Elegy for Literature

(Paperback)

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The first chapter is an overview of the current crisis of literary study, brought about by downsizings following the crash of 2008 (from which literary studies never really recovered), compounded by the Covid pandemic, and rocked by the bedrock questions put to the academic study of literature by the Black Lives Matter protests. This chapter also looks at why theory matters in the present as an introduction to modes of questioning and ways of life, which the author opposes to the English departments understanding of literature as a series of disciplinary objects to be understood or appreciated.

The second chapter is a specific exploration of the novel, the current reigning form of literature and literary study in both popular and academic contexts, and the novels relation to the present (of new materialism) and the past (the European history of the novel as the official form for warehousing bourgeois subjective experience). If new materialism (including anti-racist critiques) questions the world-view of bourgeois Eurocentric humanism, it also brings into question the centrality of that world views primary artistic form, the novel.

Author Bio

Jeffrey T. Nealon is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Philosophy at Penn State University. He is author of numerous books in literary and social theory.