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Título: Poe, Lem, and the art and science of literature
Autores: Swirski, Peter
Fecha: 1995
Publicador: McGill University - MCGILL
Fuente:
Tipo: Electronic Thesis or Dissertation
Tema: Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849
Lem, Stanisław.
Interdisciplinary approach to knowledge
Descripción: Transcending the boundaries of literature, the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Stanislaw Lem contribute to a dialogue between literary, philosophical, and scientific cultures. A critical approach to these writers that ignores the epistemic dimension in their works opens itself to the charge of misunderstanding their artistic goals and aspirations. In my dissertation I thus define, justify, and conduct an interdisciplinary study of Poe and Lem's works.
My project is underwritten by the epistemological assumption that literary works, and notably works of fiction, can make a contribution to knowledge that can be assessed in terms of interdisciplinary criteria. In the first chapter, where I discuss literature and knowledge within the interdisciplinary context, I examine various epistemological arguments in light of my central assertion. Next I examine the concepts involved in the discussion of literary works. Following the pragmatic re-orientation in literary and philosophical aesthetics, many fundamental concepts we take for granted--artworks, fictions, and texts among them--require exact re-examination and definition. Consequently, in Chapters Two and Three I review and refine the recent theories concerning the nature of works of art, the specificity of literary fictions, and the problem of literary interpretations.
My subsequent discussion of Poe and Lem is built on the theoretical base of (literary) epistemology and analytical aesthetics. I study Poe and Lem's literary fictions and theoretical essays, and the contributions they make to various fields of inquiry. In the process I critique, and sometimes refine, the explicit and implicit hypotheses articulated in their works. Specifically In Chapters Four and Five I discuss strategic and game theoretic models in the interpretation of fiction, including the concepts of communication and rationality. In Chapter Six, completing the epistemological circle inaugurated in Chapter One, I discuss the epistemological and cosmological theories proposed in Poe's "Eureka".
Idioma: en