![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
In this Introduction, I make the case for an interdisciplinary exchange between philosophy, literature, and communication studies that explores the ontological question of being through an analysis of the communicative acts constitutive of being human. Literature provides the grounds on which the philosophical exploration of communication is carried out. To clarify the proposed inquiry, I re-imagine the possibility of a “natural science” native to the humanities through an appropriation of Aristotle. A sketch of a theory of literature is advanced so the structure and significance of the essays presented in this special issue are made clear and they can be oriented in relation to the existing field of communication studies. The theoretical sketch explains what I mean by a “natural science,” namely, coming to understand the ways by which we become human through our communicative praxis. After showing how the essays collected here each speak to the guiding theory that structures the special issue, I conclude with a general call for interdisciplinarity coalesced around the ancient axiom “Know Thyself.” Such a call offers a succinct statement of the mission of humanistic studies as envisioned within this special issue.
Notes
1 Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vols. 1–2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 995a3–20.
2 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 11; Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Gramercy Books, 1994), liii–liv.
3 Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press, 1976), 7–8.
4 Heidegger, Being and Time, 11–12.
5 Noam Chomsky, “Aspects of a Theory of Mind (December 1984),” in Language and Politics, exp. 2nd ed., ed. Carlos P. Otero (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 465.
6 See William J. Brown, “Examining Four Processes of Audience Involvement with Media Personae: Transportation, Parasocial Interaction, Identification, and Worship,” Communication Theory 25, no. 3 (2015): 259–83; Naomi Johnson, “Consuming Desires: Consumption, Romance, and Sexuality in Best-Selling Teen Romance Novels,” Women's Studies in Communication 33, no. 1 (2010): 54–73; Rick Busselle and Helena Bilandzic, “Fictionality and Perceived Realism in Experiencing Stories: A Model of Narrative Comprehension and Engagement,” Communication Theory 18, no. 2 (2008): 255–80.
7 See Meg Tully, “Constructing a Feminist Icon Through Erotic Friend Fiction: Millennial Feminism on Bob's Burgers,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 35, no. 2 (2018): 194–207; Sarah Kornfield, “Cross-Cultural Cross-Dressing: Japanese Graphic Novels Perform Gender in US,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 28, no. 3 (2018): 213–29; Shadee Abdi and Bernadette Marie Calafell, “Queer Utopias and a (Feminist) Iranian Vampire: A Critical Analysis of Resistive Monstrosity in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 34, no. 4 (2017): 358–70; Matthew W. Bost and Matthew S. May, “The Surplus of the Machine: Trope and History in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 49, no. 1 (2016): 1–25; Laurence A. Rickels, “The Race to Fill the Blanks: On (Animal) Testing in Science Fiction,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 47, no. 4 (2014): 515–32; Leah M. Wyman and George N. Dionisopoulos, “Transcending the Virgin/Whore Dichotomy: Telling Mina's Story in Bram Stoker's Dracula,” Women's Studies in Communication 23, no. 2 (2000): 209–37.
8 See Francesco Sticchi, “Creating Is Resisting: A Spinozian–Deleuzian Reading of Andrei Rublev,” Empedocles 8, no. 2 (2017): 221–35; Thomas Frentz, “Quality, Rhetoric, and Choric Regression: Revisiting Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 50, no. 3 (2017): 292–314; Russell Ford, “Deleuze's Dick,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 38, no. 1 (2005): 41–71.
9 See Donovan Irven, “Between Solitude and Solidarity: Objectification in the Existential Novels of Camus and Naipaul,” Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 41, no. 2 (2018): 48–59; “Joyce and Heidegger: Appropriations of the Past Toward a New Philosophy of Transcendence,” College Literature 45, no. 3 (2018): 487–51l; The Ontological I and Other Essays (Philadelphia, PA: Streisguth | Martin, 2012).
10 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4–5.
11 Ibid., 3.
12 Ibid., 1.
13 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 69 original emphases.
14 Martin Heidegger, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 87.
15 Ibid., 149.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 6–7.
19 Ibid., 11. On this point, Heidegger argues that, due to the theological assumption that God creates things, produces them, the form/matter schema dominating all aesthetic theories is basically ambiguous at best. Does it refer to the thingly character of the thing that exists in itself; or to the work-character of the work that produces the thing?
20 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 75 original emphasis.
21 Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 74.
22 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 9.
23 Hegel, Hegel's Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 105.
24 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 67–79.
25 Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 43.
26 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 11.
27 In Being and Nothingness, Sartre attributes a version of the “existence precedes essence” formula to Heidegger, writing, “Now freedom has no essence. It is not subject to any logical necessity; we must say of it what Heidegger said of Dasein in general: ‘In it existence precedes and commands essence’” (438). And yet there is no citation of Being and Time, which must be the source of Sartre's reference. In Being and Time, we do find Heidegger claiming that “The ‘essence’ of this being [Dasein] lies in its to be. The whatness (essentia) of this being must be understood in terms of its being (existentia) insofar as one can speak of it at all” (41). See also Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 20.
28 Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles, trans. Frank Wynne (New York: Vintage, 2000); 45–46.
29 Ibid., 45.
30 Simone de Beauvoir, “Literature and Metaphysics,” trans. Veronique Zaytzeff and Frederick M. Morrison, in Philosophical Writings, ed. Margaret A. Simons with Marybeth Timmermann and Mary Beth Mader (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 271.
31 Ibid., 273.
32 Ibid., 274.
33 Nicole Piemonte, ed., “Medical Humanities,” Special Issue, Review of Communication 17, no. 3 (2017): 137–223, https://tandfonline.com/toc/rroc20/17/3?nav=tocList.
34 Markus Gabriel, Neo-Existentialism: How to Conceive of the Human Mind after Naturalism's Failure, ed. Jocelyn Maclure, contr. Jocelyn Benoist, Andrea Kern, and Charles Taylor (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 10.