Does literature think? : literature as theory for an antimythical era

"This work fosters an experience that, at the very least, disrupts the tacit reliance on transcendental reason that underlies the framework of Enlightenment knowledge (be it ethical, aesthetic, or ontological). Hence, the range of the question "Does literature think?" must be extended beyond the inherited question "What is literature?" to a domain that addresses core attributes of the history and politics of knowledge in the post-Enlightenment world. Articulating what sort of theoretical knowledge literature achieves in its own terms touches on a range of "nonliterary" questions, conventionally speaking, which pertain ultimately to what determines one's orientation in the world as the maker (and oftentimes destroyer) of the world. Therefore, within the social-historical framework I recognized as my point of departure, the question of "literature as theory" is posed in a variety of ways: specifically as a problem of law and constitutive lawlessness (archē or anarchy) in the formative imagination; as a problem of theatricality and performativity in social poiēsis; as a problem of translation, quotation, and the violence of naming; or as a problem of finitude in history - in other words, as a politics of worldliness and a critique of transcendence. The first three ways listed above correspond roughtly to the three parts of the book ... the fourth may be considered to be an element that permeates the text throughout, receiving most focused elaboration in the opening and closing essays ..." --pref. What is the process by which literature might provide us with access to knowledge, and what sort of knowledge might this be? The question is not simply whether literature thinks, but whether literature thinks theoreticallywhether it has a capacity, without the external aid of analytical methods that have determined Western philosophy and science since the Enlightenment, to theorize the conditions of the world from which it emerges and to which it addresses itself. Suspicion about literature's access to knowledge is ancient, at least as old as Plato's notorious expulsion of the poets from the city in the Republic . With full awareness of this classical background and in dialogue with a broad range of twentieth-century thinkers, Gourgouris examines a range of literary texts, from Sophocles' Antigone to Don DeLillo's The Names , as he traces out his argument that literature possesses an intrinsic theoretical capacity to make sense of the nonpropositional. Stathis Gourgouris. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 343-386) And Index.