On (Not) Making Oneself Known

TLDR: The phrase "literary knowledge" was coined by as discussed by the authors to indicate the possibility that we can speak of literary knowledge in the same register as we speak of philosophical or psychological, historical, or geographical knowledge.

Abstract: If you were to ask a room of educated sorts what constitutes philosophical knowledge, you would expect serious disagreement about what the answer should be but little as to what the question itself was asking. Ask, however, what constitutes literary knowledge and considerable confusion as to what you mean is likely to arise. ‘Philosophical knowledge’, one assumes, indicates the form of insight into the world and human predicament philosophy attempts to produce. And while no two philosophers will offer the same account of the nature of this insight, most will hear the phrase as meaning, minimally, something like ‘philosophy’s presumed contributions to human understanding.’2 The phrase ‘literary knowledge,’ however, is likely to ring odd in many ears. It is, at the very least, ambiguous. To the literal-minded, ‘literary knowledge’ will not be taken to refer to a kind of insight at all, except for the kind literature trivially gives us: the knowledge of literature that comes from reading lots of poems, novels, and plays. To the more charitableminded, however, the phrase might be taken to indicate the possibility that we can speak of literary knowledge in the same register as we speak of philosophical or, for that matter, psychological, historical, or geographical knowledge. That is, it might be taken to claim for our various practices of literary production that they can yield, collectively if not always individually, a ‘form of knowing’: that there exists distinctly literary ways of making sense of the world and