The Iliad and Beowulf provide rich sources of historical information. The novels of Henry Fielding and Henry James may be instructive in the art of moral living. Some go further and argue that Emile Zola and Harriet Beecher Stowe played a part in ameliorating the lives of those existing in harsh circumstances.
However, as Derek Attridge argues in this outstanding and acclaimed book, none of these capacities is distinctive of literature. What is the singularity of literature? Do the terms "literature" and "the literary" refer to actual entities found in cultures at certain times, or are they merely expressions characteristic of such cultures? Attridge argues that this resistance to definition and reduction is not a dead end, but a crucial starting point from which to explore anew the power and practices of Western art.
Derek Attridge provides a rich new vocabulary for literature, rethinking such terms as invention, singularity, otherness, alterity, performance and form. He returns literature to the realm of ethics, and argues for the ethical importance of literature, demonstrating how a new understanding of the literary might be put to work in a 'responsible,' creative mode of reading.
The Singularity of Literature is not only a major contribution to the theory of literature, but also a celebration of the extraordinary pleasure of the literary, for reader, writer, student or critic.
This Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by the author.
By:
Derek Attridge (University of York UK)
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 198mm,
Width: 129mm,
Spine: 10mm
Weight: 260g
ISBN: 9781138701274
ISBN 10: 1138701270
Series: Routledge Classics
Pages: 200
Publication Date: 27 April 2017
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
,
A / AS level
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition * Introductory * Creation and the other * Originality and invention * Inventive language and the literary event * Singularity * Reading and responding * Performance * Form, meaning, context * Responsibility and ethics * An everyday impossibility * Debts and Directions Notes Bibliography Index
Derek Attridge is Professor of English at the University of York, UK. Born in South Africa he is the co-editor, with David Atwell, of The Cambridge History of South African Literature and J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. He has a long-standing involvement in literary theory and the work of Jacques Derrida and is also a well-known as a Joyce scholar, serving for many years as a Trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation. He is the author of Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (2013) and, with Henry Staten, The Craft of Poetry (Routledge 2015). He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Camargo Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Reviews for The Singularity of Literature
"""A deeply important book""—Rob Pope, Language and Literature ""A significant and enduring contribution towards readable, ethically engaged literary criticism"" – Justin Neuman, Journal of Postcolonial Writing ""This book constitutes a timely, rigorous and thought-provoking alternative to the exigencies of politicised criticism"" – Lucy O’Meara, Textual Practice"
