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 Here

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 Here

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

Get Book Here

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.

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

Get Book Here

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 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

Get Book Here

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".

An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory

An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory PDF Author: Andrew Bennett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317313127
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Get Book Here

Book Description
Lively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at ‘The Beginning’ and concluding with ‘The End’, chapters range from the familiar, such as ‘Character’, ‘Narrative’ and ‘The Author’, to the more unusual, such as ‘Secrets’, ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Ghosts’. Now in its fifth edition, Bennett and Royle’s classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works, so that a reading of Jane Eyre opens up ways of thinking about racial difference, for example, while Chaucer, Raymond Chandler and Monty Python are all invoked in a discussion of literature and laughter. The fifth edition has been revised throughout and includes four new chapters – ‘Feelings’, ‘Wounds’, ‘Body’ and ‘Love’ – to incorporate exciting recent developments in literary studies. In addition to further reading sections at the end of each chapter, the book contains a comprehensive bibliography and a glossary of key literary terms. A breath of fresh air in a field that can often seem dry and dauntingly theoretical, this book will open the reader’s eyes to the exhilarating possibilities of reading and studying literature.

The Ends of Mourning

The Ends of Mourning PDF Author: Alessia Ricciardi
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804747776
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Ends of Mourning explores from an interdisciplinary perspective the contemporary crisis of mourning. In an age skeptical of history and memory, we relate to the past only as a spectacle, a product to be consumed in the cultural marketplace. The book charts the emergence and development of the problem of mourning in the writings of Freud, Proust, and Freud's successor Lacan. Freud's idea of "sorrow work" and Proust's concept of involuntary memory defined the terms of the classic modernist account of mourning in the fields of psychoanalysis and literature. Yet their insistence on the egotistical aspects of loss to the exclusion of all ethical and political considerations threatens the dissolution of the question of mourning.

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

Get Book Here

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.

Tales of Futures Past

Tales of Futures Past PDF Author: Paola Iovene
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804791600
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book Here

Book Description
Most studies of Chinese literature conflate the category of the future with notions of progress and nation building, and with the utopian visions broadcast by the Maoist and post-Mao developmental state. The future is thus understood as a preconceived endpoint that is propagated, at times even imposed, by a center of power. By contrast, Tales of Futures Past introduces "anticipation"—the expectations that permeate life as it unfolds—as a lens through which to reexamine the textual, institutional, and experiential aspects of Chinese literary culture from the 1950s to 2011. In doing so, Paola Iovene connects the emergence of new literary genres with changing visions of the future in contemporary China. This book provides a nuanced and dynamic account of the relationship between state discourses, market pressures, and individual writers and texts. It stresses authors' and editors' efforts to redefine what constitutes literature under changing political and economic circumstances. Engaging with questions of translation, temporality, formation of genres, and stylistic change, Iovene mines Chinese science fiction and popular science, puts forward a new interpretation of familiar Chinese avant-garde fiction, and offers close readings of texts that have not yet received any attention in English-language scholarship. Far-ranging in its chronological scope and impressive in its interdisciplinary approach, this book rethinks the legacies of socialism in postsocialist Chinese literary modernity.

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

Get Book Here

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

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

Get Book Here

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.