One of the many characteristics and functions of world literature consists in exploring different ways of living in a local, national or global perspective. This may at first sight seem a commonplace. Nonetheless, the implications of this observation are by no means trivial. As it turns out, across the centuries many literary texts focus on presenting or showcasing forms of good life and their various presuppositions and consequences. At the JLU a research group is currently investigating the aesthetic and literary presentations of the good life — which some colleagues have termed the eudaimonic dimension of literature — in detail in a historical and systematic perspective.
Our contribution explores in how far literary texts / narrative fictions offer descriptions or models of the good life in the context of ecological or economic crises. Interestingly, in the fictional texts the dark foil of crisis tends to stimulate the development and elaboration of concepts of well-being and good living by exploring new forms of literary writing. The critical, precarious mode that endangers the protagonists and their survival thus provokes and inspires the unfolding of eudaimonic forms.
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