L'essentiel, c'est la contingence
How Literature Does and Does Not Cope With Contingency
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5727141 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christian Benne (0000-0003-0456-5079, University of Copenhagen, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 32 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 381-401 |
| Publication date | 2018-03-16 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Textual Practice (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0950-236X • E-ISSN: 1470-1308 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0950236x.2018.1442386 |
| OpenAlex | W2793269995 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
This essay offers a critique of the concept of containing or coping with contingency (Kontingenzbewältigung) put forward by a group of German philosophers and intellectuals throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This group put an emphasis on literature, especially story-telling, for thinking about contingency as a characteristic dilemma of modernity. In contrast to their anthropological perspective, I claim not only that different literary genres, periods, and even individual works and readings perform different coping practices in a historically and aesthetically specific manner, but also that literature primarily serves as a means for reflecting on the enactment of a wide variety of coping practices. I demonstrate my theses with three short literary examples (Voltaire, Sartre, contemporary zombie fiction)
Aesthetics · Contingency · Dilemma · Epistemology · German · Linguistics · Modernity · Sociology · Zombie · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Computer Science · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |