• Necessary Literature: On the Border Between Literature and Evolution
  • La letteratura necessaria. Sul confine tra letterature ed evoluzione
  • Cometa, Michele

Description

  • The term “biopoetics” has begun to fascinate those who study literature. Yet again, it is against the backdrop of Michel Foucault, to whom is due unequivocal credit for his will to retrace, over and over, the muddy track that lies between the humanities and natural sciences.The success of the term “biopoetics” extends far beyond the biopolitical paradigm inaugurated by Foucault, even though biopoetics embraces the same central challenge: the reassessment of bios and zoos which lie in the folds, no longer so hidden, of cultural thought.Literary theorists thus appear to wish to re-examine the contradictions that the thesis of “two cultures” has set forth, at least since the period of Romanticism. The most decisive steps in this direction have been made however, not by the theorists of more insightful and certainly more plausible “cultural studies” (Kulturwissenschaft), but by those scholars who are moving, especially in the Anglo-Saxon context, towards the so-called “literary Darwinism”.Literary criticism, above all that of European origin, however, withdraw in the face of these propositions, dusting off up the old anathema of reductionism (undoubtedly, a risk of the applying the evolutionary theory to culture), rather than genuinely engaging with the debate.
  • The term “biopoetics” has begun to fascinate those who study literature. Yet again, it is against the backdrop of Michel Foucault, to whom is due unequivocal credit for his will to retrace, over and over, the muddy track that lies between the humanities and natural sciences.The success of the term “biopoetics” extends far beyond the biopolitical paradigm inaugurated by Foucault, even though biopoetics embraces the same central challenge: the reassessment of bios and zoos which lie in the folds, no longer so hidden, of cultural thought. Literary theorists thus appear to wish to re-examine the contradictions that the thesis of “two cultures” has set forth, at least since the period of Romanticism. The most decisive steps in this direction have been made however, not by the theorists of more insightful and certainly more plausible “cultural studies” (Kulturwissenschaft), but by those scholars who are moving, especially in the Anglo-Saxon context, towards the so-called “literary Darwinism”.Literary criticism, above all that of European origin, however, withdraw in the face of these propositions, dusting off up the old anathema of reductionism (undoubtedly, a risk of the applying the evolutionary theory to culture), rather than genuinely engaging with the debate.Is the field of literary theory equipped to accept this challenge? Will it be fit to conceptualise literature not as the exceptional and random creation of gifted individuals, but as the common humus (the narrative?) which has granted adaptation and survival to all individuals? Will it be able to abandon the unbroken and rather stagnant landscape of a culturalism, already beset with internal contradictions, because it is incapable of defining itself with respect to the other and of tackling the provocations of biology?

Date

  • 2011-05-29

Type

  • info:eu-repo/semantics/article
  • info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
  • Peer-reviewed article
  • Articolo peer-reviewed

Format

  • application/pdf

Identifier

10.13125/2039-6597/166

urn:nbn:it:unica-17496

Relations