary studies have increasingly been challenged by cultural and media studies. As a result of this development the researchers engaged in this project take up the question why study and teach literature. We assume that literature still matters in the 21 ^th century and argues among other things from contemporary cognitive science for the continuing importance of literature in our educational system. Special attention is given to narrative literature and its role in developing cognitive skills and textual competences.

So why study literature?

It seems to us that the question is more urgent than ever; institutionally, epistemologically, didactically and in other ways. Through plenary lectures and workshops this seminar will provide the platform for discussing and exploring the role of literature in our present society with a special view to the study and teaching of literature in the educational system from schools to universities. The seminar is one step on the road towards a theoretically well-founded basis for what might presently be considered a relatively unfounded historical fact: That literature and the teaching of literature in many educational institutions holds a privileged place in a field of study otherwise defined or outlined geographically or by language. We hope that the question “Why study literature?” will provide new ways of thinking about the role and the purposes of literature.

Participants

• From Scandinavian Institute, Aarhus University: Henrik Skov Nielsen, Stefan Iversen, Stefan Kjerkegaard, Simon Borchmann, Dan Ringgaard & Lars Granild
• From The Institute of Language, Literature and Culture, Aarhus University: Steen Bille Jørgensen, Søren Fauth, Ole Thomsen & Marianne Pade
• From The Department of Curriculum Research & The Children Literature Centre at The Danish School of Education, Aarhus University: Vibeke Hetmar, Gitte Holten Ingerslev, Jeppe Bundsgaard, Mads Haugsted, Helle Rørbeck, Nina Christensen & Line Beck Rasmussen
• Brian McHale: Models, or, Learning from Science Fiction
• Dorothy Hale: The Novel and the New Ethics
• Richard Walsh: The Force of Fictions
• Frederik Stjernfelt: Reasons for Art – Reasons for Reading
• Marie-Laure Ryan: The Fate of the Word in New Media, or, How Efficient are Computers as Literary Machines?
• Sune Auken: Literature & History.
• Svend Erik Larsen: Literature & Culture.
• Morten Kyndrup: Literature & Mediality
• Jan Alber: The Search for Other Worlds and Further Reasons to Study Literature
• Brian Richardson:The Function of Literature, the Practice of Narrative Theory, and the Roles of the Reader
• Werner Wolf: A Defence of (the Study of) Literature or: Why (the Study of) Literature cannot be Replaced by Cultural Studies and Film (Studies)

Abstracts

Brian McHale: Models, or, Learning from Science Fiction

Brian Mchale is Distinguished Humanities Professor of English in the Ohio State University

One of the most powerful and valuable products of the literary system, Itamar Even-Zohar argued nearly twenty years ago in a classic statement of his polysystem theory, is models of reality .  Literary texts are built from such models; they serve to circulate such models; and they help society to maintain its models.  Literary models of reality vary in kind and scale, ranging from micrological details of language and behavior right up to worldviews and cosmologies.  Examples from the “middle range” of literary reality-models include registers of language ( e.g., the model of baby-talk as a conventional representation, in literature and reality, of the language of children; see McHale 1994) and societal models ( e.g., the motley society model in the modernist period; see Nemoianu 1984).  In the light of literature’s modeling function, one answer to the question, “Why study literature?” is that literature provides extraordinary access to a culture’s models of reality – those of temporally or geographically distant cultures, but also those of one’s own contemporary culture, which might pass unnoticed, below the threshold of attention, without the foregrounding that literature imparts to them.

 Reality-modeling of the kind that Even-Zohar (and before him Jurij Lotman and others) have in mind is essentially conservative and homeostatic : it serves to circulate and maintain the already-given and already-known .  It is precisely this conservative, doxic function of literature (especially narrative literature) that provoked the revulsion of the twentieth-century avant-gardes, dedicated as they were to the renovation and innovation of experience (literary and extra-literary alike); Barthes’s nausea, in S/Z, in the face of the doxic system of Balzacian realism, is a classic manifestation of avant-garde aesthetics.  But is there no way in which literature can model literature, not homeostatically but rather constructively or projectively ? no way in which it can serve as a model for instead of a model of reality?

 I want to consider in this connection not any of the great twentieth-century avant-garde practices (the usual suspects), but rather a humbler, still somewhat disreputable literary genre: science fiction.  Sf is, of course, a genre of “formula fiction”; consequently, much of its reality-modeling is conservative and doxic, sometimes painfully so.  Nevertheless, it is also a genre that foregrounds world-building ; it proceeds from certain “what if?” premises, and extrapolates parts of its world more or less systematically from those premises, exploring the ramifying consequences (material, social, psychological, metaphysical, what-have-you) of a few key ontological innovations (or novums , to use Darko Suvin’s invaluable term).  Only rarely (much more rarely than sf apologists like to admit) does sf’s projective world-building actually converge with real-world innovation; but even if its “what if?” extrapolations never come to pass, sf serves the valuable function of imagining alternatives to received reality.  It allows us to think of reality-models not as inevitably given, but as merely one set of possibilities among a range of alternatives; it relativizes reality.  Thus, for example, Alfred Bester in The Stars My Destination, a superior pulp-sf novel of 1956, imagines a future in which human beings possess the ability to travel from place to place simply by the force of thought – by telekinesis.  Now telekinesis is not yet a reality of our world, and is unlikely to become one; but the foreshortening of space that this novum produces in Bester’s fictional world allows him to model an alternative to the given reality of 1956, a certain globalization that was otherwise inconceivable in his time (and is still barely conceivable in ours).

 What can we learn from science fiction?  The distinguished sf author Samuel R. Delany tells an anecdote (perhaps apocryphal) about a regular reader of sf who tries the experiment of rereading Pride and Prejudice , and found it interestingly transformed: “whereas before he appreciated Austen for her masterful portraits of human nature acting as it might in the real world, now, as he read he asked himself what kind of world must be postulated in order for the events in her story to have happened as she relates them” (in Freedman 2000, 21).  Reading realism in the light of sf involves rethinking reality-modeling not as circulation and maintenance – as homeostasis – but as projection.  All literary fiction, this anecdote suggests, is in some sense modeling for a projected world rather than merely the modeling of a received one – or at least, it could fruitfully be read that way.  This is a different, more constructive (and perhaps constructiv ist ) answer to the question, “Why study literature?”  I don’t think I’m capable of reading Pride and Prejudice in the way that Delany proposes, but I do want to try the experiment of reading Don Quixote as a kind of sf novel, one that models for a “Mediterranean world” in something like Fernand Braudel’s sense.

References

Even-Zohar, Itamar (1990)  “The ‘Literary System.’” In Polysystem Studies , Poetics Today 11, 1: 27-44.

Freedman, Carl (2000) Critical Theory and Science Fiction.   Hanover NH: Wesleyan UP.

McHale, Brian (1994)  “Child as Ready-Made: Baby-Talk and the Language of Dos Passos’ Children in U.S.A. ”  In Infant Tongues: The Voice of the Child in Literature, ed. By Elizabeth Goodenough, Mark A. Heberle and Naomi Sokoloff.  Detroit: Wayne State UP.  202-224.

Nemoianu, Virgil (1984) “Societal Models as Substitute Reality in Literature,” Poetics Today 5, 2: 275-97.

Suvin, Darko (1979) Metamorphoses of Science Fiction.  New Haven: Yale UP.

Dorothy J. Hale: The Novel and the New Ethics

Dorothy J. Hale is Professor, Department of English, University of California, Berkeley

 In the last decade, a new call for ethical criticism has been sounded from unexpected quarters of the academy.  With astonishing rapidity, a body of serious scholarship has burgeoned forth, fueling the debate not over whether ethical questions should be pursued but how the new ethical inquiry might best be conducted.  As scholars such as Geoffrey Harpham have discussed, the renewed interest in ethics is sparked by the academy’s general dissatisfaction with the disenfranchisement of individual agency (and thus individual responsibility) that is seen to be the legacy of theories that have dominated scholarship in the humanities since the 1980s: de Manian deconstruction, Foucauldian sociology, and identity politics.  For many literary critics, the turn to the ethical is not just the attempt to recuperate the agency of the individual reader or author; it is also an attempt to theorize anew the positive social value of literature and literary study.  But are these new ethical defenses of literature substantially different from the old ethical defenses of literature?  And if they are not, do they open themselves to the kind of critique that made deconstruction, new historicism and identity politics attractive theoretical positions to begin with?             

 In my recently published essay, “Fiction as Restriction: Self-Binding in New Ethical Theories of the Novel” ( Narrative , 2007), I address these questions by first underscoring the central role played in new ethical theory by one literary genre in particular.  For contemporary critics such as Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, and J. Hillis Miller, the discussion of the ethical value of “literature” is almost exclusively a discussion of the ethical value of novels.  I seek to bring into relation new ethical theories of literature which implicitly privilege the novel as an ethical agent with theories (new and old) that explicitly argue for the novel’s superiority as a literary discourse. 

But if we can see the novel providing a common ground for literary and new ethical theory, we also want to appreciate why the novel remains untheorized as a genre within new ethical theory.   In “The Novel and the New Ethics,” the paper I will present for the Aarhus symposium “Why Study Literature?”, I argue that new ethical theories of literature lead us to a new understanding of novelistic aesthetics—in part because we can see how the political commitments of new ethical theorists lead them to imagine that any discussion of literary form or novelistic aesthetics is retrograde, a fall back into New Critical close reading or even Kantian notions of disinterestedness.  “The Novel and the New Ethics” argues that the theorization of novelistic aesthetics need not be a necessary betrayal of the politicized understanding of the novel that we have gained from Foucauldian and New Historical accounts of the novel as a political discourse.  On the contrary, I show that the novel is a privileged genre in new ethical discussions of literary value precisely because the conflict between social alterity and aesthetic discourse is staged by the novel’s narrative structure.  Character as both an element of form and a social referent is a key site for this structural conflict.  The constant threat of aesthetic exploitation (to be used as an element of plot, as a foil for the protagonist, etc) helps produce the novelist effect of characterological freedom, the reader’s intense apprehension that fictional characters are autonomous, living beings.  A fictional character is felt to be no different from a real human being to the degree that her functional positionality seems like a restriction of her potentiality, a limit to the full freedom that she has the right to enjoy beyond the artistic uses that the novel puts her to.  This aesthetic effect of the novel has been so powerful that readers and critics alike have applied a discourse of human rights to fictional characters, judging a novel as good or bad according to the free will an author or narrator accords to the characters he or she represents.  The understanding of the novel as caught between its social and aesthetic nature is constitutive of novelistic aesthetics itself—and the aesthetic experience of novels is for the reader inseparable from the experience of the possibilities and limitations of alterity, of knowing social others as other.

Richard Walsh: The Force of Fictions

Richard Walsh is Senior Lecturer, Department of English and Related Literature, The University of York

 The study of literature is a metadiscourse, the reflexiveness of which in itself elucidates an inherent quality of the literary text. This paper elaborates upon that quality with specific reference to fictionality, and shows how the built-in self-consciousness of fictionality as a rhetorical orientation is a constant that connects highly wrought literary fictions with the most elemental functions of the human imagination. The communicative function of fictive rhetoric, by virtue of the self-consciousness integral to its operation, appeals simultaneously to a universal project of mastery over temporality and experience, and to the historically and culturally specific resource of the collective narrative sense with which that project is undertaken. Literature characteristically raises the exploration of this rhetorical contingency to the highest degree, and the study of literature participates in and perpetuates such exploration, demonstrating both that it occurs and how it occurs.

Frederik Stjernfelt: Reasons for Art - Reasons for Reading

Frederik Stjernfelt is Professor, Center for Semiotics, Scandinavian Institute, University of Aarhus

 "Many doctrines of aesthetics hope to explain art by one explanation - art as creativity, art as transgression of norms, art as redescription of phenomena,, etc.  I will defend the more boring pluralist claim that art has many different functions and cannot be given one simple definition. As to literature in particular, there is a tendency to identify too quickly literarity, fictionality, narrativity. But also the reading of literature has a series of different functions - this paper aims at listing a basic set among them."

Marie-Laure Ryan: The Fate of the Word in New Media, or, How Efficient are Computers as Literary Machines?

Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar

 In the mid-nineties, when digital technology made its way into most homes, computers shed their forbidding image of scientific instruments and were hailed as “poetry machines.” Taking “poetry” to mean a primarily language-based form of art, this presentation   will investigate whether the current development of New Media has corroborated or invalidated this judgment by asking: what has the computer done for the word? While in some respects the computer is much better at processing words than at processing images, in other respects it is much better at processing images than at processing words, and the most successful uses of digital technology in art and entertainment have been visually based. The question is whether the computer’s special abilities to process words can produce literary art, or whether digital media, by hybridizing traditional forms of art, take us into a post-literary culture. I will argue that new media texts and print literature stimulate different cognitive processes, involve diffferent mental skills, and produce different types of pleasure. The new modes of thinking developed in the digital age can only turn into an enrichment of the human mind if they support, expand or complement rather than replace the cognitive skills that we develop through traditional literature.

Jan Alber : The Search for Other Worlds – And Further Reasons to Study Literature

Jan Alber, Department of English, University of Freiburg

The question of why we study literature is one of the most important questions of our discipline. Generally speaking, fictional narratives present us with models of the world that urge us to make ethical judgments. From my perspective, one of the most interesting things about literary texts is that they do not only reproduce the world as we know it. Many narratives confront us with bizarre storyworlds which are governed by principles that have very little to do with the real world around us. In this paper, I focus on the ethical implications of unnatural (i.e., physically or logically impossible) scenarios from different periods of English literary history. As I will show, impossible scenarios typically widen our mental universe beyond the actual and the familiar, thus urging us to look at the world we live in from a radically different perspective.

Brian Richardson: The Function of Literature, the Practice of Narrative Theory, and the Roles of the Reader

Brian Richardson is Professor, Department of English, University of Maryland

 I will begin by stressing the polyfunctional nature of literature and indicating some of its many uses. I will then discuss reading as both the communication of knowledge and its ability to demystify false perceptions and pseudo-knowledge, a fuction especially prominent in literature over the past one hundred years. After noting some significant antecedents and providing the historical consequences of the rise in literacy during the nineteenth century, I will analyze the colonial scenes of reading in Joseph Conrad's early story, "An Outpost of Progress," in which two European functionaries based in Africa begin to read both nineteenth century novels and imperial propaganda. They are unable to read either critically, and come to an unfortunate fate. I go on to discuss the fate of reading in other works of Conrad and the modernist literary tradition. I will suggest that the nature an d goals of reading changes around the beginning of the twentieth century, as an epistemic model based on the accumulation of knowledge by reading is transformed into a different model of the hermeneutics of suspicion, as reading itself has to be interrogated for its truth content. I trace this dynamic through the twentieth century to the rise of postmodernism, which alters the reading model more radically. I conclude with some notes on the role of reading in recent minority and third world texts.

Werner Wolf: A Defence of (the Study of) Literature or: Why (the Study of) Literature Cannot Be Replaced by Cultural Studies and Film (Studies)

Werner Wolf is Professor, Department of English, University of Graz

 If one were a pessimist, one could say that the dystopian vision of an (almost) literature-free society which Ray Bradbury published more than half a century ago in his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1954) is fastly approaching its realization in today's Western culture, although without any political pressure; and as for the academic study of literature, a prophecy Thomas Love Peacock formulated in The Four Ages of Poetry in 1820, seems to have weirdly come true as well: "[...] the progress of useful art and science [...] will continue more and more to withdraw attention from frivolous and unconducive to solid and conducive studies [...] therefore the poetical audience will not only continually diminish in [...] its number [...] but will also sink lower and lower in the comparison of intellectual acquirement". Even if one does not wholly subscribe to such pessimism, a  new "Defence of 'Poetry'" (and its academic study) seems to be the agenda of the day for anyone still interested in literature. On a much more moderate and less polemical scale than in Shelley's famous essay such a 'defence' is the purpose of my contribution to the seminar "Why Study Literature?"

 After an initial summary of what literature today typically means as a subject of academic studies I will briefly discuss some qualities and functions which literature shares with other media (the seminar conveners have already provided us with a blueprint of many well-known arguments in this field). This survey permits me to argue that the study of literature cannot simply be replaced by Cultural Studies, at least not by the current variant in which the aesthetic quality of artefacts is almost irrelevant in comparison to their quality as cultural 'symptoms'. However, all of the arguments I will have adduced up to then can also be applied to film. Therefore a contemporary "Defence of Literature and its Study" must deal with the medial qualities and functions that are specific to literature – from a media-comparative or 'transmedial' point of view.

 In this context, I will, first, discuss features (and their consequences) that are specific to literature in degree: literature is the representational medium which possesses a maximum of historical width and depth when it comes to specific 'messages' in their original form, and it is a medium that can achieve a maximum of semiotic complexity. Second, there is a feature that is specific to literature in kind: literature is the only representational medium that can exclusively rely on language as humankind's privileged means of sense-making. This has crucial consequences: the language-centred quality of literature enables it to combine abstract ideas with concrete possible worlds in a unique way, presents equally unique challenges in reception (thereby also preventing, in most cases, the recipients' complete immersion in literary possible worlds), gives literature a specific inter- and metadiscursive potential and renders many literary works - poems as well as, in particular 'experimental texts' - virtually immune to intermedial transposition (cf. the recent abortive attempt of a filmicization of Tristram Shandy ) while at the same time permitting readers of printed literature to enjoy an individual pace and a freedom from sophisticated technical support unparalleled by any other medium.

Ex negativo , the medial specificities of literature could also be summarized by the question: What would happen if Fahrenheit 451 really became true and society relied more or less exclusively on film and TV (or computer-generated Virtual Realities for that matter)? I trust that the arguments outlined in my lecture will justify the conclusion that literature is in fact an irreplaceable medium and that the same irreplaceability applies to literary studies.