What can Marilynne Robinson’s novel about the drifter Lila tell us about narrative as a response to epistemic injustice? And how might we begin to understand this response in ethical terms? Robinson’s narratives are consistently engaging with the possible as opposed to the actual, and in doing so they effectively challenge our assumptions about truth and meaning. In this article, I examine how Lila through her unswerving distrust of knowledge in the form of certainties imposed on her by others constitutes such a challenge. Ultimately, I hope to show how Lila’s reticence underscores the ethical and epistemological implications of Robinson’s concern with narrative as a possible response to injustice.

This is a guest issue of Anthropoetics guest-edited by Marina Ludwigs and Elisabet Dellming, both of Stockholm University. This installment is dedicated to the 11^th Annual Generative Anthropology Conference that took place on June 8-10, 2017 at Stockholm University, Sweden. We would like to thank Eric Gans and Stacey Meeker for their assistance in preparing this issue and editing the articles. We would also like to thank the English Department of Stockholm University for their support. In addition, we would like to thank The Swedish Forum for Humanities and Social Sciences as well as The Swedish Research Council for the grants they have generously provided to support our conference.

In this reading of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower I draw on the existential phenomenology of Maurice Natanson as well as Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of the possible. I expand on Ricoeur’s claim that fiction may recover what history cannot account for as I make the case for imagination as a prerequisite for epistemically end ethically viable knowledge. I here use Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice in order to show how the episteme (in Foucault’s sense) frequently deprives historical subjects of their status as “knowers,” hence refusing them their right to “be who they are” (Fricker, 5).  My reading demonstrates how The Blue Flower (in phenomenological terms) makes irreal the everyday and in doing so constitutes literature’s peculiar capacity to provide an alternate road to knowledge. I am interested in following this trajectory in terms of the fictive possibilities of the imaginary in the constitution of knowledge in literature as a cultural/linguistic space where imagination-based knowledge is constructed. I show how the irreal quality of the everyday in The Blue Flower illuminates with a sense of possibility the current of loss (of opportunity, of life, of action) underpinning the novel’s “mood.” I argue that the irreal makes for a different way of looking at loss insofar as it makes room for something else: the emergence of meaning “in spite of everything” (Kearney, 54), thus creating a scene of representation by which the sense of meaning can come into being. For this purpose, I highlight imagination rather than history, the possible rather than the actual, and ultimately, examine the epistemological significance of such an approach.

As a phenomenon, awe is not reducible to any combination of distinct elements such as wonder, fear or reverence, but combines all of these together with surprise or even anguish. The metaphors with which awe can be described therefore never fully define what it feels like to be affected by awe: awe is motion, elevation, lightness, and flight. As experience, awe constitutes a shattering jolt that brings about a fundamental and revelatory re-conception of life: a full awareness of the invisible life, filled, "in a flash", to the brim. This study explores awe’s coming to poetical givenness in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins by taking into consideration experiential and existential as well as epistemological concerns. A phenomenological approach, for instance Edmund Husserl’s epochetic method and Michel Henry’s concept of the invisible, helps illuminate Hopkins’s poetics; a poetics which solicits a special focus precisely on awe in its various aspects. Hopkins’s poetry has a unique ability to constitute a crossing where in-depth feelings and forces of the wondrous in the striking aspects of awe can be vocalised. The focus on the phenomenon of awe’s poetical appearing therefore allows for a consideration of this life-transforming jolt as an irresistible force reverberating throughout Hopkins’s work and as such allows us to explore the experience of invisible life that lies at the heart of the possibility of conversion as a fundamental change of world-view.