Latour and Literature

Abstract

In recent years the theoretical writings of Bruno Latour have attained wide currency within literary studies. Exhausted by the protocols of ideology critique, historicism, deconstruction, and other familiar methods, scholars such as Rita Felski, Heather Love, Stephen Best, and Sharon Marcus have been inspired by Latour’s turn away from critique and toward the production of positive knowledge. Taking this state of affairs as its starting point, this book chapter provides a fresh account of Latour’s engagement with and impact on literary studies. Addressing Latour’s entire body of work, from his pioneering scholarship in the field of science studies to his recently published metaphysics, this chapter aims to accomplish three goals. First, it will examine both the literariness of Latour’s writing (e.g. the use of metaphor, the densely textured irony) as well as his debt to narratology and to semiotics, both of which have been crucial to his influential conception of nonhuman agency. Second, it considers how Latour approaches imaginative literature. Although he has not performed extended exegeses of individual texts, Latour often suggests that ‘some continuous familiarity with literature’ is central to his theoretical programme, so this chapter provides a thorough account of the role played by the literary object, especially the novel, within actor-network theory. Finally, this chapter suggests how Latour’s work could inspire new ways of apprehending literature and of practising literary criticism. While literary critics have embraced Latour’s call to develop alternatives to critique, they have been less attentive to his suggestion that imaginative literature could be a sociological resource––a device for comprehending the mystery and complexity of social life. By taking up this suggestion, then, this chapter seeks not only to explore an underappreciated aspect of Latour’s engagement with the literary but also to sketch a productive new direction for literary-critical scholarship.