Upcoming course taught by Humanities Fellow Jessie Labov.

Encyclopedia as Literature
Spring 2007
T 2:15-5:05, 260-012

This course will trace the history and theories of the encyclopedia, from Voltaire, Diderot, and D’Alembert’s collective authorship of the Encyclopédie (1751-1780) to the development of a literary mode based on the encyclopedia form (Borges, Eco, Kiš, Pavić) to our current toolkit for sifting and distilling information (the database, search engine, Wikipedia). Along that path, we would focus on the essay as a form, its roots in the Enlightenment project, and how it has been transformed with the changing position of the public intellectual and voices of dissidence today. As we read “encyclopedic” novels next to collections of essays, we will examine how each author juxtaposes entries—fragments of a mythical totality—and comments on the ontological possibility of accessing that totality.

Does the notion of anti-authoritarian dissidence, embedded in the materialist, anti-clerical position of the Encyclopedists, and in the history of the essay as a genre, survive as an inherent quality of encyclopedic fiction? Is there a politics inherent in this aesthetic?

How is it reflected in the debates over access to information and open source systems (such as Wikipedia) today?

And finally, the overarching question of the course would be: how can we read an encyclopedia, or the entries within, as literature, and what is the status of the literary knowledge that we gain in this practice?