Philosophy and Literature

This research cluster builds on a faculty group in PL that has been forming spontaneously for over a year out of a new sense of transdisciplinary respect for and mutual discovery of shared areas of research, teaching, and curricular-program interests. These range from critical theory (both in its broader origins within literary cultural studies and its historically specific genealogy from the Frankfurt School), rhetoric, and communication to literature and poetry to Continental philosophy and spirituality. Faculty who teach in different academic units share transdisciplinary interest in several areas of texts, figures and topics, and they also expose these in their classes and writings.

The interest is trans- rather than inter-disciplinary because there is no classical department or discipline that could easily contain the PL cluster as such. Thus, we have discovered that numerous among us who have not been formally trained in philosophy write and teach about Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Adorno, Marcuse, Sartre, S. de Beauvoir, Camus or Derrida. There is a lot of “philosophy” going on in their literature or communication or aesthetic and art classes. Others who have been formally trained in philosophy discuss at length great texts of literature, poetry, rhetoric, and art in their writing and teaching. And still others with interfaith or postsecular interests in spirituality bridge topics found in literature, art, redemptive critical theory, post-Holocaust ethics, and the ongoing dialogue between philosophical and religious traditions of East and West.