Literary studies and mathematics in dialog? Yes, that is possible. On the basis of shared concepts and metaphors, the contributions discuss how models are imagined and academic knowledge is narrated.
Mathematics and literary studies in dialog? This is exactly what this volume is practicing. It shows that both disciplines talk to each other because they can; and they can because they are oriented differently and yet similarly towards what holds the world together at its core. Mathematics operates with metaphors taken from life, not despite, but because it is oriented towards reality. Literature, on the other hand, is anything but a mere invention. It emerges from the exciting waves of its time, indeed, it is part of them; and literary science does the same. And precisely because both disciplines, mathematics and literary studies, speak as life sciences from the heart of this (planetary) world, they overlap. This unity in diversity makes dialog not only possible, but even fruitful. It is precisely from this that the interdisciplinary dialog in this book was born. At the heart of this dialog is the thesis that imagination not only inspires literature and its science, but also considerations and discussions in theoretical mathematics. Gravitational waves, space-time, black holes - what we think we know about them today began with imagination: the power to picture them, to imagine them. The ability to see what could not be seen, i.e. to imagine it, paved the way for being able to understand it by means of algorithms, topologies and models. Conversely, the science dedicated to the imagination, i.e. literary studies, lives from being able to understand text worlds as algorithms, topologies and models of planetary encounters. And in the process of modeling and analyzing, both disciplines in turn work with prisms and concepts that are familiar and overlap: singularity, multiplicity, the butterfly effect, waves. In short, the book invites us to understand imagination as knowledge; and knowledge as imagination.
