Michel Pierssens

What Does Fiction Know

Many of the points I will touch upon are quite well-known: the whole matter of the disappearance of linearity in modern fiction for one. But by going back to such antiquated themes my aim is not so much to come up with striking novelties as to try and connect some of the features of 20th century novel with notions that can be drawn (whether that be legitimate or not is another matter) from contemporary thinking on science. The basic idea will thus be to try and show that in order to understand many of the major aspects of modern literature one needs to construct models drawing on sometimes not too familiar ideas first put forward in a non-literary context by scientists and epistemologists. A more remote aim will be to show how literature can be construed as one of the essential modes at our disposal to understand our surrounding