What is the process by which literature might provide us with access to knowledge, and what sort of knowledge might this be? The question is not simply whether literature thinks, but whether literature thinks theoretically – whether it has a capacity, without the external aid of analytical methods that have determined Western philosophy and science since the Enlightenment, to theorize the conditions of the world from which it emerges and to which it addresses itself.

Suspicion about literature’s access to knowledge is ancient, at least as old as Plato's notorious expulsion of the poets from the city in the Republic. With full awareness of this classical background and in dialogue with a broad range of twentieth-century thinkers, Gourgouris examines a range of literary texts, from Sophocles’ Antigone to Don DeLillo’s The Names, as he traces out his argument that literature possesses an intrinsic theoretical capacity to make sense of the nonpropositional.

Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, UCLA 1990. Professor Gourgouris writes and teaches on a variety of subjects, ultimately entwined around questions of the poetics and politics of modernity.

He is the author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, 1996) and Does Literature Think?: Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford, 2003), and editor of the forthcoming Freud and Fundamentalism (Fordham, 2009). Outside these projects he has also published numerous articles on Ancient Greek philosophy, modern poetics, film, contemporary music, Enlightenment law, psychoanalysis. He is currently completing work on two projects of secular criticism: The Perils of the One and Nothing Sacred.

He is also an internationally awarded poet, with four volumes of poetry published in Greek, most recent being Introduction to Physics (Athens, 2005). He has translated the work of various Greek poets into English – notably Yiannis Patilis’ Camel of Darkness (Quarterly Review of Literature Book Series, Vol 36, 1997) – as well as the poetry of Heiner Müller and Carolyn Forché into Greek. He writes regularly in major Greek newspapers and journals on political and literary matters.