Writing-between-Worlds () von Ottmar Ette

With its new sub-title Romance Literatures of the World, the book series Mimesis presents an innovative and integral understanding of the Romance world and Romance Studies from the perspective of literary studies and cultural theory. It takes account of the fact that the fascinating development of Romance literatures and cultures both in Europe and beyond has set worldwide dynamics in motion which continue the great traditions of the Romance world and open up new horizons for them. Mimesis works from a transareal understanding of Romance Studies which integrates Romance literatures and cultures both within and outside Europe and which transcends the national and disciplinary boundaries which often conceal the interactions between different traditions and developments in Europe and the Americas, in Africa and Asia. In the archipelago of Romance Studies, Mimesis reveals how the representation of reality in the Romance literatures of the world opens the door to a multilingual cosmos of diverse logics.

This book proposes that there is no better, no more complex way to access a community, a society, an era and its cultures than through literature. For millennia, literature from a wide variety of geocultural areas has gathered knowledge about life, about survival, and about living together, without either falling into discursive or disciplinary specializations or functioning as a regulatory mechanism for cultural knowledge. Literature is able to offer its readers knowledge through direct participation in the form of step-by-step intellectual and affective experiences. Through this ability, it can reach and affect audiences across great spatial and temporal distances. Literature what different times and cultures have been able to understand as such in a broad sense has always been characterized by its transareal and transcultural origins and effects. It is the product of many logics, and it teaches us to think polylogically rather than monologically. Literature is an experiment in living, and living in a state of experimentation.

About the author

Ottmar Ette has been Chair of Romance Literature at the University of Potsdam, Germany, since 1995. He is Honorary Member of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) (elected in 2014), member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (elected in 2013), and regular member of the Academia Europaea (since 2010).