Josh Berson, "Fictional Evidence"

What if scholarship were more open to uncertainty and disarray?

I am an enormous fan of Josh Berson. (Carla, here. Hi, everyone.) Josh is an incredible human with a polymathic mind and work that ranges across fiction and nonfiction, sound and word. You'll hear some of that in this seed, which takes us from a day at the beach to a million years ago, from meat to clothing repair practices.

Josh asks us to consider what might happen if we blur the lines between our expectations, as readers, of fiction and nonfiction. He calls for a practice of what he calls “epistemological humility,” a kind of readerly aesthetic that praises patchiness, a textual and narrative orientation that resists the desire for seamlessness or completeness.

What might happen, he asks, if we approached “research essay” texts and the like in the spirit of openness to the kind of incompleteness, the beautiful disarray that we're more comfortable with when we read fiction?

You’ll see what he means when you watch.

We might also ask, I’d add: is it not only (not mainly?) the writer but also the reader, in paying attention to a text through the act and practice of reading, who decides its genre?

Bio

Josh Berson’s books include The Human Scaffold and The Meat Question. An anthropologist, historian, writer of fiction and nonfiction, sound artist, and all-around brilliant thinker and scholar, Josh can be found at https://joshberson.net/.

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