The uses of literature in friendship research: a semiotic approach: The first novels I read as a child about friends I did not see as friendship stories but just being about a group of kids and their ongoing lives. It is hard to say when I discovered friendship as a general topic worth considering, but I remember the profound effect of reading, much later in life, Elena Ferrante’s novels from Naples about the friendship between Lila and Elena. I realised how literature can show (and re-present) truths that are hard to find described in research literature (e.g., sociology, psychology, philosophy) and may only be touched upon indirectly in some anthropological fieldwork. The reading experience sparked some questions about the complex relationships between knowledge, friendship (and other forms of love), and literature both as the art of storytelling and as a field of scholarship investigating stories. How can fictional friendships tell us about the real thing? Semiotic realism may offer an answer that places fictive friendships on an equal footing with real ones through shared mechanisms of interpretation that are related to the kinds of emotional attachments we make to the stories we read. Literature offers an entrance to ‘the beauty of friendship’ (to quote Agnes Heller), where the author seems to know us better than we know ourselves. Using Umberto Eco’s notion of the encyclopedia as a complex representational tool, I propose how to place a selection of ‘famous friendships’ (fictional or ‘real’) in a wider network of research, both from social, natural and humanistic sciences. A model network of about 400 entries on friendship and related relevant concepts, including 39 pairs (and groups) of friends, will be presented, and among its nodes one can locate both real and fictive friendships, as well as literary criticism and other fields of research. This ‘model a’ (a for Anglocentric) can be culturally translated (i.e., modified, recreated) into other languages, providing material for cross-cultural studies.
Claus Emmeche is associate professor at the History and Philosophy of Science section of the Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen. He teaches philosophy of science (‘videnskabsteori’), and researches the philosophy of interdisciplinarity. Over the years he has collaborated with his former supervisor Jesper Hoffmeyer on developing the field of biosemiotics.
He has studied social science, biology, and earned a PhD in philosophy of biology (1989). He has published The Garden in the Machine (1994) on Artificial Life, as well as essays, articles, reviews, and contributions to The Great Danish Encyclopedia, the Brøndums Encyklopædi, and Filosofisk Leksikon. At the Niels Bohr Institute in the 1990’s he started the Center for the Philosophy of Nature and Science Studies with his mentor, physics professor Benny Lautrup.
As a part of this research, he began to wonder about the nature of the relation between friendship and institutionally defined professional relations like those between colleagues or between teachers and students — can they be friends when considering the question of favouring a colleague for a job or a joint project not because of competence but because of friendship? As an offshoot of these questions, he began to study friendship research more systematically to conceptually map this ‘invisible’ interdisciplinary field.