Comparative Literature / Interdisciplinary Humanities

Hybrid: The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included.

Alejandro Lopez (Boston University)

In the early 1950s, Lacan admonished psychoanalysts for utilizing Newtonian epistemology fifty years after Einstein and Heisenberg had dismantled it. It may be worth asking ourselves if we, literary critics, are still operating under the same logic today—125 years after the fact. How wide is the epistemological gap between the humanities and the sciences? Is there an equivalent one between literature and the sciences? The answer to the second question is categorically no—if anything, it runs in reverse. Literature operates in a position of antelación: it anticipates, prefigures, and formally enacts epistemological shifts before the sciences or the critical apparatus are equipped to name them. Kafka denounced the effects of bureaucracy before the bureaucratic machine was perfected. Carroll dissolved space-time logic before Einstein formalized it. Literature does not lag behind—do its critics and criticism? How do we avoid the disciplinary and methodological silos we aim to transcend? Taxonomical efforts have led us to slice the literary tissue ever thinner and to adjust the focus of our literary microscope ever sharper. Is it working? Has our understanding of the physiology of our texts become clearer? Or, has the literary disappeared in the slicing?

No critical apparatus can genuinely empower the communities it claims to serve while remaining trapped in the epistemological silos that have historically determined which texts and voices count.

This seminar asks what literary criticism looks like if we accept that it’s not the earth that pulls the apple, but that the apple follows the curvature of spacetime; that time is not linear or circular but helicoidal; and that meaning does not travel by ground but by air. We welcome papers that interrogate the epistemological foundations of today’s literary criticism by examining its blind spots and the logic that creates them.

This seminar invites participants to assess the current state of literary criticism and to imagine how the field might transform if we challenge its epistemological foundations. We welcome papers that examine the field's blind spots, challenge the silos that may be trapping it, and are willing to venture into the effects a paradigm change could produce.