EBOOK
About
In this path-breaking new work, Gregory Jusdanis asks why literature matters. Why are we afraid to admit our pleasures of reading, to defend the arts to the school board, to discuss the importance of literature in life? Drawing on a wealth of references from Aristophanes to Eudora Welty, from Fernando Pessoa to Orhan Pamuk, from Cavafy to hypertext stories, Jusdanis reminds us that the arts have always been under attack. Instead of despair, however, he offers a pragmatic defense of literature, arguing that it performs a social function in dramatizing the break between illusion and reality, life and the life-like, permanence and metamorphosis. The ability to distinguish between the actual and the imaginary is essential to human beings. Our capacity to imagine something new, to project ourselves into the mind of another person, and to fight for a new world is based on this distinction. Literature allows us to imagine alternate possibilities of human relationships and political institutions, even in the watery world of the Internet. At once daring and lucid, Fiction Agonistes considers the place of art today with passion and optimism.
Related Subjects
Reviews
"Jusdanis displays a wonderfully encyclopedic knowledge of criticism and literature from the ancient Greeks to contemporary postmodern and post-structuralist writers…Jusdanis has laid forth a provocative and interesting reflection on the current state of literature and its place in the world…For anyone interested in the art of letters, Fiction Agonistes is a worthwhile read."
Global Comment
"Fiction Agonistes is a formidable work: wide-ranging, erudite, and incisive in its entire range of argument. It represents a powerful effort to think through the issues that have surrounded the academic debate about the study of literature and to arrive at a full understanding of its centrality to the institutional processes of human life, and most especially to the reflective consciousness upon
Harvard University
"All in all, Jusdanis' insightful study offers a thought-provoking and important contribution to the debate on why literature matters. One of the strengths of the book lies in his lucid disentanglement of various conceptions subsumed under the slogan of art's death and his subsequent knowledgeable interrogation of these in light of the parabatic. His insightful observations invite further research
Journal of Literary Theory