Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Bhattacharya, Sourit
• Chattopadhyay, Arka

Titel

Speculation and Fiction: Introduction

Ist Teil von

• Sanglap : journal of literary and cultural inquiry, 2015-07, Vol.2 (1), p.1

Ort / Verlag

Leamington Spa: Ratnabali Publishers

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Quelle

ProQuest_Literature Online_英美文学在线

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Fiction in that analysis appears to be the medium through which the conjectural element of speculation is given a concrete material body. What we produce here in this introduction is thus our various readings of these two domains: speculation and fiction, which we believe have a dialectical relation between them, especially in the aspects of form and content, thought and practice, the raw material and the product etc. The first part by Arka Chattopadhyay engages with speculative philosophy, realism, and contingency before discussing them in fiction while the second by Sourit Bhattacharya takes up the question of animal in the speculative narrative and the potential exchanges with the field of animal studies. Speculation and Thinking in Philosophy and Literature To re-turn to Aristotle's Poetics-one of the first critical and philosophical texts to deal with the question of literary classification- we have the famous distinction between history and poetry where the Greek thinker reflects that while history deals with "what has happened," poetry by which he means the literary in a more general way, deals with "what may happen" (Aristotle 35, emphasis mine). In more recent times, the neo-historicist approach has mobilized literature in and as history, drawing on various models of revisionary and counterfactual textual history in all of which there is an implicit and explicit claim that literature can reconstitute history through its own discursive formation and plug holes that might exist in the official annals. While we may or may not agree with Aristotle that literature is "more...