Recognizing the need to rehabilitate literature as a reliable mode of knowledge as part of the general effort to shore up the singular contributions of the humanities, this session proposes an approach that refocuses what counts as knowledge by recovering the Aristotelian notion of experience-based and action-oriented practical knowledge (phronesis). Save for isolated efforts of modern recovery (by philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alastair MacIntyre, and Martha Nussbaum), phronesis has disappeared from modern taxonomies of knowledge. The failure to recognize the vast middle realm of practical wisdom, attentive to human interactions in particular situations, between the certainty of hard science and absolute relativism has been a key reason for incomplete understandings of the cognitive value of narrative and literature more generally, including by literary criticism and narratology. This session argues that to appreciate the cognitive value of literature, including the imaginary plots of fiction, it is essential to first establish the irreducibility of the realm of praxis and of the judgment of practitioners to theoretical understanding (episteme). An essential component of phronetic or case-based judgment is narrative; like practical judgment, stories attend to the realm of the particular. This session illuminates the intrinsic connection between literature and phronesis as immersed rather than detached modes of understanding. The three papers approach the common goal from different directions.

In “Interpretation as Practical Wisdom,” Paul Kottman suggests that phronesis might name the capacity to draw conclusions of general significance from the perception of the uniqueness of a complex, particular situation. In this respect, it resembles an aesthetic sensitivity as well as an interpretive capacity. Drawing on prior work by Hans G. Gadamer and Martha Nussbaum on phronesis, the paper will suggest what might be gained if we treat interpretive work as a kind of practical wisdom.

In “A Seat at the Table: Literary Studies and Environmental Praxis in the Anthropocene Discourse,” Vasilije Ivanovic argues that the humanities in general, and literary studies in particular, can provide a unique and integral perspective to the science-dominated approaches of many Anthropocene discourses. In particular, literary studies as a form of cultural engagement provides more than a merely theoretical, epistemological framework: it provides critical access to and engagement with practical cultural responses to the Anthropocene that moderate the affective internalization of Anthropocene problems. Thus, literary responses to environmental change such as the plethora of writing after the Fukushima nuclear disaster from 2011 (e.g. Tawada Yoko’s Fushi-no-Shima, or Kawakami Hiromi’s Kamisama 2011) are articulations not only of epistemological engagement with contemporaneous trauma, but an active process in which the real implications of a shifting environment – both natural and cultural/political – are taken to task. Rob Nixon’s concept of the “writer-activist” is read here as a logical extension of an Anthropocene ontology in which Heideggerian being-in-the-world crystallizes into environmental praxis – which by association necessitates a form of cultural knowledge production that is phronesis much more so than theoria, transcending traditional literary epistemology and its oft-criticized theoreticism, and earning literary studies a much-deserved “seat at the table” in the Anthropocene.

In “Phronesis as Alternative Post-Critical Reading,” Monika Kaup spotlights the relevance of phronesis for the ongoing reappraisal of literary critical practices referred to as “post-critique,” which aims to put literary studies on a new footing as a result of the growing discontent with the hegemony of the hermeneutics of suspicion. She argues that repositioning literature in the setting of practical wisdom advances the goals of the post-critique movement. Viewing narrative knowledge as a special kind of understanding for the realm of practice is a “reparative” reading in the sense intended by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a “hermeneutics of recovery of meaning.” As such, it encompasses many uses of literature, including the “naïve” unscholarly readings” that Rita Felski’s post-critical approach aims to resurrect. However, viewing literature as a reliable because practical mode of knowledge, Kaup suggests, rules out reductive suspicious readings in a more categorical way. It extracts literature from the grasp of allegorizing abstract theory by virtue of relocating it in the “middle realm” of practical knowledge and experience. This in turn might newly validate traditional experience-based “ways of knowing” from the Global South much debated in indigenous and postcolonial studies.