Literature as a Site of Worldview Negotiation : A Case Study of Resonance in Ted Chiang’s Science Fiction

Sammanfattning

The externalization of memory and knowledge in technological devices affects human cognitive worldviews with the existential implication of lost narrative agency. This thesis addresses how we can remain authors of our own lives when memory and knowledge are increasingly stored and mediated through external technology, and treated as data rather than lived, interpretive relations to the world. Theological, philosophical, and sociological viewpoints are engaged in hermeneutic dialogue with Ted Chiang’s novelette The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Fiction. The thesis traces two technologically induced epistemological ruptures in the material: the historical acquisition of literacy, and the futuristic introduction of memory protheses for perfect recall. Both literacy and memory protheses are approached as forms of technology that transform human cognition and therefore the epistemological architecture that conditions truth practices and cognitive worldviews. The thesis suggests that cognitive worldviews are not grounded in factuality or archival data, but in the sustained relation of the self to the world, in the interpretation and narration of our lives.The formation of cognitive worldviews is approached through phenomenology, Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance, Maria Essunger’s reflective worldview studies in literature, and Gisèle Sapiro’s linguistic and sociological literary studies to explore how literature can make the existential costs of epistemological ruptures visible and negotiable. The concept of resonance is explored as a possible constructive resource for negotiating the existential terms of our relation to technology, without resorting to resistance or rejection. Resonance—understood through affection, self-efficacy, transformation, and uncontrollability—offers a relational reorientation toward truth, the self, and the world. The thesis contends that literature can provide a site, a literary existential arena, for understanding and negotiating the epistemological boundaries that condition cognitive worldviews.