The Future of Post-Human Literature: A Preface to a New Theory of Fiction and Non-Fiction
CISP - Cambridge International Science Publishing, July 2011, Pages: 530
Is literature really so treasurable (or valuable) that, as Helen Keller once euphorically put it, "literature is my utopia"? (FQA 2011)
This euphoric valuation of literature by Keller can be contrasted with an opposing view, as Terry Eagleton (1996: 176, 178) once wrote that "there is no such thing as literature which is 'really' great or 'really' anything, independently of the ways in which that writing is treated within specific forms of social and institutional life….[B]y recognizing that literature is an illusion is to recognize that literary theory is an illusion too….It is an illusion…in the sense that literary theory…is really no more than a branch of social ideologies…."
Contrary to these opposing views about literature (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), literature (in relation to fiction and non-fiction) is neither possible nor desirable to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe.
This challenge to the opposing conventional views about literature does not mean, however, that literature is worthless, or that those fields of study (related to literature) like aesthetics, cultural studies, hermeneutics, psychology, history, literary criticism, rhetoric, and so on should be dismissed too. Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.
Instead, this book provides an alternative (better) way to understand the future of literature, in the dialectic context of fiction and non-fiction-while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). This book offers a new theory (that is, the comparative-impartial theory of literature) to go beyond the existing approaches on literature in an original way.
If successful, this seminal project is to fundamentally change the way that we think about literature, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what the author originally called its "post-human" fate.
Part One: Introduction
Chapter One. Introduction-The Treasure of Literature
The Euphoric Valuation of Literature
Literature in Relation to Fiction and Non-Fiction
The Diverse Sub-Fields of Literature
The Theoretical Debate
The Comparative-Impartial Theory of Literature
Theory and Meta-Theory
The Logic of Existential Dialectics
Sophisticated Methodological Holism
Chapter Outline
Part Two: Fiction
Chapter Two. Fiction and Its Complicity
The Imagination of Fiction
Fiction and the Mind
Fiction and Nature
Fiction and Society
Fiction and Culture
The Illusion of Fiction
Part Three: Non-Fiction
Chapter Three. Non-Fiction and Its Duplicity
The Reality of Non-Fiction
Non-Fiction and the Mind
Non-Fiction and Nature
Non-Fiction and Society
The Deception of Non-Fiction
Part Four: Conclusion
Chapter Four. Conclusion-The Future of Literature
Beyond Fiction and Non-Fiction
Bibliography
Index
Dr. Peter Baofu is the author of 51 new theories in 42 books (as of March, 2011) to provide a visionary challenge to conventional wisdom in all fields of knowledge ranging from the social sciences through the formal sciences and the natural sciences to the humanities, with the final aim for a unified theory of everything.
As a polymath, he is known for his pioneering works on "comparative-impartial literature," "supersession computing," "detached gambling," "multilateral acoustics," "metamorphic humor," "heterodox education," "post-human mind games," "post-Earth geology," "substitutive religion," "post-cosmology," "contrarian personality," "post-ethics," "multifaceted war and peace," "post-humanity," "critical-dialectic formal science," "combinational organization," "hyper-sexual body," "law reconstruction," "comprehensive creative thinking," "hyper-martial body," "multilogical learning," "contingent urban planning," "post-capitalism," "selective geometry," "post-democracy," "contrastive advantages," "ambivalent technology," "authoritarian liberal democracy," "the post-post-Cold-War era," "post-civilization," "transformative aesthetic experience," "synthetic information architecture," "contrastive mathematical logic," "dialectic complexity," "after-postmodernity," "sophisticated methodological holism," "post-human space-time," "existential dialectics," "unfolding unconsciousness," "floating consciousness," "hyper-spatial consciousness," and other visions.
Dr. Baofu earned an entry to the list of "prominent and emerging writers" in Contemporary Authors (2005) and another honorary entry in The Writers Directory (2007)-and was also interviewed on television and in newspapers about his original ideas. He was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar in the Far East. He had taught as a professor at different universities in Western Europe, the Caucasus, the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, South Asia, and North America. He finished more than 5 academic degrees, including a Ph.D. from the world-renowned M.I.T., and was a summa cum laude graduate.
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