Abstract
Abstract Since the 1960’s, epistemological skepticism and constructionism have had a firm position in literary studies. Structuralism’s late phase, post-structuralism, certain sub-branches of current narratology, and certain representatives of recent sociology of literature, in particular, have maintained this sort of philosophical line of thought in literary studies. According to it, literature’s epistemic function can chiefly lie in that it possibly helps us to deconstruct different discourses or world views and to understand their strengths and weaknesses. The article argues for the view that these research trends operate with a unidimensional conception of reality and with a questionable version of constructionism. Hence, they do not understand the specificity of societal-cultural reality and social actors’ specific epistemic relation to it. On this basis, modern literature can be seen as a discursive practice with epistemic and evaluative properties. It is a practice that usually deals with the problems that are caused by the development of societal-cultural reality and that are felt personally important by the authors of literary texts. Often it is just literary texts that first give a public expression to problems such as these.
Highlights
OI n his well-known study, Le Capital au XXIe siècle (2013), the French economist Thomas Piketty praises the 19th century European literature’s way of representing society and its huge class inequalities
Literary scientists do not necessarily share Piketty’s view. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, literary studies have widely abandoned the thought that literary works could offer us genuine knowledge of the world
Already in structuralism’s late phase, especially, in Umberto Eco’s Opera aperta (1962) and Roland Barthes’ S/Z (1970) literature ceases to be an epistemic route to the world, it is still, in these two works, capable of problematizing different views of the reality
Summary
OI n his well-known study, Le Capital au XXIe siècle (2013), the French economist Thomas Piketty praises the 19th century European literature’s way of representing society and its huge class inequalities. In post-structuralist thinking, realism and naturalism have been understood as narrative conventions that do not possess an epistemologically privileged position in literature In this constellation, literature’s societal-critical function lies in that it can question different ways of representing the reality, i.e. it can show them as human constructs and reveal what sort of epistemological and ideological engagements underlie them. Constructionism has told us that literature is a means to cultivate subjectivity, to outline the world in fresh way and to maintain in society an awareness of the contingent nature of existing social arrangements These thoughts are certainly approvable, but they cannot characterize sufficiently modern literature’s functions in society. In order to be able to do this, we need to clear up in what ways modern literature deals with societal-cultural reality
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