Gayatri Spivak, across her oeuvre, has emphasized the “singular unverifiability” of literature. A literary text, as she demonstrates, affords no easy consensus on its meaning. Literature's unverifiability is articulated in various ways across literary theory. Literature is poetic rather than functional (Jacobson); tropological rather than literal (de Man); iterable and without closure (Derrida); and singular rather than generalizable (Ranciere). Unverifiability is at the core of literature; it is, in a sense, what gives literature its very literariness. But why must literary critics insist that unverifiability is the singular domain of literature, a phenomenon that is unique to the literary? How might the unverifiability of literature be compared to that of objects in other disciplines? What new avenues of cross-disciplinary thought could such a comparison make possible?

This panel compares the unverifiability of literature and mathematics. As academic administrators increasingly demand that literary studies emulate the quantitative methods of math and the sciences, some literary scholars have begun treating literature as data (Moretti, Piper), while others have doubled down on the distinctiveness of literary objects (Spivak, Hayot, Kramnick, Nersessian) -- circumscribing and defending our academic territory. But when we pretend to already know what is and is not literary, we risk limiting the potential expansiveness of the literary; we foreclose the possibility of discovering math in literature and literature in math.

This panel builds on and challenges the comparative framework for crossing disciplinary boundaries that Spivak outlines in Death of a Discipline. While we agree with Spivak that genuine translation involves engaging with an/other language without foregone conclusions, that is, as open-ended, unverifiable figures rather than as transparent objects, we differ in approaching math, too, as a figurative language. We examine literary texts that translate mathematical figures, and vice versa. We also raise questions about broader family resemblances between the two disciplines. Our goal is to explore literariness, defined as the unverifiability of the figure, as a meta-discourse that allows for intra-disciplinary collaborations across math and literature -- collaborations that harness rather than diminish literature’s unverifiability.

Bhattarai’s presentation shows how J.M. Coetzee’s 1999 novel, Elizabeth Costello, undermines the Euclidean model of space -- with its topology of inside/outside -- by rendering the relative positions of characters and readers indeterminate. It does so, Bhattarai argues, to interrupt readers’ extension of human sympathies to the novel’s non-human characters from across a safe and stable distance, forcing them to read in these figures signs of their own proximity to plant and animal life, their own non-humanity. Bhattarai designates the novel’s non-Euclidean form as planetary, using the term in the sense provided by Spivak -- as an uncanny experience of the untranslatability of the other and of the self as figures. Bhattarai’s presentation thus lays out the theoretical framework for the panel with a geometric interpretation of Spivak’s comparative framework itself.

Swartz turns to an early novel to show how it drew inspiration from formal logic. In a reading of Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678), Swartz argues that Lafayette pits the logical form of the dilemma against a discourse of historicity in order to develop a new narrative mode that feels intuitively true but whose truth cannot be verified. If Swartz shows how early novelists borrowed from math to develop the realist texture of novelistic discourse, Li, much like Bhattarai, suggests that modernist writers foreground and undermine the mathematical infrastructure of the realist novel. Specifically, Li argues that Virginia Woolf’s novel, Night and Day (1919), subverts the realist novel’s imperialist imagination of social reality as a Euclidean space to be mapped and known. Woolf’s novel grapples with the waning authority of Euclidean geometry and its ostensibly universal truths by consigning math to the realm of intersubjective fantasy and meaning-making. Rather than treat math as a transparent abstraction, Woolf materializes it as a quasi-fictional fetish object that organizes characters into new social formations -- in excess of those prescribed by empire -- by remaining opaque and unknowable.

Finally, Kroeger compares the central ideas of formal logic with various literary formalisms that have emerged in the last one hundred years, focussing on developments in narratology. He brandishes Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic structuralism, constituted by arbitrary signs, as a distinctively literary meta-discourse within which mathematical and literary formalisms can be co-translated and co-related. Together, these presentations develop a discourse for defending literary studies without resorting to a defensive stance over our academic territory.