Literature Against Fundamentalism

Abstract This book argues that literature is a mode of thinking, stories being perhaps the oldest thinking ‘device’ known to humankind. The ways in which literature enables us to think are distinctive and necessary, because of the relationships between its material (‘language’) and its subject matter (‘reality’, internal, external, or both). These relationships are exposed in their full complexity with the rise of literature as writing (and not just as any writing)—and, hence, this book looks at the book too, distinguishing between oral and written literatures without dismissing the former or subsuming the latter. It argues that literature enables us to engage with reality in language, and language in reality—where both are mutually constitutive, constantly changing, and partly elusive. This mode of engagement is defined and illustrated as essentially an agnostic one. Hence, among other things, literature is an antidote to fundamentalism. The book argues that reading literature as literature, and not just as material (which it also is) for aesthetic, sociological, political, and other theoretical discourses, is essential for humanity. In the process, the book offers a radical re-definition of literature, an illuminating engagement with religion and fundamentalism, a revaluation of the relationship between the sciences and humanities, and, finally, a call to literature, as in ‘a call to arms’.