Literary Landscapes: Forms of Knowledge in the Humanities
King Lear, and the whole of Romantic poetry, among numerous other references, have illustrated some of the fundamental meanings of literary landscapes. In these cases, landscapes represented the interiority of a character. But literary landscapes, in the common imagination, also represent a view of an extensive knowledge system. In these cases, for example, from the Bible to the Encyclopedia of D'Alembert, and Diderot, the "tree" has most often come to represent the hierarchy of knowledge and its link to a common origin of this knowledge system.
By the end of the 19th century, with the specialization of the sciences, the certainties of the hierarchy of knowledge – the singular tree – were called into question. Wilhelm Dilthey distinguished the fundamental differences between the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). And in the very construction of his novel "Bouvard et Pécuchet", Gustave Flaubert shows the fragmentation and questions the confidence in the the truth of the sciences, whether human or natural.
As the middle of the 20th century developed, through a structuralist revolution, the reflection on the nature of the human sciences returned to the notion of "humanities," where the human is at the center. And where the hierarchy of knowledge cannot be separated from a relationship to morality.
In the 21st century, Deleuze, in contrast to the tree diagram, then develops the image of the rhizome to underline the absence of hierarchy in the relationships between the different fields of knowledge and the horizontality of its deployment.
Throughout this long history, new literary landscapes – as representation and reality – emerged to inform the imagination of the relationship of knowledge. And today, more recent critical orientations, such as ecocriticism, contribute new meanings to literary landscapes and emphasize the responsibility of the human being in the exploration of nature.
These are some of the many rich aspects of the relationships between literary landscapes and representations of knowledge in the humanities. At this conference, we will explore these dynamics along several axes:
• The Tree and the Rhizome
• Representations of Landscape as Knowledge
• Literary Cartographies of Knowledge
• Between Knowledge and Morality
• Literary Maps and Geo-critics
• Ecocriticism and the Humanities.
Dr. Bernard Franco
Faculté des lettres, Sorbonne Université, France