The Ends of Literature

The Ends of Literature PDF Author: Brett Levinson
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804743464
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
The Ends of Literature analyzes the part played by literature within contemporary Latin American thought and politics, above all the politics of neoliberalism. The "why?" of contemporary Latin American literature is the book's overarching concern. Its wide range includes close readings of the prose of Cortázar, Carpentier, Paz, Valenzuela, Piglia, and Las Casas; of the relationship of the "Boom" movement and its aftermath; of testimonial narrative; and of contemporary Chilean and Chicano film. The work also investigates in detail various theoretical projects as they intersect with and emerge from Latin American scholarship: cultural studies, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial studies. Latin American literature, both as a vehicle of conservatism and as an agent of subversion, is bound from its inception to the rise of the state. Literature's nature, role, and status are therefore altered when the Latin American nation-state succumbs to the process of neoliberalism: as the "too-strong" state (dictatorship) yields to the "too-weak" state (the market), and as the various practices of civil society and public life are replaced by private or privatized endeavors. However, neither the "end of literature" nor the "end of the state" can be assumed. The end of literature in Latin America is in fact the call for more literature; it is the call of literature, in particular that of the Boom. The end of the state, likewise, is the demand upon this state. The book, then, analyzes the "ends" in question as at once their purpose, direction, future, and conclusion. Also key to the study is the notion of transition. Within much recent Latin American political discussion la transición refers to the passage from dictatorship to democracy, as well as to the failure of this shift, the failure of post-dictatorship. The author argues that the movement from literary to cultural studies, while issuing from intellectual and aesthetic circles, is an integral component of this same transition. The thematization of the bind between these two displacements—hence of Latin America's voyage into "post-transition"—forms a fundamental portion of the text.

The Ends of Literature

The Ends of Literature PDF Author: Brett Levinson
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804743464
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book

Book Description
The Ends of Literature analyzes the part played by literature within contemporary Latin American thought and politics, above all the politics of neoliberalism. The "why?" of contemporary Latin American literature is the book's overarching concern. Its wide range includes close readings of the prose of Cortázar, Carpentier, Paz, Valenzuela, Piglia, and Las Casas; of the relationship of the "Boom" movement and its aftermath; of testimonial narrative; and of contemporary Chilean and Chicano film. The work also investigates in detail various theoretical projects as they intersect with and emerge from Latin American scholarship: cultural studies, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial studies. Latin American literature, both as a vehicle of conservatism and as an agent of subversion, is bound from its inception to the rise of the state. Literature's nature, role, and status are therefore altered when the Latin American nation-state succumbs to the process of neoliberalism: as the "too-strong" state (dictatorship) yields to the "too-weak" state (the market), and as the various practices of civil society and public life are replaced by private or privatized endeavors. However, neither the "end of literature" nor the "end of the state" can be assumed. The end of literature in Latin America is in fact the call for more literature; it is the call of literature, in particular that of the Boom. The end of the state, likewise, is the demand upon this state. The book, then, analyzes the "ends" in question as at once their purpose, direction, future, and conclusion. Also key to the study is the notion of transition. Within much recent Latin American political discussion la transición refers to the passage from dictatorship to democracy, as well as to the failure of this shift, the failure of post-dictatorship. The author argues that the movement from literary to cultural studies, while issuing from intellectual and aesthetic circles, is an integral component of this same transition. The thematization of the bind between these two displacements—hence of Latin America's voyage into "post-transition"—forms a fundamental portion of the text.

The End of Literature, Hegel, and the Contemporary Novel

The End of Literature, Hegel, and the Contemporary Novel PDF Author: Francesco Campana
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030313956
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
This book explores the concept of the end of literature through the lens of Hegel's philosophy of art. In his version of Hegel's 'end of art' thesis, Arthur Danto claimed that contemporary art has abandoned its distinctive sensitive and emotive features to become increasingly reflective. Contemporary art has become a question of philosophical reflection on itself and on the world, thus producing an epochal change in art history. The core idea of this book is that this thesis applies quite well to all forms of art except one, namely literature: literature resists its 'end'. Unlike other arts, which have experienced significant fractures in the contemporary world, Campana proposes that literature has always known how to renew itself in order to retain its distinguishing features, so much so that in a way it has always come to terms with its own end. Analysing the distinct character of literature, this book proposes a new and original interpretation of the 'end of art' thesis, showing how it can be used as a key conceptual framework to understand the contemporary novel.

The Event of Literature

The Event of Literature PDF Author: Terry Eagleton
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300178816
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Offers a thorough examination of the philosophy of literature, looking at the place of literature in human culture, what literature can be defined as and much more.

Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel

Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel PDF Author: P. Vermeulen
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781137414526
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book explores the paradoxical productivity of the idea of the end of the novel in contemporary fiction. It shows how this idea allows some of our most significant twenty-first century writers to re-imagine the ethics and politics of literature and to figure intractable forms of life and affect.

Richard Ford and the Ends of Realism

Richard Ford and the Ends of Realism PDF Author: Ian McGuire
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609383435
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
"An original exploration of the work of writer Richard Ford in the context of its place within contemporary debates about the possible role, meaning of, and value of literary realism in a postmodern age"--

The Death of Literature

The Death of Literature PDF Author: Alvin B. Kernan
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300052381
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Looks at political and critical attacks on literature, suggests that traditional literature is no longer useful to our technological society, and argues that a new concept of literature is needed

Sacrificing Commentary

Sacrificing Commentary PDF Author: Sandor Goodhart
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
To support his argument, Goodhart offers a close analysis of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, Shakespeare's Richard II, four passages from the Hebrew Torah (the story of Joseph and his brothers, the Ten Commandments, the story of Jonah, and the story of Job), and a talk given shortly after the war by Yiddish poet and playwright Halpern Leivick. Goodhart concludes that criticism as we know it within a formal academic humanities setting, far from expounding the critical reading a given work makes available to us, more often acts out or repeats the very structures or conflicts that are its subject matter.

Modernism à la Mode

Modernism à la Mode PDF Author: Elizabeth M. Sheehan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501728156
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Modernism à la Mode argues that fashion describes why and how literary modernism matters in its own historical moment and ours. Bringing together texts, textiles, and theories of dress, Elizabeth Sheehan shows that writers, including Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, W.E.B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, turned to fashion to understand what their own stylized works could do in the context of global capital, systemic violence, and social transformation. Modernists engage with fashion as a mood, a set of material objects, and a target of critique, and, in doing so, anticipate and address contemporary debates centered on the uses of literature and literary criticism amidst the supposed crisis in the humanities. A modernist affect with a purpose, no less. By engaging modernism à la mode—that is, contingently, contextually, and in light of contemporary concerns—this book offers an alternative to the often-untenable distinctions between strong or weak, suspicious or reparative, and politically activist or quietist approaches to literature, which frame current debates about literary methodology. As fashion helps us to describe what modernist texts do, it enables us to do more with modernism as a form of inquiry, perception, and critique. Fashion and modernism are interwoven forms of inquiry, perception, and critique, writes Sheehan. It is fashion that puts the work of early twentieth-century writers in conversation with twenty-first century theories of emotion, materiality, animality, beauty, and history.

The Use and Abuse of Literature

The Use and Abuse of Literature PDF Author: Marjorie Garber
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307277127
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
In this deep and engaging meditation on the usefulness and uselessness of reading in the digital age, Harvard English professor Marjorie Garber aims to reclaim “literature” from the periphery of our personal, educational, and professional lives and restore it to the center, as a radical way of thinking. But what is literature anyway, how has it been understood over time, and what is its relevance for us today? Who gets to decide what the word means? Why has literature been on the defensive since Plato? Does it have any use at all, other than serving as bourgeois or aristocratic accoutrements attesting to one’s worldly sophistication and refinement of spirit? What are the boundaries that separate it from its “commercial” instance and from other more mundane kinds of writing? Is it, as most of us assume, good to read, much less study—and what would that mean?

The Lost Second Book of Aristotle's "Poetics"

The Lost Second Book of Aristotle's Author: Walter Watson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226875083
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Of all the writings on theory and aesthetics - ancient, medieval, or modern - the most important is indisputably Aristotle's "Poetics", the first philosophical treatise to propound a theory of literature. The author offers a fresh interpretation of the lost second book of Aristotle's "Poetics".