Postmoderne, Kulturökologie und literarisches Wissen
July 5th, 2010
In the evolution of literature and culture in the second half of the 20th century, the shift from modernism to postmodernism seemed to mark a major new and irreversible stage. Meanwhile, in the 21st century, the apparently irrevocable triumph of postmodernism has itself been historicized and relativized by various new developments in politics, culture, and in literature itself.
In my paper, I will comment on the new, not yet clearly defined epistemology of contemporary cultural and literary studies ‘after postmodernism’, and specifically focus on the question of how the place and function of literature can be newly assessed within the dynamic and increasingly globalized development of contemporary knowledge.
This transdisciplinary significance of literature and literary studies can be illustrated in the dialogue with cultural ecology. In the light of theories of Gregory Bateson and Peter Finke among others, which emphasize both the analogies and the differences between natural and cultural ecosystems, literature can itself be described as the symbolic medium of a particularly powerful form of “cultural ecology” in the sense that it has explored, in ever new scenarios, the complex relationship of prevailing cultural systems with the needs and manifestations of human and nonhuman “nature,” and from this paradoxical act of creative regression has drawn its specific power of innovation and cultural self-renewal. In this view, literature emerges as a distinct form of cultural-ecological knowledge, which enables the imaginative exploration of dimensions of lived experience within the vital culture-nature-relationship that are not accessible in the same way to other forms of knowledge.
This function, of course, is not restricted to individual texts but extends to different modes and genres of writing. Whereas early versions of ecocriticism proclaimed the realist, nonfictional mode as the true form of environmental writing, a cultural-ecological view of literature focuses on the specific potential of the genres of imaginative writing that have evolved, in response to ever-changing historical contexts, in the course of literary history.
Literature in this sense is the self-reflexive staging of complex dynamical life processes on the boundary of culture-nature interaction, and as such represents a specifically powerful knowledge of life, of Lebenswissen (Ette), in its own right. A cultural-ecological approach describes the knowledge produced by literature both in its evolutionary stages and in aspects that are shared across periods and cultures. While taking into account the wide diversity of styles, forms, genres, and movements in literary and cultural history, it also emphasizes the transnational dimensions and global interconnections of literary knowledge at a time in which its production and reception takes place in a worldwide literary community.
Prof. Dr. Hubert Zapf
Hubert Zapf ist Professor für englische Literaturwissenschaft
und Amerikanistik an der Universität Augsburg.