The question of literature The place of the literary in contemporary theory

by Bissell, Elizabeth Beaumont

• ISBN13: 9780719057458
• ISBN10: 0719057450
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-10-31
• Publisher: Manchester University Press

Summary

This book seeks to recontextualize literature and the literary within the full diversity of postmodern theory. It relates literature to the institution of the university, to ethical judgements and values, new media and computer technology, and the nature of representative democracy.

Author Biography

Beaumont E. Bissell has done research on Modernist Literature and Literary Theory at Exeter and Hertford Colleges, Oxford, and at Princeton University.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	vii
Acknowledgements	xi
Introduction	1	(18)
Elizabeth Beaumont Bissell
The literary and the ethical: difference as definition	19	(29)
Charles Altieri
Singular events: literature, invention, and performance	48	(18)
Derek Attridge
The post-literary condition: Sartre, Camus, and the question(s) of literature	66	(25)
David Carroll
Literary force, institutional values	91	(14)
Timothy Clark
The literary as activity in postmodernity	105	(21)
Marianne DeKoven
The question concerning literature	126	(16)
Thomas Docherty
Literature as regime (meditations on an emergence)	142	(14)
John Frow
`Fiction' and the experience of the other	156	(18)
Peggy Kamuf
Constructing Xanadu: towards a poetics of hypertext fiction	174	(16)
Adrian Page
Pretend what you like: literature under construction	190	(17)
Bruce Robbins
Literature -- repeat nothing	207	(26)
Robert Smith
Index	233