125.

]
criticism in translation

Introduction: A Survival Kit for the Humanities?

In 2001, the official year of the life sciences in Germany, Ott

Literature as
Knowledge for Living,
Literary Studies as
Science for Living
ottmar ette

mar Ette began pulling together ideas for what was to become 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, Ga
briel 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 vo
luminous 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 English both as Knowledge for Survival and as About
Life Knowledge1Ette first began to reclaim for literary studies the dual
italic 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 berLebenswis
sen focuses on the disciplinary history and practices of the field of Romance
literatures,2 its companion volume from 2005, ZwischenWeltenSchreiben: Lite
raturen 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

edited, translated, and

withan introduction by
veram. kutzinski
Vera M. Kutzinski is the Martha Rivers
Ingram Professor of English 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 (Uof
VirginiaP, 1993) and has translated Nicols
Guillns The Daily Daily (U of California P,
1989). She is completing a book to be titled
Langston Hughes in the Americas. With
Ottmar Ette, Kutzinski coedits the series
Alexander von Humboldt in English for
Chicago University Press.

the University of Chicago

[ 2010 by the moder n language association of america ]

c r i t i c i s m i n t r a n s l a t i o n

Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Studies as Science for Living

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 land
scape 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 marginal
ized 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 aca
demic 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 ambi
tious plan through which the German federal gov
ernment, 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 competi
tive 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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] Ottmar Ette

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erage of 1 million each annually); (2) infrastruc

tural 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 fu
ture research concepts and strategies with which
to establish ten internationally recognized aca
demic beacons (qualifying candidates would need
at least one excellence cluster and one excellence
graduate school and would stand to receive an av
erage 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 universi
ties 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 every
where, 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 fac
ulty 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-f ive is tantamount to professional death).
How could anyone not welcome the news of signif
icant 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 an
nounced in 2006, seventy-four universities submit
ted 319 preliminary applications to the selection
committee, which ranked them according to aca
demic quality, interdisciplinarity, international vis
ibility, and ability to integrate regional research
capacities. The committee invited thirty-s ix of

c r i t i c i s m i n t r a n s l a t i o n

Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Studies as Science for Living

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 in
stitutions selected in this round were those with
emphases on technology, engineering, and the
natural sciences (including the so-c alled life sci
ences). Of the ninety invited and funded propos
als, 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 pic
ture substantially. What is more, only one of the
new graduate schools (at the Free University of Ber
lin) focuses on literature. All rhetoric about inter
disciplinarity 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 (Literaturwis
senschaft 9). The analogy was especially palpable
on the University of Potsdams Golm campus: be
fore the recent renovations, Ettes office was in a
building previously occupied by the Stasi (the Ger
man 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 aca
demic 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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] Ottmar Ette

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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 re
garded 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 deliv
ered as a public lecture at the Ibero-American In
stitute 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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Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Studies as Science for Living

cept of literature (Messling 102), there are several

interesting points of contention. Gumbrecht, for
one, is adamant that neither literature nor liter
ary studies be regarded as a source of normative
models for living together (90). The best literary
scholars, writes Gumbrecht, do not preach ethi
cal principles (that is best left to philosophers)
but think ex-centrically in relation to the institu
tions of their times (his examples here are Erich
Auerbach and Harold Bloom [91]). While some re
spondents are concerned about the potential loss
of literatures aesthetic autonomy (and privilege)
in Ettes approach and encourage more confron
tational 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 natu
ral scientists (9192). Not all, however, are favor
ably disposed toward a complementary alliance of
these two realms. Klaus Michael Bogdal, professor
of literature at the University of Bielefeld, for in
stance, is concerned about a dilution of the critical
potential, or usefulness, of the humanities abil
ity to examine oppression, inequality, competi
tion, 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 contrib
utes 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 hu
manities at large, has been widely debated in the
United States academy for the past decade or so,

italic

italic

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] Ottmar Ette

c r i t i c i s m i n t r a n s l a t i o n

more often than not in the context of comparative

literature. The American Comparative Literature
Associations 2004 Report of the State of the Disci
pline, 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 comfort
ably 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 re
ality, 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 cre
ate 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 in
volve 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 liter
ary 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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Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Studies as Science for Living

cept of world literature that flows from the pur

ported universality of human experience. Haun
Saussy has called this universality comparative
literatures most obvious, and usually undertheo
rized, candidate for trunk status. Situations, emo
tions, 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 lit
erary representations of human experiences across
the planet. If we grant that the literatures of the
world are complex repositories of such represen
tations, Ettes point that literary scholarship can
uniquely address questions about cultural similari
ties 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 selfevidence 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 schol
ars 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 Zusammen
Lebenswissen (knowledge of [and for] living to
gether), 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 readings
and 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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] Ottmar Ette

Notes
All 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, Alexander von Humboldt, and others. The difference of

c r i t i c i s m i n t r a n s l a t i o n

Can the debate that Ottmar Ette has initiated

be translated into other languages and into other
cultural and academic settingsnotably, into
English and into the context of the United States
academy? Neither berlebenswissen nor berle
benswissenschaft, key concepts in Ettes intellectual
universe, translates smoothly into English, which,
its philological proximity to German notwithstand
ing, 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 English should challenge humanists in Ameri
can academia not to remain at the margins of a
critical debate that has so far been conducted
mainly in languages other than English. This dif
ficulty may provide an opportunity for humanists,
on this side of the Atlantic and in the rest of the
English-speaking world, to consider if and how we
might reclaim life as a ground for our intellectual
pursuits. Doing so strikes me as particularly impor
tant in a society where the rhetoric of life has been
lionized not only by the biosciences (this is true ev
erywhere) 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 re
validated and reappropriated. If it can be done in
literature, why not in literary studies?

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10

Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Studies as Science for Living

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 initiative on the BMBF Web site is also available in Eng lish,
but most of the links are not.
5. The BMBF Web site does not include a list of the preliminary proposals that were submitted for the first round.
6. Germany announced a third round of the Initiative 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), Eng lish and American literatures
(Ansgar Nnning from the Graduate School for the Humanities 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 Osna
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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] Ottmar Ette

From the Garden of Knowledge

Scholarship on literatures and languages
what 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 different cultures might live together with mutual respect for each others differences. How,
then, can we secure the existence of these disciplines and assure their survival? We need to
reorient the humanities in this changed environment 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 second 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 increasingly occupied this space and its potential for
creating meaning and for connecting meaning 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 robbing the humanities of any authority to produce knowledge about life. This narrowing of
bios, a broadly conceived understanding of
life that includes specifically cultural dimensions, 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
present and future societies, it is vital that

11

Literature as Knowledge for Living,

Literary Studies as Science for Living
ottmar ette

c r i t i c i s m i n t r a n s l a t i o n

12

Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Studies as Science for Living

they conceive of themselves as sciences for liv

ing [Lebenswissenschaften]. Literary scholars
can take the lead by capitalizing on their disciplines 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 life
that is, it must be grounded in dialogue and
theory rather than in ideology (Nietzsche 59).
This trajectory might prevent literary scholarship, along with the rest of the humanities,
from comfortably settling down in a Nietzschean 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 systematic 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 natural sciences? No. Rather than attacking the
semantic reductionism of the biosciences concept 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 understanding 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 hypothetical 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 partners. In the long run, literary criticism and

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] Ottmar Ette

Life, the Life Sciences, and the Sciences

for Living
In the early twenty-fi rst 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 sciences.1 The strange career of the so-c alled
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 impression 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 human 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, predictable chain.2 The popularization of fascinating 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 biosciences 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 discursive code that places the biosciences at the
center of a societys attention. Against these
sciences hegemonic claims to universality,
Hans-G eorg 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

c r i t i c i s m i n t r a n s l a t i o n

theory will likely survive only if they formulate strategies and approaches that would include them fully in a nonreductive conception
of the sciences for living.

13

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14

Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Studies as Science for Living

light of the fact that there are no criteria for

comprehending texts or words. For the natural 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 apparatus of a civilization that is founded on science 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 reduces the term life from the breadth of meaning 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 context 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 liberating 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 dealing 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 personal, 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 potential for disconcerting questionsand no less
disconcerting answersthat literature has always 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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] Ottmar Ette

c r i t i c i s m i n t r a n s l a t i o n

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 irritation (1). Literary scholars, unlike philosophers, 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 resulted 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, literary 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 enormous 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 sciences 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 completely and exclusively.3 Especially in times of
heated debates about preimplantation diagnostics and stem cell research, literary scholarship stands a better chance than philosophy
to propose models for life without arousing
the suspicion of proffering, or even prescribing, normative concepts. This is particularly

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Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Studies as Science for Living

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 experimental ensemble of biochemical, biophysical, biotechnological, and medical fields of research,
we inevitably run the risk of losing the broad
cultural diversity inherent in bios. A culturally sound concept of life, one that is also oriented toward literature, can counteract such
a potential danger by reclaiming the differentiation 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 intellectuals whose thinking revolved, to a considerable 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 comprehend 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 living 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 unnoticed 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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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 Chinese peasants. Beneath the conflicts, and also
through them, an economic and cultural leveling 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 concretely visible now in the unprejudiced, precise,
interior and exterior representation of the random 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 stratification 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 catastrophes, admire and love our epoch for the
sake of its abundance of life and the incomparable 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 period 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-

c r i t i c i s m i n t r a n s l a t i o n

tastrophes of World War II and the Shoah

and in the midst of an acutely felt linguistic
and cultural homogenization. It is no coincidence that the final chapter of Mimesis, in the
German original, ends with the verb erleben
[to experience or to live through]:

17

Sq. brackets would make

clear that this is your
interpolation. Correct?

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Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Studies as Science for Living

evance of literature and literary scholarship

to human societies and their histories. Terminologically, 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 living. Further, these different aspects of knowledge 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 immediate life contexts and through the production and reception of symbolic goods. In this
way, knowledge for living can also be understood as an imagined form of living and as a
process of imagining life (and lives), in which
self-referentiality and self-reflexivity are critically 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 simultaneously according to different sets of logic.
Against this background, one may understand literature as an ever-changing and
interactive storehouse of knowledge for living. In contrast to philosophy, which seeks
to construct internally coherent systems of
meaning, literature focuses on artistically
enriching coherence with incoherence, a process that quantum theory knows as superposition. 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. Because literature neither negates nor cements

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Intra- and Extratextual Dimensions of

Knowledge for Living
Knowledge for living has behind it a long tradition in Western European literary histories,
in which, starting with Aristotles concept of
catharsis, the question of literatures performance 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, originally published in English in 1972, Wolfgang
Iser identifies three major aspects of the relation between text and reader: the process
of anticipation and retrospection, the consequent 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-

c r i t i c i s m i n t r a n s l a t i o n

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 fragments of knowledge circulate through it. Literature 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, knowledge 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.

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Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Studies as Science for Living

ment of our being of which we are not directly

conscious, literature offers us the chance to
formulate the unformulated (145). Following 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 aesthetics has introduced but never fully engaged
(Apellstrukt ur 250):d the interconnectedness of literature and life practice, which is
implicit in the idea of knowledge for living.
The extent to which literature integrates fragments 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 models the discursive structures of what one might
call, with a wink in Barthess direction, fragments of a living discourse. Unlike philosophy, 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 ability 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: intratextually (e.g., in the narrative modeling of characters) 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 literary characters as complex choreographies of
individuals who possess different kinds of life
knowledge. For example, in Miguel de Cer-

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c r i t i c i s m i n t r a n s l a t i o n

vantess Don Quixote, the cradle of the modern 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 experimentally 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 popular 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 unexpectedly, 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 movements and clashes.
For certain characters, the literary experiment can turn out to be painful, as it does for
Flauberts Emma Bovary in the intratextual
constellations that connect her with the country doctor Bovary, the pharmacist Homais,
the merchant Lheureux, and the estate owner
Rodolphe. Emmas life project is wrecked
through her contact with the differently located 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 understood as a microcosm of different types
of knowledge for living, to the extent at least
that the heteroglossia on which Bakhtin insisted 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 knowledge for living, Bakhtins cosmos of polyvocality, 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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22

Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Studies as Science for Living

edge for living are embedded in the multi-,

inter-, and transcultural contexts of literature 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 perspective of anthropology) as well as forms of
a worldwide circulation of knowledge, which,
on the intratextual level, represent delocalized 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 fiction 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 deviant 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 knowledge for living might be transformed into
extratextual life practice or else of how this
transformation, this acquisition of knowledge, might be prevented or at least slowed.
Whether it wants to or not, literature taps
into readers knowledge for living and threatens 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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Knowledge for Living Together

Taken together, the intra- and extratextual
dimensions of the knowledge for living that
literature stores constitute fundamental aspects 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

c r i t i c i s m i n t r a n s l a t i o n

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 knowledge acquisition fascinates contemporary
authors and their worldwide audiences. As
Amin Maalouf pointed out in a 2001 interview, 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 different cultures. This is arts function... (Babouin 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 reading 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 narratives 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 degree 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.

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24

Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Studies as Science for Living

in this context are artistic representations

of living spaces: a city, a house, and a room
are fractal patterns that may function like a
modle 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 affords us the opportunity to tease out forms of
living together as they manifest themselves in
literary texts and to situate these forms culturally, historically, or societally. We can deduce 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 always been concerned with knowledge for living 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 subject of life. But literary criticism and critical
theory should be at the forefront of such discussions as we face the most important, and at
the same time riskiest, challenge of the twentyfirst century: the search for paradigms of coexistence 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 sciences 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 posthumously published lecture Comment vivre
ensemble. In this lecture, part of a seminar

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c r i t i c i s m i n t r a n s l a t i o n

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, concerns himself with the question of distance to
the other and to material objects, in the novelistic sphere and in actual life. Barthes also addresses 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 spectrum of historically accumulated knowledge
of vivre ensemble, of which only parts have
been passed on to later generations. Analyses 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 questions that academic scholarship, notably psy-

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Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Studies as Science for Living

chology, would have to labor long and hard to

bring to life.
In many ways, Barthess question in Com
ment 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 literatures meaning and entelechy must not lead to
a continued exiling of life from literary scholarship. The bracketing of one of the central
questions that literature poses has inhibited
literary theorys development, particularly
since the second half of the twentieth century. We continue to feel this trends negative
repercussions today, when societies should
instead recognize literature as an indispensable source of knowledge for living and for
living together. While this function should
not replace other functions of literature, literary 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 knowledge that has tremendous relevance for the
knowledge for living together. Literary scholarship 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 autobiographical writings for and about life and
survival [berLebenSchreiben], in particular,
produce a knowledge whose analysis is indispensable for a comprehensive understanding of life. This knowledge will help inform

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Literary Scholarship as a Science for

Living Together
To determine anew the place of humans in
the universe, literary scholarship needs to reflect anew on its place in a changed system of
knowledge production. A concept of knowl
edge 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 attuned 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-t heoretically 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 develop 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-

c r i t i c i s m i n t r a n s l a t i o n

the further development of our societies,

challenging their historically grown selfconceptions 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 consequently have to reflect on the limits and the
validity of its own ideas in the lived contexts
of multicultural side-by-side-ness, intercultural togetherness, and transcultural mixedupness. Paradigms for producing knowledge
for living together will also have to combine
respect for others with an awareness of gender, social, and other cultural differences. Doing 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.

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Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Studies as Science for Living

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 accessible 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 include literary studies as much as they do bioscientific research. Such collaborations might
contribute to elaborating what Auerbach, in
the passage above, from the final chapter of
Mimesis, called the abundance of life. Literary 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 perspectives 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 increasingly 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).

Notes
1. 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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Translators Notes
This 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 Geistesw issenschaf
ten (2007), from the journal Lendemains, and Literatur
als Lebenswissen, Literaturwissenschaft als Lebensw is
senschaft?, the introduction to his book berLebenswis
sen: 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.DavidT. Arens
for his indefatigable editorial counsel, Daniel Spoth and
Anja Becker for their assistance with references and related matters, and Ottmar Ette for reviewing my drafts.
a. The beginning of this excerpt omits Ettes comments on Nietzsches On the Uses and Disadvantages of
History for Life (1874).
b. For further details, see Ette, ZwischenWeltenSchrei
ben 269.
c. In The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, 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

c r i t i c i s m i n t r a n s l a t i o n

tions. One need not be clairvoyant to predict that this tendency will gain momentum as transdisciplinary concepts
of knowledge production mature and, in the process, develop 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 different areas of knowledge and to bind them together more
strongly and flexibly. For additional details on transdisciplinarity, see Ette, ZwischenWeltenSchreiben 20.
2. For the genetic codes tantalizing history of metaphorizing 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 knowledge 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.

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Literature as Knowledge for Living, Literary Studies as Science for Living

into two polar groups (2): literary intellectuals and
scientists. While Snow did criticize the degree of incomprehension 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 culture (11): literary intellectuals. While some, most notably 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 Response in Prose Fiction articulates aspects of this idea,
as does his book The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aes
thetic Response.

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