The Importance of World Literature

I will start with a broad statement: literature has traditionally been regarded as a system of representation while science has been viewed and praised as a system of knowledge. In my work I have challenged this idea, emphasizing that literature is also a system of knowledge and science is also a system of representations. This separation, that David mentioned at the beginning of his speech, is non-existent, or rather it is an artifact and it is dangerous. The sciences and the humanities are systems of knowledge and representations: they know the world, make sense of it, decipher and represent what they have understood of the world in their own specific ways.