Kulcsár-Szabó Zoltán, Lénárt Tamás, Simon Attila, Végső Roland (szerk.): Life After Literature

Kulcsár-Szabó Zoltán, Lénárt Tamás, Simon Attila, Végső Roland (szerk.): Life After Literature. Perspectives on Biopoetics in Literature and Theory,  Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress Volume 12, Springer, 2020

The essays collected in this volume take up the question of biopoetics in a number of different contexts in order to invest the category with a new set of possible meanings. What appears to be of special importance to us is that the term "biopoetics" immediately raises the question of the complicated relationship between scientific discourses on life and literary representations of life in terms of a relation of mutual determination. Is there such a thing as a poetics of life? What would such a poetics consist of? Should we apply scientific categories of life to the interpretation of literature? Or should we understand literature itself as an important cultural means of constructing our "concepts" of life that are then captured, elaborated, and transformed in scientific discourse?