No Fixed Address

In recent years, literary criticism has focused ever more systematically on the historical development of the relationship between literary forms of communication and the cultural and political knowledge formations in which they are embedded. As a contribution to this greater trend, this essay attempts to situate the historical origins of a modern concept of literature in early modern Europe and to define its specific function in an epistemological perspective. Pascal's Pensées provide a contemporary heuristic with which the new function of fiction is analyzed, using Cervantes' Don Quijote as a paradigmatic example. Combining key elements from the social history of knowledge, systems theory, and reader-response theory, the essay discusses the methodological problems of conceiving fictionality in ahistoric terms and of attributing a system status to literature. As an alternative to these approaches, it proposes a model of discursive virtualization to describe the changing function of literary communication around 1600

Art · Criticism · Epistemology · Function (biology) · Literary criticism · Literature · Pascal (unit) · Perspective (graphical) · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Computer Science · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

• The Dialogic Imagination

  M M Bakhtin, Michael Holquist et al.•The Dialogic Imagination•1982

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• Don Quixote and the Problem of Reality

  Alfred Schutz•Collected Papers II•1976

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• The Nature of the Book

  Adrian Johns•The Nature of the Book•1998

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• How To Do Things With Words

  J L Austin, John Austin•How to do things with words•1975

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• Spielräume des auktorialen Diskurses

  Klaus Städtke, Ralph Kray•Spielräume des Auktorialen…•2003

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• Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact

  Ludwik Fleck, Thaddeus J Trenn et al.•Genesis and Development of a…•1981

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• The legitimacy of the modern age

  Hans Blumenberg•The legitimacy of the modern age•1983

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• Stil. Geschichten und Funktionen eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Diskurselements

  Peter Monteath, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht et al.•Poetics Today•1987

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