The Values of Literary Studies
The Values of Literary Studies
What is valuable about literary studies? What is its point and purpose? In The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas, leading scholars in the field illuminate both the purpose and priorities of literary criticism. At a time when the humanities are increasingly called upon to justify themselves, this book seeks to clarify their myriad values and ideologies. Engaging the idea of literary value while at the same time remaining attuned to aesthetic, ethical, political and psychological principles, this book serves to underscore the enduring significance of literary studies in an academic climate that is ostensibly concerned with expediency and quantification. As a sophisticated examination of literary theory and criticism, The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas provides a comprehensive and hopeful view of where the discipline is now and what avenues it is likely to take from here.
- Features some of the most eminent scholars of literature and cultural theory in the world
- Engages with a pressing issue across the humanities: the need to articulate their value and social good
- A state of the discipline study of interest to all academics in the field of literature and the wider humanities
Reviews & endorsements
'The value of this book and its timeliness in a culture that increasingly emphasises the exchange value of academic study (in the name of impact, transferable skills and value for money) may just involve the many ways in which its contributors argue for the non-instrumentalist transformative power of the literary as itself underpinning the values of literary studies.' Andrew Bennett, Textual Practice
'The collection The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas is a timely and important response to the question: what is the value of literary studies? … these essays offer diverse approaches that firmly attest to literary studies' value in generating ways to critically evaluate and reimagine the self and the world.' Michelle Chiang, Journal of Modern Literature
Product details
November 2015Paperback
9781107575684
275 pages
228 × 153 × 17 mm
0.42kg
Available
Table of Contents
- 1. The value of criticism and the project of modernism Anthony Cascardi
- 2. Caprice: individual subjectivity in literary criticism Helen Small
- 3. The phenomenology of literary valuation Charles Altieri
- 4. Literature is history: aesthetic time and the ethics of literary will Alan Singer
- 5. Dead on arrival: time and the value of old books Kathleen McLuskie
- 6. The price of value Christopher Nealon
- 7. To shelter the nothing that happens Julian Murphet
- 8. When literary criticism mattered Simon During
- 9. Literature among the objects of modernist criticism: value, medium, genre James Chandler
- 10. 'Value!': Psychoanalysis, value, literature Jean-Michel Rabaté
- 11. Afterlives of comparison: literature, equivalence, value Natalie Melas
- 12. Feminism, gender and the literary commons Robin Truth Goodman
- 13. The value of world-making in global literacy studies Debjani Ganguly
- 14. Multiple versions of fictional minds: manuscript research, digital editing and enactive cognition in literary studies Dirk van Hulle
- 15. After suspicion: surface, method, value Rónán McDonald
- 16. Literary experience and the value of criticism Derek Attridge.
