Writing-between-Worlds: TransArea Studies and the Literatures-without-a-fixed-Abode

In: Mimesis Band 64

Abstract

This book proposes that there is no better, no more complex way to access a community, a society, an era and its cultures than through literature. For millennia, literature from a wide variety of geocultural areas has gathered knowledge about life, about survival, and about living together, without either falling into discursive or disciplinary specializations or functioning as a regulatory mechanism for cultural knowledge. Literature is able to offer its readers knowledge through direct participation in the form of step-by-step intellectual and affective experiences. Through this ability, it can reach and affect audiences across great spatial and temporal distances. Literature – what different times and cultures have been able to understand as such in a broad sense – has always been characterized by its transareal and transcultural origins and effects. It is the product of many logics, and it teaches us to think polylogically rather than monologically. Literature is an experiment in living, and living in a state of experimentation.