'Literature' tag archive

Timothy Bewes, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022). 336pp., £28.00 pb., 978 0 23119 2972 A bold question motivates Timothy Bewes’ Free Indirect: Is a non-subjective thought possible? Bewes looks for an answer in recent developments in the novel. His contention is that the novel is a […]

Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 2019). 432pp., £19.99 pb., 978 1 78873 043 3 A concern with allegory as a mode of interpretation rather than as a literary historical description of a moribund genre has been a leitmotif in Fredric Jameson’s thought from Fables of Aggression (1979) and The Political […]

In 1983, Toni Morrison’s classic interview-turned-essay ‘Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation’ was published in Mari Evans’s anthology Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. 1 In the piece, Morrison concerns herself with the figure of the ancestor in African American literature. For her, the ancestor is a ‘distinctive element of African American writing’, and because […]

Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgement and Capitalist Form (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), 416pp., £28.95 hb., 978 0 67498 454 7 ‘[I]f only we could forget for a while about the beautiful and get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy’. In this oft-cited remark, made […]

Kim Stanley Robinson is the author of more than twenty works of fiction, including the celebrated Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars), Forty Signs of Rain, The Years of Rice and Salt, 2312 and, his latest novel, New York 2140. A former student of Fredric Jameson, Robinson’s work is consistently anti-capitalist. His […]

Form, as it is mastered, becomes attenuated; it becomes dissociated from any liturgy, rule, yardstick; the epic is discarded in favour of the novel, verse in favour of prose; there is no longer any orthodoxy, and form is as free as the will of its creator. Gustave Flaubert [1] ‘Just as our literature began with […]

Literary into cultural studies A reply to Martin Ryle Antony Easthope To parody a well-known saying, I shall say that a little formalism turns one away from History, but that a lot brings one back to it. Roland Barthes In ‘Long Live Literature?’ (RP 67) Martin Ryle explores the implications ofthe outcome ofthe crisis in […]

Long Live Literature? Englit, Radical Criticism and Cultural Studies Martin Ry/e Has the time come for ‘English’ as an academic discipline to disappear? A crisis can only last so long, after all, before it becomes terminal (or terminally boring). And ‘English’ has been in a self-proclaimed state of crisis for the last fifteen years, in […]

A Nation, Yet Again The Field Day Anthology Francis Mulhern Anthologies are strategic weapons in literary politics. Authored texts of all kinds – poems, novels, plays, reviews, analyses – play more or less telling parts in a theatre of shifting alliances and antagonisms, but anthologies deploy a special type of rhetorical force: the simulation of […]

Orientalism and After An Interview with Edward Said Edward Said is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York and editor of Arab Studies Quarterly. Best known academically for his book Orientatism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978), which was a milestone in the redefinition of the concerns of literary studies, […]

Writing the Revolution The Politics of Truth in Genet’s Prisoner of Love Simon Critchley , … Saintliness cannot be placed in question. Emmanuel Levinas 1 The last thing Jean Genet’s work needs is another philosopher’s commentary. After Sartre’ s monumental Saint Genet and Derrida’ s equally monumental-although anti-Sartrean -Glas, it might seem prudent, indeed respectful, […]

NEWS SAMUEL BECKETT (1906-1989) “,,:,.,.; ~ ,•. . “‘. “‘… . W ~~ ~:’~..’ .”‘~””:.’ < ~ ,.~ The last days and months of the 1980s were a time of astonishing social and political upheaval. In the midst of these events, news came from Paris, discreetly and quietly, of the death of Samuel Beckett. No […]

The emergency that was and is the AIDS epidemic produced a radical, almost geological reconstruction of the terrain of (homo)sexual politics, a reconstruction that we are only hesitantly coming to terms with. The social trajectory described by the emergent sexual communities in the West, from dubious toleration to the threat of imminent annihilation, was already […]

Obituary J.G. Ballard, 1930–2009 I always suspected that eternity would look like Milton Keynes. J.G. Bal ard (1993) With the recent outpouring of tributes to the late J.G. Ballard on the part of mainstream literary culture, it is easy to forget that he was in the 1970s the recipient of a reader’s report that read […]

In our recent highlight from RP163, David Cunningham examines the relationship between Lukács' 'The Theory of the Novel' and his later Marxist works, and its asks how we are to read this work today.