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).
