GERST 6110 - Narration and Knowledge

(crosslisted)
(also COML 6892, ENGL 6953)

Spring. 4 credits.

P. Fleming.

This seminar investigates the unique modes of knowledge embodied in various forms of ‘literary’ narration-from myth, epic, and the novel to the fairytale, anecdote, and case history. At stake in the seminar are the ways in which storytelling and its intensive theorization provide a form of knowledge sui generis about experience, temporality, consciousness, subjectivity, sociality, history, etc. This “epic side of truth” (Benjamin) or “non-conceptual thinking” (Blumenberg) circumscribes epistemic insights that can neither be reduced to logos nor forsaken if one aspires to a fuller understanding of existence in its multiplicity and singularity.