Doctor Chris Conti

My research falls broadly into the areas of Twentieth-Century Literature and Philosophy and Literature. I’m interested in the way novelists often described as modernist or postmodernist engage with the philosophical discourse of modernity and how their work in turn appeals to moral philosophers, political theorists, philosophical anthropologists, and philosophers of technology. The interaction between philosophy and literature that I try to articulate in the first instance concerns a sort of rivalry in which novelists assert the claims of literary language and narrative form against the universalising drift of philosophical thinking that stems from its prioritisation of the concept. Modernist writers often present the novel and literary thinking about it as a competitor discourse to the metaphysical tradition and its persistence in enlightenment and post-enlightenment discourses like the philosophy of history. Literary and philosophical discourses often align, nonetheless, in their opposition to the rationalised forms of organised social life and in their diagnoses of the pathologies of modernity, even as they take diverse positions regarding the scientific direction of global civilisation. The broad literary and philosophical responses to the altered nature of reality in modernity as a contingent condition come together in the theory of the novel and critical theory. The evolution of these responses as they develop from key aesthetic ideas in German Romanticism to the ensuing craft reflections by novelists from Balzac to Dostoevsky and onto the twentieth-century novel is an ongoing interest in my research.

I am currently focused on Hans Blumenberg’s metaphorology both as a way of articulating the anti-absolutist goals of an art of uncertainty in the work of various twentieth-century novelists, poets, and dramatists and for the benefit it offers to considerations of the value of literature in the age of AI.

I also pursue a wider interest in the value of literature in several undergraduate courses (The Value of Literature; Law, Literature and Culture; Modern Drama: Theory and Practice) and in my postgraduate supervision.