CONNECTED AGENTS, COMPLEX SYSTEMS. OBSERVING LITERATURE AS A TRANSDISCIPLINARY CULTURAL RESEARCH PRACTICE

The ambitious agenda of comparative studies in literature, the comparison of literatures in different cultures and societies, suggests a transdisciplinary mode of observation. As a complex linguistic form of communication literature is a cultural object of research whose investigation requires the theories on language and media as well as the theories on social organization and historical dynamics. Since the 1990s the cultural studies more and more make use of systems theoretical models, which focus on the interdependence of cognition and communication. The paper offers an exemplary discussion of self-organizing systems and illustrates the interdependence of cognitive and social self-organization through an empirical study on the memorization of a short narrative.