The question of literature

The place of the literary in contemporary theory

Edited by Elizabeth Beaumont-Bissell

Publication date:

31 October 2002

Length of book:

256 pages

Publisher

Manchester University Press

Dimensions:

216x138mm

ISBN-13: 9780719057458

BOOK DESCRIPTION
TABLE OF CONTENTS

As literary theory has grown more influential, interdisciplinary and sophisticated, it has come to concern itself with a much greater range of issues and objects than those traditionally considered literary. It now addresses philosophy, history, psychology, politics and the media. Addressing a central and fundamental, but relatively neglected, issue in literary theory, this title seeks to recontextualise how theory has changed our understanding of literature and its questions by relating literature to the institution of the university, to ethical judgements and values, new media and computer technology and the nature of representative democracy.

1. Introduction
2. The literary and the ethical: difference as definition – Charles Altieri
3. Singular events: literature, invention, and performance – Derek Attridge
4. The post-literary condition: Sartre, Camus and the question(s) of literature – David Carroll
5. Literary force, institutional values – Timothy Clark
6. The literary as activity in postmodernity – Marianne DeKoven
7. The question concerning literature – Thomas Dochertty
8. Literature as regime (meditiations on an emergence) – John Frow
9. 'Fiction' and the experience of the other – Peggy Kamuf
10. Constructing Xanadu: towards a poetics of hypertext fiction – Adrian Page
11. Pretend what youlike: literature under construction – Bruce Robbins
12. Literature – repeat nothing – Robert Smith