Literature as Knowledge for Living Essay

According to Vera M. Kutzinski in his introduction, Ottmar Ette was sent to the east of Germany after the reunification of Germany to strengthen academic institutions. There, universities were going to fix the so-called Initiative for Excellence, which would make German universities more competitive. But, when it came to application, a little percentage of humanities institutions were selected, because the focus was actually on science and technology.This situation was what fueled Ette to take a turn on his domesticate and st subterfugeed to work on not trying to convince why literary studies were better or worth more attention or research, but to make skeptical see why society cannot do without literary studies. Ettes official work on this matter is titled Lendemains, where he focuses on literary studies as something that society needs to survive and the relations established between human universes in literary terms. Below is presented a short review on his evaluation on this matter.Ette argues that literature and phrase do not seem to deal with language about liveness any longer. Instead, scientific and technological academic fields have taken over. So what has to be d ane for the humanities to deal with life again would be, according to him, reorientating the idea of life, which should be based on making society see how the humanities can improve how human beings live with one another, and this should be done in concert with the biosciences, creating an easily understandable language which allowed scientific and literary discourses to work together as equals.Ette also discusses how biotechnology and natural-scientific fields of pick out have become the sciences of life because it has been socially accepted, since their subjects of study have to do with life. And also how literary scholars do not pay attention to the humanities losing fundament on this respect. So, according to the author, the concept of life should be changed from a bio-chemical, b iophysical, and biotechnological and medical, to acultural-literature-oriented one, as other scholars also maintained before (Leo Spitzer and his ideal of literature being the science that seeks to comprehend the human being to the extent to which he expresses himself in words and linguistic creations). Then, the author introduces the concept knowledge for living as the var. of knowledge inherent to literature, this is, literature having knowledge about or of life. But then, it comes the following question how to acquire this knowledge for living?This could be answered (according also to Wolfgang Isers work) by the act of reading, this is reading fictional literary pieces and having acknowledges through it that make the reader gain a kind of knowledge that he/she would not experience in their own life otherwise. This introduces the concepts of intratextuallity (the knowledge of living that characters of novels possess) and extratextuallity (the ways of acquiring certain cultural a nd sociohistorical knowledge for living), both of which influence the reader culturally, in their behavior, their life, etceteradepending on what they read. These two dimensions of the knowledge for living constitute, at the same time, the knowledge for living together, which is acquired by the readers through literature as the conditions for plurality to live together which have been shaped all throughout history. In these terms, the author mentions Roland Basthers work Comment vivre ensemble, and how literary analysis could connect literature and life. This is, for example, how to live (in the novel), how certain people have lived (in biography), etc.In addition, these knowledges should take into account different contexts and cultures, gender and social differences, in order to be universal and valid. The conclusion of the author is that the humanities first need to realize the potential that they possess concerning knowledge for living which, in conjunction with the natural an d social sciences, would give new perspectives for the exploration of art and literature as knowledge for living.