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Research Article

No. 10 (2026): Open Issue

Literature as a Site of Speculative Thought: On Method and Encounter

DOI
https://doi.org/10.64957/nesir.1934873
Submitted
15.01.2026
Published
22.04.2026

Abstract

This article develops a speculative approach to literature grounded in process philosophy, arguing that speculative thought is not an external interpretive framework applied to literary texts, but a mode of thinking that participates in the operative processes of literature itself. Drawing primarily on Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy and its contemporary elaborations, the article conceptualizes speculation as a methodological obligation that advances by imposing constraints on its own movement while remaining answerable to experience. Literature is approached not as an object to be decoded, but as a site where relations, potentials, and events are actively composed. Through a close engagement with Brian Massumi’s reading of Kafka and Erin Manning’s analyses of Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces, the article shows how literary practices mobilize speculative dynamics by staging encounters between actuality and potentiality, stability and transformation. The figure of the home functions as a central thread, understood not as a symbolic container but as a porous and negotiated configuration through which historical, geographical, and affective forces intersect. By foregrounding encounter rather than application, the article proposes a reorientation of literary theory: a shift in the guiding question from what literature means to how it moves, orients feeling, and holds actuality and potentiality in productive tension.

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