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Introduction: A Survival Kit for the Humanities?
In 2001, the offIcIal year of the lIfe scIences In Germany,
ott
mar ette beGan pullInG toGether Ideas for what was to be come
the programmatic essay excerpted and translated here. ette is known
for different things in different places: in spain and hispanic
america, he is renowned for his work on Jos mart, Jorge semprn,
mario Vargas llosa, Gabriel Garca mrquez, and a host of other
authors. In the francophone world, he is best known for his
writings on roland barthes and, more recently, on amin maalouf,
while his reputation in his native Germany rests on his voluminous
work on alexander von humboldt and on the new literatures in
German. that this polyglot professor of romance literatures is, at
heart and in practice, a comparatist goes almost without saying. he
is also, perhaps as inevitably, a literary theorist and a cultural
critic, whose work has attracted attention throughout europe. In
his 2004 book berLebenswissena title that might be rendered in en
glish both as Knowledge for survival and as about life
Knowledge1ette first began to reclaim for literary studies the dual
concepts of lebenswissen and Lebenswissenschaft, which I have
translated provisionally as knowledge for living and science for
living to set them off from the biotechnological discourses of the
life sciences. while ber Le bens wissen focuses on the disciplinary
history and practices of the field of romance literatures,2 its
companion volume from 2005, ZwischenWeltenSchreiben: Li tera tu ren
ohne festen Wohnsitz (writing between worlds: literatures without a
fixed abode), extends ettes inquiry to the global contexts of
shoah, cuban, and arab american literatures. both volumes urge that
literary studies be opened up, made accessible and relevant, to the
larger society. doing so is, simply and plainly, a matter of
survival (ZwischenWeltenSchreiben 270).
the issue of the survival of literary studies takes center stage
in ettes contentious contribution to the year of the humanities in
Germany in 2007. his emphasis on survival is hardly hyperbolic, as
was clear from two events that made this purported celebration of
the humanities look more like a dirge. the first one was the kick
off event in bonn, Germanys former capital, of the seventh european
union research framework program, which did not
criticism in translation
Literature as Knowledge for Living,
Literary Studies as Science for Living
ottmar ette
edited, translated, and with an introduction by
vera m. kutzinski
Vera m. KutzInsKI is the martha rivers
In gram professor of en glish and profes
sor of comparative literature at Vander
bilt university. Kutzinski has written the
award winning Against the American Grain:
Myth and History in William Carlos Williams,
Jay Wright, and Nicols Guilln (Johns hop
kins up, 1987) and Sugars Secrets: Race
and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism (u of
Virginia p, 1993) and has translated nicols
Guil lns The Daily Daily (u of california p,
1989). she is completing a book to be titled
Lang ston Hughes in the Americas. with
ott mar ette, Kutzinski coedits the series
alexander von humboldt in en glish for
chi cago university press.
[ 2010 by the modern language association of america ] 1
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have a single panel or workshop dedicated to the humanities. the
second was the announcement of the winners of the second round of
Germanys exzellenzinitiative (Initiative for excellence), in which
the humanities were again left holding the short end of the
stick.
while the fate of the humanities and especially of literary
studies is a global concern these days, the momentous shifts in
europes academic landscape provide a telling context for ettes
polemic. Germany in particular has undergone significant changes in
the past two decades, resulting from the countrys reunification in
1989 and from the concurrent expansion of the european union. the
university of potsdam, where ette holds the chair in romance
literatures, is located in the state of brandenburg, near berlin,
the reunified Germanys capital. brandenburg is part of the still
marginalized eastwhat many, twenty years after the fall of the
berlin wall, still call the new German states. In the early 1990s,
the German government encouraged faculty members from universities
in the west to move to the east to strengthen academic institutions
there. many humanists did, ette among them, and they built up
departments and research centers with international reputations,
despite severely limited institutional resources and crumbling
infrastructures. the proverbial slap in the face came in 2006 and
2007: virtually none of the universities in the east were deemed
fit to be included in the excellence Initiative, an ambitious plan
through which the German federal government, in a joint effort with
individual states, hoped to create a small number of elite national
institutions. the idea was (and is) to make German universities,
which have lost ground since their heyday in the nineteenth
century, more competitive and visible on the international
scene.
according to the web site of Germanys bundesministerium fr
bildung und forschung (ministry for education and research [bmbf]),
the Initiative for excellence, which grew out of the european
unions 2005 Joint Initiative for research and Innovation,3 takes a
three pronged approach by providing: (1) support for graduate
schools (around forty universities were to receive an av
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erage of 1 million each annually); (2) infrastructural support
aimed at the creation of competitive excellence clusters with close
ties to professional schools and to nonacademic research bodies
(thirty clusters would receive about 6.5 million each per year);
and (3) additional support for future research concepts and
strategies with which to establish ten internationally recognized
academic beacons (qualifying candidates would need at least one
excellence cluster and one excellence graduate school and would
stand to receive an average of 21 million per annum).4 on the
surface, and from a distance, this all sounded wonderful, almost an
embarrassment of riches even in the days before the current budget
crunch at universities worldwide. besides, in 2006 few questioned
the need for a nationwide reform of the German university system,
which was long overdue: ratios of faculty members to students were
dismal everywhere, especially in the popular humanities tracks; the
academic and administrative responsibilities faculty members took
on in addition to teaching bordered on the unworkable; there was
close to no support for graduate students and junior faculty
members research; and new professorships opened up only when those
who occupied chairs either retired or passed away. (In Germany,
unlike in the united states, mandatory retirement at age sixty five
is tantamount to professional death). how could anyone not welcome
the news of significant funds being made available for
restructuring an outdated and overburdened academic system? among
humanists, however, the initial enthusiasm waned quickly when it
became apparent that the offerings were very unevenly distributed
across academic institutions and fields. as it turned out, the news
for the humanities, especially for literary studies, was far from
good.
here are some of the ugly realities. when the first round of the
Initiative for excellence was announced in 2006, seventy four
universities submitted 319 preliminary applications to the
selection committee, which ranked them according to academic
quality, interdisciplinarity, international visibility, and ability
to integrate regional research capacities. the committee invited
thirty six of
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these institutions and ninety of their full project applications
into the second round; not a single university from the eastern
states was among them.5 this exclusion, which did not go without
public protest, speaks volumes about the internal disposition of
federally steered German university politics. more disturbing, the
vast majority of institutions selected in this round were those
with emphases on technology, engineering, and the natural sciences
(including the so called life sciences). of the ninety invited and
funded proposals, only two were from the humanities (two others
arguably had humanities components); generously calculated, that
would be between two and four percent. the percentage of proposals
from the humanities rose to almost fifteen percent (seven out of
forty seven) in the second round from 2007, which included two
universities from the eastern states, but these increases do not
change the picture substantially. what is more, only one of the new
graduate schools (at the free university of berlin) focuses on
literature. all rhetoric about interdisciplinarity notwithstanding,
a strong preference for science and technology based fields is
evident here.6 ettes wry quip that the humanities occupy the same
position in Germanys academic scene that the east does in Germanys
national political context seems more than justified
(literaturwissenschaft 9). the analogy was especially palpable on
the university of potsdams Golm campus: before the recent
renovations, ettes office was in a building previously occupied by
the stasi (the German democratic republics secret service)the
telltale double doors added a peculiar historical touchand he still
holds his large lecture courses in a refurbished hall once used to
garage tanks.
such regional analogies do not have easy counterparts in united
states academia. but the political bias in favor of
biotechnological fields has an uncomfortably familiar ring in our
academic settings, where the humanities have long been treated as
poor cousins, especially when it comes to resource allocation. this
situation is bound to worsen. It does not help matters that such
unequal resource allocation may well be, as ette argues, one of the
many symptoms of the per
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ception that humanists have withdrawn from the rest of society
and that their fields are spiraling into ever greater social and
political insignificance. this perception of humanists aloofnessand
not all of it is mere perceptionis hardly limited to Germany or
even to europe. If it were to continue unchecked, at least some of
what we refer to as national literature departments, not to mention
other humanities disciplines, may well go the way that many
comparative literature departments and programs have already gone,
as funds are getting ever scarcer. even in the united states,
literary studiesespecially departments that are not regarded as
service departmentsrisk becoming, to use an apt German idiom,
Orchideenfcher, (orchid disciplines): beautiful to the eye but
without any direct use value and hence eminently expendable in a
fiscal crisis. the challenge, as ette rightly sees it, is not just
to convince university administrators that our institutions need
these disciplines but also to explain to broader audiences of
skeptics why our societies cannot do without literary studies.
ettes well timed remarks, which he first delivered as a public
lecture at the Ibero american Institute in berlin and subsequently
published in the bilingual romanist journal Lendemains, prompted a
flood of responses from universities across and beyond Germanyfar
more than the journal could publish. Lendemains printed eleven of
them in its 2007 and 2008 issues combined, and a collection of
others was published by the Gnther narr press in the fall of 2009
(asholt and ette). replies to ettes call for academic collaboration
under the umbrella term sciences for living and especially to his
conception of literary studies as a science for living together
came from many quarters in literary and cultural studies.7 several
literary figures were also part of the debate, notably amin maalouf
and Jorge semprn.
the critical responses to ette give the initial impression that
he is preaching to the choir. hans ulrich Gumbrechts comments are a
case in point. he calls ettes arguments self evident: after all,
how could any institution, especially a science [Wissenschaft],
refuse to be measured according to what it contributes to life
(89)? but despite broad approval for the resocialization of the
con
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cept of literature (messling 102), there are several interesting
points of contention. Gumbrecht, for one, is adamant that neither
literature nor literary studies be regarded as a source of
normative models for living together (90). the best literary
scholars, writes Gumbrecht, do not preach ethical principles (that
is best left to philosophers) but think ex centrically in relation
to the institutions of their times (his examples here are erich
auerbach and harold bloom [91]). while some respondents are
concerned about the potential loss of literatures aesthetic
autonomy (and privilege) in ettes approach and encourage more
confrontational approaches to the life sciences (tholen), others
speak out in favor of a greater convergence of literary studies and
the natural sciences. but, as Gumbrecht cautions, it would be a
dangerous simplification to assume that natural scientists reflect
less on what they do than humanists. and if critical self
consciousness is not the exclusive province of the humanities, it
remains to be seen which competences and experiences humanists
might fruitfully contribute to dialogues with natural scientists
(9192). not all, however, are favorably disposed toward a
complementary alliance of these two realms. Klaus michael bogdal,
professor of literature at the university of bielefeld, for
instance, is concerned about a dilution of the critical potential,
or usefulness, of the humanities ability to examine oppression,
inequality, competition, ignorance, lies, deceptions, religious
hatred, and their linguistic aesthetic representations (97). others
worry about ettes terminology, particularly about the key concept
of lebenswissenschaft, a term that was popular in nazi Germany,
even if it did not originate there. similarly, some in the united
states would worry if the phrase pro life, with all its ideological
baggage, were adopted to render a humanities focus on life.
the question of what literary studies contributes to the world
is also bound up in the tricky question of the disciplines object
of study, which is not easy to answer on a good day. the issue of
what we actually teach in literary studies, and in the humanities
at large, has been widely debated in the united states academy for
the past decade or so,
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more often than not in the context of comparative literature.
the american comparative literature associations 2004 report of the
state of the discipline, published in 2006 as Comparative
Literature in the Age of Globalization, is but one example of
discussions in which literary scholars address only one another
(saussy). Is it surprising, then, that the broader public perceives
the literary profession as detached from the world and resting
comfortably behind the safe enclosures of its garden of knowledge?
ette, for one, is unwilling to settle for a vision of humanists as
victims of anti intellectual publics before whom they keep casting
pearls of wisdom to little or no avail. a more immediate reality,
at least in Germany (for now), is what toni tholen, professor of
literature at the university of hildesheim, calls the rage for
continual change, reorientation, competition, and control on the
part of educational politics and administrations, which makes it
nearly impossible for many humanists to pursue any research at all,
no matter what its subject or direction (108). tholen refers to the
fact that Germany seems intent not only on supporting research but
also on establishing its own version of the two tier system that
already exists at most universities in the united states. the plan
is to create Lehrprofessuren (teaching professorships) in the
humanities to staff examination committees in the new ba and ma
tracks that are to make the German system more compatible with the
system in the rest of europe and the world. for tholen, literary
studies as science for living should involve literary scholars
collective opposition to such policies. ettes argument is enabling,
then, in that it calls on humanists to be public arbiters of their
disciplines fate. for disciplines such as literary studies, which
have either theoretically denied the existence of any form of
subjective agency or overinvested in specific forms of collective
agency (such as identity politics, according to Gumbrecht), it is
high time to put their collective knowledge to work by assuming a
more active responsibility for their institutional and societal
survival.
ettes ideas about literature and life, then, are not just a
backhanded way of returning the field of (comparative) literary
studies to some loose con
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cept of world literature that flows from the purported
universality of human experience. haun saussy has called this
universality comparative literatures most obvious, and usually
undertheorized, candidate for trunk status. situations, emotions,
ideas, personalities seems to recur across any corpus of world
literature, be it ever so diverse. If we will only take for granted
that the topics of literature refer to the same things, comparison
becomes possibleindeed, all too possible (13). but thematic or
formal similarities are hardly the onlyor even most fruitfulgrounds
for literary comparisons. ette himself finds it more productive to
pinpoint areas of divergence and overlap in literary
representations of human experiences across the planet. If we grant
that the literatures of the world are complex repositories of such
representations, ettes point that literary scholarship can uniquely
address questions about cultural similarities and differencesand do
so more fully than any natural or even social science canis not
only plausible but compelling. It may seem self evident that, to
survive, a society needs to know more than what it takes to keep
humans breathing. but self evidence is dangerous, of course,
because it seems to require from us neither thought nor action.
to focus on life, then, does not mean to build thematic gateways
to universality but to chart sets of relations. at issue is the
ability of literary scholars to adjust to multiple frames of
reference and to attend to relations rather than givens (saussy
34)and life, in ettes essay, is never a simple given. the
systematic study of relations (among humans and among other forms
of life) can give rise to theoretical paradigms, such as
ZusammenLebenswissen (knowledge of [and for] living together), that
encapsulate conceptual and actual interconnections on regional and
global scales.8 the affinities with douard Glissants potique de la
relation are not coincidental for a specialist in romance
literatures who is thoroughly familiar with the caribbean. through
careful readingsand through collaborations among readers from
different specialtiesliterary studies can supply the local
specifics without which knowledge for living remains a vacuous
abstraction.
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can the debate that ottmar ette has initiated be translated into
other languages and into other cultural and academic
settingsnotably, into en glish and into the context of the united
states academy? neither berlebenswissen nor berlebenswissenschaft,
key concepts in ettes intellectual universe, translates smoothly
into en glish, which, its philological proximity to German
notwithstanding, does not lend itself to long composites. ettes
terms combine the idea of surviving (berleben) through knowledge,
or knowledge for survival (berleben), with the concept of knowledge
for and about (ber) living. translations into french (savoir vivre)
and spanish (saber vivir) would be much easier. this need not,
however, be disabling. the very difficulty of translating these
concepts into en glish should challenge humanists in american
academia not to remain at the margins of a critical debate that has
so far been conducted mainly in languages other than en glish. this
difficulty may provide an opportunity for humanists, on this side
of the atlantic and in the rest of the en glish speaking world, to
consider if and how we might reclaim life as a ground for our
intellectual pursuits. doing so strikes me as particularly
important in a society where the rhetoric of life has been lionized
not only by the biosciences (this is true everywhere) but also, and
even more aggressively, by conservative religious and other
organizations. we might borrow a leaf here from african american
and postcolonial literatures, which have shown how ideologically
compromised terms can be revalidated and reappropriated. If it can
be done in literature, why not in literary studies?
NotesAll unattributed translations are mine.
1. The books subtitle, Die Aufgabe der Philologie, continues
this double entendre, which clearly leans on Walter Benjamin: it
refers to the task of philology (or literary studies) and to its
surrender.
2. The book has chapters on Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, Roland
Barthes, Hannah Arendt, Max Aub, Al-exander von Humboldt, and
others. The difference of
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Ettes approach comes into view if one reads his chapter on
Spitzer and Auerbach in concert with Emily Apters Global
Translatio, also from 2004.
3. To make the European Union the most competitive and dynamic
knowledge- based economic area by 2010, the European Council of
Lisbon agreed in 2000 that member states should spend three percent
of their gross national product on academic research and
development.
4. Bundesministerium. The description of the initia-tive on the
BMBF Web site is also available in En glish, but most of the links
are not.
5. The BMBF Web site does not include a list of the pre-liminary
proposals that were submitted for the first round.
6. Germany announced a third round of the Initia-tive for
Excellence in March 2010. The announcement stresses
interdisciplinarity. But interdisciplinarity means something
different to natural scientists and engineers than it does to
humanists. Because biology and physics, for instance, are
considered distinct disciplines, natural scientists never have to
look to the social sciences and the humanities to claim
interdisciplinarity.
7. The fields from which replies to Ettes call came include
Romance literatures (Wolfgang Asholt from the Univ. of Osnabrck),
En glish and American literatures (Ans gar Nnning from the Graduate
School for the Hu-manities at Justus Liebig Univ. in Giessen),
philosophy (Christoph Menke from the Univ. of Potsdam), German
studies (Wolfgang Adam from the Interdisciplinary Inst. of Early
Modern Cultural History at the Univ. of Os na-brck), and, last but
not least, comparative literature (Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht from
Stanford Univ.).
8. Walter Mignolos paradigms for co- existence point in a
similar direction, but his focus is on Latin America.
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Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Studies as Science
for Living
ottmar ette
From the Garden of Knowledge
Scholarship on literatures and languageswhat used to be called
philology and still is in many quarters outside the United
Stateshas long lost its momentum in public intellectual discourse.
Its marginalization occurs at a point in history when we need the
humanities to help solve one of the most urgent problems of the
twenty- first century: how radically dif-ferent cultures might live
together with mu-tual respect for each others differences. How,
then, can we secure the existence of these dis-ciplines and assure
their survival? We need to reorient the humanities in this changed
en-vironment and to ask anew the question that Goethe posed in a
different historical context: tell me, what is life to you?
When one examines the development of the humanities, especially
during the sec-ond half of the past century, one notices that the
term life has almost entirely disappeared from methodological and
ideological debates. While this does not automatically entail a
loss of these debates relevance for life, it does mean that the
humanities have lost a space for reflection. Other academic fields
have increas-ingly occupied this space and its potential for
creating meaning and for connecting mean-ing with action. Through
the term life sciences, a constellation of biotechnological
disciplines has appropriated the term life in an effective,
deceptively self- evident way, increasingly rob-bing the humanities
of any authority to pro-duce knowledge about life. This narrowing
of bios, a broadly conceived understanding of life that includes
specifically cultural dimen-sions, to a bio- and natural-
scientific concept is dangerous for the life of a society and for
its cultural and intellectual development. Can humanists change
this course?
For the humanities to survive in our pres ent and future
societies, it is vital that
1 2 5 . 4 ] ottmar ette 11
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they conceive of themselves as sciences for living
[Lebenswissenschaften]. Literary scholars can take the lead by
capitalizing on their dis-ciplines critical function to develop an
open concept of life and of knowledge about and for living,
systematically interrogating the uses and disadvantages literary
scholarship has for life.a Such knowledge must serve lifethat is,
it must be grounded in dialogue and theory rather than in ideology
(Nietzsche 59). This trajectory might prevent literary
schol-arship, along with the rest of the humanities, from
comfortably settling down in a Nietz-schean garden of knowledge
increasingly walled off from the concept and the practice of life.
The reorientation toward the idea of life that I advocate here
cannot be a superficial, short- lived tactic. Rather, it ought to
be a sys-tematic and concerted effort to think through the
obligations that the sciences humaines, the human sciences, have to
our societies and to begin to realize their immense potential for
improving how people live with one another. Any academic discipline
that does not make its knowledge available to the society in which
it exists shirks its responsibility toward that society and, in the
end, has largely itself to blame for being pushed aside.b
Should the humanities confront the nat-ural sciences? No. Rather
than attacking the semantic reductionism of the biosciences
con-cept of life, humanists need to initiate a serious dialogue
with the biosciences. This dialogue has to include literary and
cultural knowledge, thus making possible a more complete
under-standing of life and of the humanities as part of the
sciences for living. Doing so would break down the imaginary border
between Charles Percy Snows two cultures, whose hypotheti-cal
existence many still take for granted on the discursive level and,
even more so, on the level of academic politics and policies.c We
need to create a contrastive and complementary web of knowledge and
comprehensive scientific systems that include humanists as equal
part-ners. In the long run, literary criticism and
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theory will likely survive only if they formu-late strategies
and approaches that would in-clude them fully in a nonreductive
conception of the sciences for living.
Life, the Life Sciences, and the Sciences for Living
In the early twenty- first century, systems of ordering
knowledge production continue, as a rule, to prescribe clear
distinctions between the natural sciences and the humanities and
between the humanities and the social sci-ences.1 The strange
career of the so- called life sciences is a case in point.
Discussions of the human genome, stem cell research, the
possibility for cloning animal or human life, and the engineering
of genes or seeds have increasingly left the public with the
impres-sion that a few, highly specialized academic fields actually
covered the entire spectrum of knowledge about human life. At least
before September 11, a search for the key to hu-man life dominated
feature pages, television shows, and political debates. The mystery
of life finally appeared to be decipherable: it was a code, a
calculable and, in the end, predict-able chain.2 The popularization
of fascinat-ing theories for comprehending life and of impressive
natural- scientific research results changed how people conceived
of everyday life and of a safe future. Both the mass media and
sponsors of research invested the biosci-ences with extraordinary
significance: the life sciences became the sciences of life.
But the genetic code of life is not the only thing we can read.
Equally readable is the dis-cursive code that places the
biosciences at the center of a societys attention. Against these
sciences hegemonic claims to universality, Hans- Georg Gadamer
offers a cautionary note about the relation between the natural
sciences and the humanities:
One enjoys asking the humanities in which precise sense they
want to be sciences, in the
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light of the fact that there are no criteria for comprehending
texts or words. For the natu-ral sciences and various forms of
technology, it is certainly true that a lack of ambiguity in their
means of communication is guaranteed. But it is incontrovertible
that even the appa-ratus of a civilization that is founded on
sci-ence and technology does not nearly cover all aspects of living
together. (202)
The phrase life sciences is as ambiguous as it is radiant and
all- encompassing. It vastly re-duces the term life from the
breadth of mean-ing it enjoyed in Western antiquity. Because of its
possessive and repressive tendencies, and through the metaphors it
borrows from literature and the humanities, the concept of life
sciences attempts to bar other branches of knowledge from accessing
life.
Philosophy has already reacted to the challenge of genetic
technology. In the con-text of eugenics, for instance, philosophy
has questioned what life would be like without, as Habermas puts
it, the emotions roused by moral sentiments like obligation and
guilt, reproach and forgiveness, without the lib-erating effect of
moral respect, without the happiness felt through solidarity and
without the depressing effect of moral failure, without the
friendliness of a civilized way of deal-ing with conflict and
opposition (73). Yet in a 2000 speech, Habermas also observes that
philosophy is no longer confident enough to risk answers to
questions regarding the per-sonal, or even the collective, conduct
of life (1). Criticizing the field of ethics for having been
reduced to what Adorno had called a melancholy science (15),
Habermas tellingly resorts to a literary text to point to the
poten-tial for disconcerting questionsand no less disconcerting
answersthat literature has al-ways held in store for its readers.
Max Frischs novel Stiller (1954) shows that literature never misses
an opportunity to tell us about life and to show us the paradoxes
and aporias of knowledge for living. Habermas uses Stiller to make
this point: Frisch has Stiller, the public
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prosecutor, ask, What does a human being do with the time he has
to live? I was hardly fully aware of the question; it was simply an
irrita-tion (1). Literary scholars, unlike philoso-phers, barely
react to such questions; they do not even register them anymore. In
the end, is it not literary scholarship that has turned from a
joyful, or at least pleasurable, pursuit into a melancholy one?
The swift dissemination of the term life sciences has provoked
many reactions and complaints but, it seems to me, has not
re-sulted in any new strategies in the fields that focus on
literature. Literary scholars have hardly begun to consider the
impact of the biosciences recourse to the life metaphor and all the
confusion and perplexity that follow in the wake of this impact.
Above all, liter-ary scholars should know better than to risk
relinquishing the term life and allowing it to function in such a
limited way.
The publics ready embrace of the term life sciences indicates
that people have an enor-mous interest in the systematic study of
life, and this interest should open our eyes to the opportunities
for the humanities if they were to conceive of themselves as part
of the sci-ences for living. After all, life is not the loot of a
single cluster of disciplines; it does not obey the logic of a
simple code. Indeed, work in the natural sciences has gained much
clarity from its varied encounterswith, for instance, moral
economies and cognitive passions (Daston 157). While it might be
comforting to think that the life sciences participate in life more
than their proponents would either know or care, this does not
excuse humanists from the responsibility to protect life from the
bioscientific claim to represent it com-pletely and exclusively.3
Especially in times of heated debates about preimplantation
diag-nostics and stem cell research, literary schol-arship stands a
better chance than philosophy to propose models for life without
arousing the suspicion of proffering, or even prescrib-ing,
normative concepts. This is particularly
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important because models for the right (way of) life, both in
literature and in philosophy, have an ever- shorter half- life in
multi-, inter-, and transcultural contexts where life- forms and
situations rapidly pluralize.
If we perceive the life sciences merely as a network of largely
applied sciences while at the same time considering them as an
experimen-tal ensemble of biochemical, biophysical,
bio-technological, and medical fields of research, we inevitably
run the risk of losing the broad cultural diversity inherent in
bios. A cultur-ally sound concept of life, one that is also
ori-ented toward literature, can counteract such a potential danger
by reclaiming the differen-tiation between zo, the simple fact of
living common to all living beings, and bios, which denotes the
form or way of living proper to an individual or group (Agamben 1).
Giorgio Agamben places this distinction at the center of his Homor
Sacer from the start. The Italian philosopher is in the tradition
of great intel-lectuals whose thinking revolved, to a con-siderable
degree, around the epistemological relevance of forms as well as
concepts of life.
In an essay for the programmatic journal Die Wandlung [The
Transformation], Leo Spitzer defined literary scholarship as the
science [Wissenschaft] that seeks to compre-hend the human being to
the extent to which he expresses himself in words (speech) and
linguistic creations (179). For this science, following Auerbachs
line of thought about a philology of Weltliteratur, to dare again
what earlier periods dared to doto designate mans place in the
universe (Philology 17), it has to conceive of itself as a science
for liv-ing and, as such, a part of the life sciences in the
broadest sense. That such an idea is hardly foreign, at least to
scholarship in Romance languages, is evident from the notable yet
un-noticed frequency with which the lexeme life appears at the end
of Auerbachs foundational work, Mimesis. Here, Auerbach grapples
with a new orientation and a new conception of philology against
the background of the ca-
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tastrophes of World War II and the Shoah and in the midst of an
acutely felt linguistic and cultural homogenization. It is no
coinci-dence that the final chapter of Mimesis, in the German
original, ends with the verb erleben [to experience or to live
through]:
The strata of societies and their different ways of life have
become inextricably mingled. There are no longer even exotic
peoples. A century ago (in Mrime for example), Corsicans or
Spaniards were still exotic; today, the term would be quite
unsuitable for Pearl Bucks Chi-nese peasants. Beneath the
conflicts, and also through them, an economic and cultural
level-ing process is taking place. It is still a long way to a
common life of mankind on earth, but the goal begins to be visible.
And it is most con-cretely visible now in the unprejudiced,
precise, interior and exterior representation of the ran-dom moment
in the lives of different people. So the complicated process of
dissolution, which led to fragmentation of the exterior action, to
reflection of consciousness, and to stratifica-tion of time, seems
to be tending toward a very simple solution. Perhaps it will be too
simple to please those who, despite all its dangers and
ca-tastrophes, admire and love our epoch for the sake of its
abundance of life and the incompa-rable historical vantage point
which it affords. But they are few in number, and probably they
will not live to see much more than the first forewarnings of the
approaching unification and simplification. (55253; Ettes
emphases)
Today, we have a broader view than Auerbach did in the immediate
postWorld War II pe-riod of the cultural homogenization that he
sketched and of the simultaneous cultural (re) differentiation that
was then underway. Yet his insistence on a concept of life stands
for an awareness of the need for literary scholars to care about
and for life in the fullest sense.
Knowledge for Living
I want to use the concept of knowledge for living to suggest new
perspectives on the rel-
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evance of literature and literary scholarship to human societies
and their histories. Ter-minologically, knowledge for living opens
our view onto the complex relation between the semantic poles of
the compound phrase. This relation is multilayered or
multidimensional. To combine living with knowledge implies
knowledge about or of life. It also implies knowledge for the
purpose or benefit of liv-ing. Further, these different aspects of
knowl-edge exist in life and are inseparable for a living (and
knowing) subject. Knowledge is a fundamental characteristic of life
processes and the practice of living. From this vantage, knowledge
for living appears as a specific way of living ones life, which
includes reflecting on how one lives. Knowledge for living can be
gained through concrete experiences in im-mediate life contexts and
through the produc-tion and reception of symbolic goods. In this
way, knowledge for living can also be under-stood as an imagined
form of living and as a process of imagining life (and lives), in
which self- referentiality and self- reflexivity are criti-cally
important. In other words, knowledge for living is bound up in life
experiences but never tied to a single logic. Rather, the term
implies the ability to think and act simultane-ously according to
different sets of logic.
Against this background, one may un-derstand literature as an
ever- changing and interactive storehouse of knowledge for liv-ing.
In contrast to philosophy, which seeks to construct internally
coherent systems of meaning, literature focuses on artistically
enriching coherence with incoherence, a pro-cess that quantum
theory knows as superpo-sition. As a mutable and dynamic storehouse
of knowledge for living, literature devises and aesthetically
shapes blueprints for how to live. For this purpose, it draws on,
and draws in, many partial knowledges, including academic
discourses. Literature specializes in not being specialized, with
respect to disciplines and to lived realities and cultural
differences. Be-cause literature neither negates nor cements
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the division between the humanities and the biosciences and has
access to a multitude of codes from radically different traditions
of thinking and writing, the most diverse frag-ments of knowledge
circulate through it. Lit-erature is therefore singularly able to
store a wide range of knowledge for living and to keep it at its
readers disposal. It also shapes forms of life artistically, in
Juri Lotmans sense of a secondary modeling system, enabling readers
to experience them aesthetically. In the biosciences and
biotechnologies, life and knowledge cannot be thought of together
in specific forms, practices, and models the way they can in the
realm of literature, where life is not forced into disciplinary
systems.3 For literary criticism and critical theory, knowl-edge
for living is intrinsic to the very process of knowing; it is part
of the object of study and of the subjects (the scholars)
individual life contexts.
Intra- and Extratextual Dimensions of Knowledge for Living
Knowledge for living has behind it a long tra-dition in Western
European literary histories, in which, starting with Aristotles
concept of catharsis, the question of literatures perfor-mance of
knowledge for living has been as central as the question of how to
acquire such knowledge. In an essay on the act of reading from a
phenomenological point of view, origi-nally published in En glish
in 1972, Wolfgang Iser identifies three major aspects of the
re-lation between text and reader: the process of anticipation and
retrospection, the conse-quent unfolding of the text as a living
event, and the resultant impression of lifelikeness (Reading
Process 142). Compelling the reader to seek continually for
consistency causes the reader to be entangled in the text gestalt
that he himself has produced; this creates the impression of
experiencing as a form of imaginative living through (14243).
Insofar as the act of reading includes an ele-
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ment of our being of which we are not directly conscious,
literature offers us the chance to formulate the unformulated
(145). Follow-ing Iser, we may say that fictionality creates a
space of experimentation in which readers, in serious playfulness,
can test out different life situations, with which they can engage
to collect experiences that they could not have in real life.
Isers observation that fictional texts [are] always ahead of our
practice of life, of the way in which we live our lives touches on
a problem that the field of reception aesthet-ics has introduced
but never fully engaged (Apell struk tur 250):d the
interconnected-ness of literature and life practice, which is
implicit in the idea of knowledge for living. The extent to which
literature integrates frag-ments of knowledge for living and sets
them in motion enables it to produce knowledge for living as
knowledge of having imaginatively lived through an event or
situation. In this way, literature translates into narrative
mod-els the discursive structures of what one might call, with a
wink in Barthess direction, frag-ments of a living discourse.
Unlike philoso-phy, literature can translate life knowledge into
experiential knowledge that is unfettered from the discipline-
bound rules of academic discourse, allowing it to come into view
more clearly. Along with being able to integrate multiple sets of
logic simultaneously, this abil-ity is one of literatures greatest
trump cards.
My brief recourse to the promise that Isers reader- response
theories has not yet fulfilled helps explain how the concept of
knowledge for living applies to and functions in literary texts in
at least two ways: intratex-tually (e.g., in the narrative modeling
of char-acters) and extratextually (e.g., in how people experience
art in a given society).
On the intratextual level, the challenge is to understand the
dynamic modeling of liter-ary characters as complex choreographies
of individuals who possess different kinds of life knowledge. For
example, in Miguel de Cer-
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vantess Don Quixote, the cradle of the mod-ern European novel,
there are two characters with vastly divergent knowledges for
living. The novel juxtaposes their knowledges in ever- new twists
and turns of the plot and ex-perimentally tests, reflects, and
modifies them in its fictional laboratory. Sancho Panza, on the one
hand, inhabits the world of Spanish sayings, relying on knowledge
that has been accumulated in the proverbs of Iberian popu-lar
culture, which Werner Krauss presented in such novel and
entertaining ways (30833). Don Quixote, on the other hand,
possesses a knowledge for living that represents the splendor and
the peril, the creativity and the collapse, of a fictional world
that unexpect-edly, and fatally, encroaches on the practice of real
life. The novel sets in motion these antithetical fragments of
knowledge for living and charts the consequences of their
move-ments and clashes.
For certain characters, the literary exper-iment can turn out to
be painful, as it does for Flauberts Emma Bovary in the
intratextual constellations that connect her with the coun-try
doctor Bovary, the pharmacist Homais, the merchant Lheureux, and
the estate owner Rodolphe. Emmas life project is wrecked through
her contact with the differently lo-cated sociocultural discourses
of mediocrity embodied in these characters and with their ides
reues which so fascinated Flaubert.
The world of the novel may thus be un-derstood as a microcosm of
different types of knowledge for living, to the extent at least
that the heteroglossia on which Bakhtin in-sisted so emphatically
can mark the existence of an open dialogue in the feedback- linked
multiparameter systems of which knowledge for living consists
(Cramer 168). If literature is an interactive medium for storing
knowl-edge for living, Bakhtins cosmos of polyvo-cality, in its
turn, constitutes forms, norms, and ways of life that are as
different as they are differently acquired. The self-
referentiality and self- reflexivity of all processes of knowl-
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edge for living are embedded in the multi-, inter-, and
transcultural contexts of litera-ture as a whole, especially in the
translingual literary forms that I call literatures without a fixed
abode. Literature offers forms of local knowledge for living (what
Clifford Geertz has termed local knowledge from the per-spective of
anthropology) as well as forms of a worldwide circulation of
knowledge, which, on the intratextual level, represent delocal-ized
or translocalized life practices.
On the extratextual level, attention to specific cultural and
sociohistorical ways of acquiring literary knowledge for living
takes center stage. Where closeness to life and the testing of a
life practice through fic-tion is concerned, the question arises of
how to translate the literary experiment into ones own ways of
living, perhaps even into certain groups practices of everyday
life. Whatever the cultural specifics of such a translation, it
never literally carries over from one situation to another.
Literatures problematic power to shape ideas of a good life and to
corrupt presumably innocent, yet receptive, readers registered in
the nineteenth- century French immoralism trials against novels and
poetry (Heitmann), the court proceedings against Lady Chatterleys
Lover, the ostracism of de-viant authors in Cuba, and the fatwa
against Salman Rushdie, among many examples. In the foreground of
this long tradition always stood reflections of how intratextual
knowl-edge for living might be transformed into extratextual life
practice or else of how this transformation, this acquisition of
knowl-edge, might be prevented or at least slowed. Whether it wants
to or not, literature taps into readers knowledge for living and
threat-ens to upend existing norms.
The reciprocal imbrications of intra- and extratextual levels
are particularly important for a literary works paratextual
apparatus: prefaces and afterwards, titles and subtitles,
illustrations and interviews with authors. The literatures of the
world bridge immense
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distances in time and place to facilitate transtemporal and
translocal acquisitions of life knowledge. Far from a rare
occurrence, this diversity of culturally inflected patterns of
interpretations and practices of knowl-edge acquisition fascinates
contemporary authors and their worldwide audiences. As Amin Maalouf
pointed out in a 2001 inter-view, The fact that human beings from
the most different cultures read the same stories, react to them,
smile about the same texts or get excited by them, presents an
opportunity to create passageways between vastly differ-ent
cultures. This is arts function . . . (Bab-ouin and Maalouf 101).
Following Maalouf, who was born in Lebanon, lives in Paris, and
whose novels, written in French, are available in many languages,
we might say that read-ing literature in different cultural
surrounds can create new connections between cultures, which can
influence the behavior, even the life practices, of groups of
readers anywhere in the world. At the same time, it is safe to
assume that national and monolingual nar-ratives continue to
dominate the scene. The one- hundred- year- old reception history
of the writings of the Cuban poet, essayist, and revolutionary Jos
Mart illustrates the de-gree to which discursive forms or political
ideas remain accessible to later generations of readers (Ette, Jos
Mart). This accessibility holds equally true for norms and forms of
life and even extends to readers adopting certain patterns of
action and ways of life.
Knowledge for Living Together
Taken together, the intra- and extratextual dimensions of the
knowledge for living that literature stores constitute fundamental
as-pects of what I would like to call knowledge for living together
[Zusammenlebenswissen]. Literary scholarship ought to devote
special attention to the ways in which novels, drama, and poetry
render explicit literary characters knowledge for living. Of vital
significance
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in this context are artistic representations of living spaces: a
city, a house, and a room are fractal patterns that may function
like a mo dle rduit (Claude Lvi- Strauss) or a mise en abyme (Andr
Gide) to offer paradigms of knowledge for living and confer
knowledge for how to live together in a given society. Examining
representations of such spaces af-fords us the opportunity to tease
out forms of living together as they manifest themselves in
literary texts and to situate these forms cul-turally,
historically, or societally. We can de-duce from such studies
highly dynamic forms of knowledgehighly dynamic because they are,
by necessity, highly adaptablethat are most accurately described as
knowledge for living together.
At its core, knowledge for living together is knowledge of the
conditions, possibilities, and limits of living together as the
literatures of the world have shaped it aesthetically and have
tested it experimentally from radically different cultural
perspectives. The concept has not only social, political, and
economic dimensions but also cultural and ethical ones. Although
the literatures of the world have al-ways been concerned with
knowledge for liv-ing together, literary scholars have yet to mine
this resource in any extensive and systematic fashion. Nor have
they contributed any of this knowledge to recent public debates on
the sub-ject of life. But literary criticism and critical theory
should be at the forefront of such dis-cussions as we face the most
important, and at the same time riskiest, challenge of the twenty-
first century: the search for paradigms of co-existence that would
suggest ways in which humans might live together in peace and with
mutual respect for one anothers differences.
Literary scholarship, as part of the sci-ences for living, is
always acutely aware of itself, because it wants to produce
knowledge for living together. This self- ref lexivity is perhaps
the legacy of Roland Barthess post-humously published lecture
Comment vivre ensemble. In this lecture, part of a seminar
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held at the Collge de France in 197677, Barthes focuses his
intellectual attention and theoretical curiosity on the question of
how people might live together in difference. He notes under the
keyword closure that leaving the protective mothers womb might
itself stand for life and its definition: to leave is to be
exposed: life itself (96). Unsurprisingly, Barthes, as semiologist
and sign theorist, con-cerns himself with the question of distance
to the other and to material objects, in the novel-istic sphere and
in actual life. Barthes also ad-dresses the significance of
touching the other slightly (what he called frlage [112]), which
shows performatively that the others body is not taboo, no matter
the reason for touching it. He focuses as well on the significance
of an immediate environment for living together, a proxmie, a
concept the author of The Pleasure of the Text had taken from
Edward Twitchell. Proxmie refers to a culturally shaped space that
surrounds the subject at arms length, so to speak, and whose
perhaps most important objectsas crateurs de proxmieare the lamp
and the bed (15556). Barthes also took important cues from Gaston
Bachelards The Poetics of Space (1958) and developed Bachelards
spatial analysis as he addressed the question of living
together.
Probing the different forms and rhythms of cloistral and
anchoretic coexistences, for instance, would bring to light a broad
spec-trum of historically accumulated knowledge of vivre ensemble,
of which only parts have been passed on to later generations.
Analy-ses of texts by Thomas Mann, mile Zola, Daniel Defoe, or Andr
Gide, in addition to the numerous autobiographemes of scholars
themselves, can broaden this spectrum even further. Much like Iser,
in the writings of his that I have quoted above, Barthes starts
from the premise that literature is always ahead of everything
else: toujours en avance sur tout (167). In other words, literature
has available for its readers areas of knowledge and ques-tions
that academic scholarship, notably psy-
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chology, would have to labor long and hard to bring to life.
In many ways, Barthess question in Comment vivre ensemble is
intertwined with his Lovers Discourse, but it stretches the former
text toward a new horizon. His inquiry into the topic of living
together illustrates initial possibilities for how literary
analysis might connect literature and life without collapsing one
into the other. The realization of litera-tures meaning and
entelechy must not lead to a continued exiling of life from
literary schol-arship. The bracketing of one of the central
questions that literature poses has inhibited literary theorys
development, particularly since the second half of the twentieth
cen-tury. We continue to feel this trends negative repercussions
today, when societies should instead recognize literature as an
indispens-able source of knowledge for living and for living
together. While this function should not replace other functions of
literature, lit-erary theory should finally accept it and take it
seriously as a genuine research subject.4
In thousands of years, the literatures of the world have
accumulated a body of knowl-edge that has tremendous relevance for
the knowledge for living together. Literary schol-arship would do
well to devote much more, and more systematic, attention to
analyzing exactly how literature stores such knowledge. Exploring
this storage function in detail is a foundation for reorienting
literary theory and for precise and dynamic accounts of specific
forms and ways of life. The different genres and subgenres of the
literatures of the world can provide us with knowledge of how to
live (in the novel), of how people have lived (in biography), and
of how to try to transform ones own performed life into knowledge
for living (in autobiography). The varieties of au-tobiographical
writings for and about life and survival [berLebenSchreiben], in
particular, produce a knowledge whose analysis is indis-pensable
for a comprehensive understand-ing of life. This knowledge will
help inform
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the further development of our societies, challenging their
historically grown self- conceptions and guiding meaningful agendas
for the future.
The issue of how to live together better includes the question
of how to approach knowledges for living that have completely
different cultural origins and inf lections. Any knowledge for
living together will con-sequently have to reflect on the limits
and the validity of its own ideas in the lived contexts of
multicultural side- by- side- ness, intercul-tural togetherness,
and transcultural mixed- upness. Paradigms for producing knowledge
for living together will also have to combine respect for others
with an awareness of gen-der, social, and other cultural
differences. Do-ing so is crucial for the peaceful coexistence of a
humanity that, since the midtwentieth century, has possessed
nuclear and other means of its own destruction.
Literary Scholarship as a Science for Living Together
To determine anew the place of humans in the universe, literary
scholarship needs to re-flect anew on its place in a changed system
of knowledge production. A concept of knowledge for living,
understood as one of literary studies tasks, would be able to
deliver an important impetus for creating an academic landscape
better and more productively at-tuned to the cultural diversity of
human life. The conception of biosciences as life sciences, in its
turn, would greatly benefit from reclaiming the idea of life in a
cultural and literary- theoretically grounded way that would return
to the very idea of life science its indispensable cultural
dimension. I see it as inevitable that literary scholarship will
de-velop in the direction of a science for living together
[Zusammenlebenswissenschaft] and that the humanities will become
incorporated into a broader conception of the sciences for living.
Nevertheless, we should not fool our-
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selves: art and literature will not provide us with some higher
form of knowledge about life. But literature is capable of
simulating many forms of life practice, making them ac-cessible
performatively and offering readers ways to re- live them and to
understand the limits of their own cultural knowledge(s).
The time is right to understand literary scholarship as a
science for living together and to embark on research
collaborations that in-clude literary studies as much as they do
bio-scientific research. Such collaborations might contribute to
elaborating what Auerbach, in the passage above, from the final
chapter of Mimesis, called the abundance of life. Liter-ary
scholars need to rise to the challenge of using their analytic
frameworks to emphasize the abundance of life that literature holds
in store for its readers, to augment it, and to carry the results
of their critical analyses out into our various societies.
Complementary approaches and methods from the natural sciences,
the social sciences, and the humanities, joined in a broad- based
understanding of the life sciences as part of the sciences for
living, can open up new per-spectives for the systematic
exploration of art and literature as experiential knowledge, as
survival knowledge, and as knowledge for living together. A
decisive and enlivening application of literary scholarships unique
potential offers a timely response to increas-ingly pressing
questions about the uses that the study of literature has for life.
To invoke Nietzsche one last time, if the humanities succeed in
organiz[ing] the chaos within themselves, they may recognize their
real needs (123).
Notes1. But actual developments in academic scholarly
practice over the last twenty years (see Frhwald et al.) have
been quite different: the crossing of disciplinary lines has
increasingly blurred these divisional distinc-
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tions. One need not be clairvoyant to predict that this
ten-dency will gain momentum as transdisciplinary concepts of
knowledge production mature and, in the process, de-velop in ways
parallel and complementary to other forms of academic
specialization. The goal of a transdisciplinary structure is not
the interdisciplinary exchange among conversation partners firmly
anchored in a discipline but a continual crisscrossing of diverse
disciplines. It goes without saying that the development and the
results of this nomadic practice, which is transdisciplinary in the
true sense, must be tested and solidified through ongoing
disciplinary and interdisciplinary contacts. In this way, it
becomes possible to render dynamic radically differ-ent areas of
knowledge and to bind them together more strongly and flexibly. For
additional details on transdisci-plinarity, see Ette,
ZwischenWeltenSchreiben 20.
2. For the genetic codes tantalizing history of meta-phorizing
and readability, see Blumenberg 372409.
3. It remains to be seen to what extent genetics and stem cell
research will develop new models of knowledge that can put into
perspective, or even undermine, the supposed externality of
knowledge to life processes that have no consciousness of
themselves.
4. Literature has often overlooked this prospective dimension,
one that can be of great use to critical theory. Literary
scholarship can convert the fragments of knowl-edge for living,
which it brings to the surface through its analytic methods, into
its own forms of knowledge for living, thus keeping them, too, in
store for the future.
traNslators NotesThis translation is an edited composite of
excerpts from two overlapping texts by Ottmar Ette: his
programmatic article Literaturwissenschaft als Lebenswissenschaft:
Eine Programmschrift im Jahr der Gei stes wis sen schaf-ten (2007),
from the journal Lendemains, and Literatur als Lebenswissen,
Literaturwissenschaft als Le bens wis-sen schaft?, the introduction
to his book berLebenswissen: Die Aufgabe der Philologie (2004). We
use the more resonant title, of the introduction, without the
question mark. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of the
quotations Ette uses are mine. I thank F. David T. Arens for his
indefatigable editorial counsel, Daniel Spoth and Anja Becker for
their assistance with references and re-lated matters, and Ottmar
Ette for reviewing my drafts.
a. The beginning of this excerpt omits Ettes com-ments on
Nietzsches On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life
(1874).
b. For further details, see Ette, ZwischenWeltenSchreiben
269.
c. In The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolu-tion, the first
of Snows 1959 Rede lectures at Cambridge University, Snow
pronounced that the intellectual life of the whole of western
society [was] increasingly split
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into two polar groups (2): literary intellectuals and
scientists. While Snow did criticize the degree of in-comprehension
on both sides, he was quick to blame the lack of communication
between the two cultures on the anti- scientific and generally
backward- looking attitudes of the presumed guardians of
traditional cul-ture (11): literary intellectuals. While some, most
no-tably F. R. Leavis, promptly returned Snows volley, many others
sided with Snow to proclaim a widespread crisis of confidence in
the humanities (Plumb).
d. Isers article Indeterminacy and the Readers Re-sponse in
Prose Fiction articulates aspects of this idea, as does his book
The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response.
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