Politics of LiteratureISBN: 978-0-7456-4530-8
Hardcover
248 pages
February 2011, Polity
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The politics of literature is not the same as the politics of
writers and their commitments, nor does it concern the way writers
represent social structures or political struggles. The expression
'politics of literature' assumes that there is a specific
connection between politics as a form of collective practice and
literature as a historically determined regime of the art of
writing. It implies that literature intervenes in the parceling out
of space and time, place and identity, speech and noise, the
visible and the invisible, that is the arena of the political.
This book seeks to show how the literary revolution shatters the perceptible order that underpinned traditional hierarchies, but also why literary equality foils any bid to place literature in the service of politics or in its place. It tests its hypotheses on certain writers: Flaubert, Tolstoy, Hugo, Mallarmé, Brecht and Borges, to name a few. It also shows the consequences of this for psychoanalytical intepretation, historical narration and philosophical conceptualization.