Thinking with Literature: The Next Phase

Terence Cave, 20219-2020 Paris IAS Fellow, presents his research project at the weekly internal web seminar.

This presentation will be a report on the recently completed first draft of my new book, provisionally entitled Thinking  with Literature II: Literature as Autopoiesis. It will sketch the way the project has evolved to this point, both as an interdisciplinary enterprise and as a personal research project. I shall give an account of the book’s aims and methodologies, including in particular the relation of literary studies to the interdisciplinary field of cognitive studies. The first two draft chapters of the book will be presented in order to give a more fine-grained sense of how arguments emerge from clusters of literary materials, in order to provoke some discussion, among other things, on the place of literary studies in interdisciplinary debates, on what counts as a ‘redescription’ of an object of knowledge, on literary utterances as ‘artefacts’, and on the implications of the provisional title of the book (literature as in some sense a ‘life-form’).