Numbers, Literature, Aesthetics

Abstract

I presented this talk as a keynote address at the "Beyond Narrative: Literature, Culture, and the Borderlands of Narrativity" conference held in Leipzig in October of 2019.One thrust of the paper was that quantitative and aesthetic discourses are not as opposed as we tend to think-that numbers can possess the kind of dramatic, affective, narrative power often taken to be uniquely literary.My paper built toward a reading of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, focusing on the enchanting, wonderful merging of quantitative and aesthetic domains.Five months later, with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself obsessively processing data with very different emotions: fear, anger, regret, and the anguish of uncertainty.These, too, may seem the stuff of literature, but just as we impose narratives on numbers, numbers impose meanings on us.