Flaubert, Foucault, and the Bibliotheque Fantastique: Toward a Postmodern Epistemology for Library Science,

Positivist concepts of knowledge, meaning, and communication, dominant within the discourse of library and information science, are facing a crisis : they are unable to adequately characterize and structure the experience of interacting with and within the modern academic library. This article addresses the issue of epistemology and library and information science by considering Michel Foucault's (1967/1977) essay La Bibliotheque fantastique which is a work of literary criticism rather than a scientific analysis. The usefulness of considering the library experience from the point of view of literary criticism lies in its potential to provide an alternative perspective from which the rationalistic assumptions of a positivistic epistemology can be foregrounded, transcended, and critiqued, along with the conception of the academic library which it supports. Following a brief account of the implications of the positivist perspective for conceptualizing the modern library experience, this article will offer an alternative postmodern epistemology from which library scholars can rethink traditional notions of the library, librarian and, most importantly, library users.