Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

The humanities have always been interdisciplinary. It is impossible to understand literature today without referring also to philosophy and history. In this paper, I explore the interconnectedness of philosophy and the humanities, particularly comparing philosophical theories on epistemology to how literature is used to process and sort knowledge, and then how this may be used to understand the role that the arts and humanities will play moving into the future. I analyze a few of the key texts of fiction of the twentieth century, such as the Ficciones of Borges and use these to draw comparisons with new theories of epistemology, paying particular attention to the emergent epistemology of the digital humanities. As signaled by the critic Alfonso de Toro in his book Borges infinito: Borgesvirtual, the fictions of Borges are at the center of the epistemology that surrounds the technological revolution. “La biblioteca de Babel” recounts the possibility of an archive that contains all possible records, but this overdose of information makes everything inside of it incomprehensible. Moreover, each individual story is intricately built upon a system of references that spread out like a web, reaching out and folding back upon the story and thus also the meaning and significations held therein. This is what some critics call a hypertext. As technology continues to progress and our archive continues to become bloated, we must reassess how we navigate through this web of references to avoid epistemological stagnation in the future of the humanities.