What forms of proof show up in literary fiction? Colloquially, proofs are understood as incontrovertible evidence of a thing or event— as the strongest form of evidence. Yet, in pure math, they do not refer to evidence at all. Rather, a proof is a way of making evident or clear something that must necessarily be true. In other words, proofs take part in the discourses of the evident, rather than the procedures of evidence. Rather than verifying that something is true, proofs make the truth apprehensible to the human reader, developing it in a way that fits into a human mind. 

Does literary fiction partake in this form of proving? While we often think of the realist novel as preoccupied with number and counting, where number conveys reality and fact. Could there be another genealogy of mathematics within the novel? What forms of the real emerge? What is our responsibility as scholars to certain methodologies for moving along discourses of the fact? Is there a distinction between fact and proof within literature or literary critique more broadly? What do we do with our standards of proof and evidence in fields that have undergone archival erasure? Does subalternity demand different forms of proof?

This seminar examines the question of proof as an epistemological problem and aesthetic provocation for literary works and for literary critics. We welcome submissions interested in the following possible topics:

• Archival evidence or questions about number, within Black Studies, postcolonial studies, or world literary studies (McKittrick, Hartman, Appadurai, Spivak)
• Truth claims, axiomatic assertions, and speculative epistemologies in works of fiction, including but not limited to the novel
• Proof across disciplines, i.e. contributions from those working in literature and science, mathematics, or computational methods
• Formal accounts of proof or evidence in literature, that relate to or engage with legal notions of proof/evidence or proof in sociological fields (Poovey, Daston)
• Poetic or other literary forms that take up, interrogate or aestheticize evidence in museum, anthropological, legal, mathematical, or social-scientific contexts—e.g. the “forensic” aesthetic that Sianne Ngai identifies in “conceptual art's fascination with things typically exhibited as scientific proof in legal contexts (receipts, data, blood samples, and invoices)”
• Alternative/subaltern knowledge practices
• Theoretical reflections on the limits of empiricism, or a focus on empirical evidence, within literary-critical practice (Hartman)
• The novel as a way of theorizing knowledge (Kornbluh, Jackson)
• What literary criticism and literature can offer as a mode of knowledge in the age of AI and large language models