'L'essentiel, c'est la contingence': how literature does and does not cope with contingency. Issue 3 (16th March 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Benne, Christian
• Is Part Of: Textual practice. Volume 32:Issue 3(2018)
• Page Start: 381
• Page End: 401
• Publication Date: 2018-03-16
• Subjects: Contingency -- Kontingenzbewältigung -- poetics and hermeneutics -- mythical analogon -- existentialism -- zombie fiction -- post-human condition; Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals; Semiotics -- Periodicals; 801.95
• DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2018.1442386
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0950-236X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: 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).