„L’essentiel, c’est la contingence“: How literature does and does not cope with contingency

TY - JOUR

T1 - „L’essentiel, c’est la contingence“: How literature does and does not cope with contingency

AU - Benne, Christian

PY - 2018/3/16

Y1 - 2018/3/16

N2 - This essay offers a critique of the concept of containing or coping with contingency (Kontingenzbewältigung) put forward by a group of German philosophers and intellectuals throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This group put an emphasis on literature, especially story-telling, for thinking about contingency as a characteristic dilemma of modernity. In contrast to their anthropological perspective, I claim not only that different literary genres, periods, and even individual works and readings perform different coping practices in a historically and aesthetically specific manner, but also that literature primarily serves as a means for reflecting on the enactment of a wide variety of coping practices. I demonstrate my theses with three short literary examples (Voltaire, Sartre, contemporary zombie fiction).

AB - This essay offers a critique of the concept of containing or coping with contingency (Kontingenzbewältigung) put forward by a group of German philosophers and intellectuals throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This group put an emphasis on literature, especially story-telling, for thinking about contingency as a characteristic dilemma of modernity. In contrast to their anthropological perspective, I claim not only that different literary genres, periods, and even individual works and readings perform different coping practices in a historically and aesthetically specific manner, but also that literature primarily serves as a means for reflecting on the enactment of a wide variety of coping practices. I demonstrate my theses with three short literary examples (Voltaire, Sartre, contemporary zombie fiction).

M3 - Journal article

SN - 0950-236X

VL - 32

SP - 381

EP - 401

JO - Textual Practice

JF - Textual Practice

IS - 3

ER -