"Vårt liv drar bort i förvandling"

Litteraturen och dess vetenskap i tidens ström

Abstract

”Our Life Glides By in Transformation”. Literature and Scholarship in the Flux of Time

This article – originally a sexagenarian lecture – first considers the transience of the inner life of human beings, bringing out the unique ability of literature to create, in stream-of-consciousness narrative, a model of what it would mean, in contrast, to preserve mental processes in detail. The article goes on to consider, firstly, the way in which literature may widen our horizons by placing us in the minds of other human beings seemingly distant from ourselves; and, secondly, the movement of literature beyond what is humanly expressible in Aeschylean and Sophoclean tragedies of destiny as well as the poetry of Octavio Paz, Paul Celan and René Char.

The article also deals with literary scholarship and social values. It regards them as basically transient forms of collective mental programming while espousing the double vision of nevertheless accepting them as valid and valuable at a given time. It enters the caveat, however, that the present-day tendency towards particularism and perspectivism in literary scholarship may, if it is not kept within reasonable limits, be taken so much further in the future that any kind of summary or generally valid argument is ruled out entirely. Thereby scholarship as it is practised today would have become obsolete.

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