For a Cosmopolitical Philology: Lessons from Science Studies

The gradual institutionalization of “literature and science” as an academic subspecialty should not obscure the fact that its raison d’être is by no means obvious or settled. This is not a criticism: one of the field’s advantages, at a time when “interdisciplinarity” has become a mind-numbing administrative cliché, should be that of provoking new thought about fundamental questions by forcing its practitioners to confront both the problems and possibilities of its unlikely coupling. The present paper is an attempt to contribute to this project by answering the question “what can the literary disciplines learn from science studies?”