Tomas Weber Reviews Victoria Kahn's The Trouble with Literature

For Los Angeles Review of Books, London-based poet Tomas Weber faces down the climate denialist, in a way, in a review of Victoria Kahn's The Trouble with Literature (Oxford University Press, 2020). "Good scientific knowledge is well made, because being well made is the precondition for reliable, persuasive information," he advises. More:

But while there has been a substantial amount of work on the way scientific knowledge occupies this tension between belief and making, there has been comparatively little research on the central role of literature in the development of the idea that belief is fabricated. Indeed, we might think of literature as the opposite of scientific fact — one is dreamy and the other concrete. Yet as Victoria Kahn makes clear in The Trouble with Literature, her Clarendon Lectures from 2017, literature and scientific knowledge share two key qualities: both can inspire belief and both are, fundamentally, “made up.”

Early modern literature was marked by a revival of interest in classical rhetoric. The aim of rhetoric was, of course, to use language to fabricate belief. For the early moderns, this posed a problem for religious faith: if belief is fabricated, the outcome of rhetorical dexterity, it becomes difficult — though not impossible — to maintain that faith is a divine gift of grace. From there, it is only a small step to the idea that religion itself is invented by human minds.

It is this “trouble” that Kahn traces in her book. Through that story, she ultimately offers a transhistorical definition of literariness: literary texts fabricate belief, but they also raise belief as a question, troubling it, reconfiguring its meaning. And although Kahn herself does not go so far, The Trouble with Literature might also prompt us to wonder what role literature plays in the organization of contemporary categories of knowledge.

Read on at LARB.