Presentation

Épistémocritique is a biannual digital journal. Founded in 2007 by Michel Pierssens, it is the first French-language journal devoted to the study of knowledge at work in literary texts. Based on the observation that the literary enterprise and the scientific enterprise are not fields with a closed identity, but that there are many forms of interaction between them, the journal aims to decompartmentalise research in literature. It therefore rejects the procedures of disciplinary isolation and the pre-constructed divisions between the “two cultures”, in which it sees only the contingent translation of representations specific to a moment in Western culture. It also rejects national approaches to culture and knowledge at a time in history when debates on the universality of knowledge are becoming crucial. The journal is therefore resolutely interdisciplinary, international and multilingual. The works published examine the uses to which texts—and, more generally, works of art—put the knowledge they mobilise, as well as their dissemination and cultural adaptation. The methods used draw on the history of science, epistemology, the history of ideas, sociology, hermeneutics and literary genetics.