Nicholas Lawrence - Böcker

The ambition of this book is to resituate the problem of ‘world literature’, considered as a revived category of theoretical enquiry, by pursuing the literary-cultural implications of the theory of combined and uneven development. This theory has a long pedigree in the social sciences, where it continues to stimulate debate. But its implications for cultural analysis have received less attention, even though the theory might be said to draw attention to a central – perhaps the central – arc or trajectory of modern(ist) production in literature and the other arts worldwide. It is in the conjuncture of combined and uneven development, on the one hand, and the recently interrogated and expanded categories of ‘world literature’ and ‘modernism’, on the other, that this book looks for its specific contours. In the two theoretical chapters that frame the book, the authors argue for a single, but radically uneven world-system; a singular modernity, combined and uneven; and a literature that variously registers this combined unevenness in both its form and content to reveal itself as, properly speaking, world-literature. In the four substantive chapters that then follow, the authors explore a selection of modern-era fictions in which the potential of their method of comparativism seems to be most dramatically highlighted. They treat the novel paradigmatically, not exemplarily, as a literary form in which combined and uneven development is manifested with particular salience, due in no small part to its fundamental association with the rise of capitalism and its status in peripheral and semi-peripheral societies as a ‘modernising’ import. The peculiar plasticity and hybridity of the novel form enables it to incorporate not only multiple literary levels, genres and modes, but also other non-literary and archaic cultural forms – so that, for example, realist elements might be mixed with more experimental modes of narration, or older literary devices might be reactivated in juxtaposition with more contemporary frames.

How might we read Salomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte as a work of philosophy in its own right? What would such a reading mean for the way we understand his thought? While the self-authored history of Maimon’s life has garnered much attention since being first published in 1792, it has been predominantly read as the mere story of a somewhat idiosyncratic philosopher striving towards wisdom and truth. By simply paying close attention to certain phrases employed within the book, and elucidating the philosophical significance accompanying them, this study offers a reading that breaks with this tradition. The pragmatic treatment of Maimon’s life history is interpreted as a philosophical act rooted in his own system of thought. Salomon Maimon’s life becomes the history of the supra-individual imagining I – or the world soul which grounds psychology as science – up to and including the invention of the very idea of such a universal being. This same idea can be discovered in the ten extended chapters of Lebensgeschichte dedicated to the writings of Maimon’s greatest teacher, Maimonides. And it is by bringing this to light that the study establishes the coherence these chapters share with the motley collection of psychological fragments surrounding them. In doing so, it discovers a continuity between Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte and his philosophical work at large in the concept of a free, pragmatic and productive imagination. Nicholas Lawrence is a philosopher at the School of Culture and Education at Södertörn University. Salomon Maimon’s Life is his doctoral thesis.