1st Edition

Engagements with Contemporary Literary and Critical Theory

208 Pages

by Routledge

208 Pages

by Routledge

208 Pages

by Routledge

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Description

Engagements with Contemporary Literary and Critical Theory is a wide-ranging but accessible introduction to the key thinkers and theories integral to the study of literature. Organized thematically, the book provides historical introductions and uses a variety of relevant contemporary examples to illuminate the field. Evan Gottlieb contextualizes the latest developments with regard to... Read more

Introduction

Structure of the book and some caveats

References

Forms

Matters of form in the twentieth century

Terry Eagleton: the Marxist critic as public intellectual

Fredric Jameson: committing to form and history

Franco Moretti: maps, graphs, and distant reading

Engaging with classic literature: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park

Engaging with contemporary literature: Ian McEwan’s Atonement

Engaging with film and new media: Austen on the big screen

References

Discourses

Matters of discourse in modernity

Jean Baudrillard: prophet of the postmodern

Giorgio Agamben: a genealogy of biopolitics

Rey Chow: entangling ethnicity, visuality, and language

Engaging with classic literature: Emily Brontё’s Wuthering Heights

Engaging with contemporary literature: Hari Kunzru’s White Tears

Engaging with film and new media: Easy

References

Subjectivities and embodiments

The birth of the subject

Slavoj Žižek: theorizing with psychoanalysis and Marxism

Judith Butler: beyond gender performativity

Catherine Malabou: philosophy, plasticity, neuroscience

Engaging with classic literature: Daniel Defoe’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

Engaging with contemporary literature: Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch

Engaging with film and new media: The Fall

References

Media, networks, machines

Toward our contemporary media moment

Jacques Rancière: aesthetics for everyone

Bruno Latour: from networks to modes of existence and beyond

N. Katherine Hayles: defining the posthuman

Engaging with classic literature: Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Engaging with contemporary literature: Gwyneth Jones’s Proof of Concept

Engaging with film and new media: Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther

References

Animals, affects, objects, environments

We have never been human

Donna Haraway: cyborgs, companion species, Chthulucene

Sara Ahmed: affects, objects, and feminist killjoys

Timothy Morton: being ecological with object-oriented ontology

Engaging with classic literature: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Engaging with contemporary literature: Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation

Engaging with film and new media: Margaret Atwood’s Angel Catbird

References