Description
Book SynopsisDrawing on a global history of politicized writing, this book explores literature's utility as a mode of activism and aesthetic engagement with the political challenges of the current moment.
The question of literature's uses' has recently become a key topic of academic and public debate. Paradoxically, however, these conversations often tend to bypass the rich history of engagements with literature's distinctly political uses that form such a powerful current of 20th- and 21st-century artistic production and critical-theoretical reflection.
The Political Uses of Literature reopens discussion of literature's political and activist genealogies along several interrelated lines: As a foundational moment, it draws attention to the important body of interwar politicized literature and to debates about literature's ability to intervene in social reality. It then traces the mobilization of related conversations and artistic practices across several histo
Trade Review
An absorbing, richly textured, and innovative study that engages a welcome range of voices and geographical sites. The Political Uses of Literature opens new perspectives on literature and activism of the past 100 years, sensitively illuminating the local specificities and shifting historical conjunctures shaping the purposes to which politicized art has been put in transnational movements and theoretical conversations. * Nicole Simek, Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature, Whitman College, USA *
This is a timely and necessary book that presents a compelling case for re-establishing political purpose as central to artistic production. The breadth of its focus marks it out as a landmark contribution to the comparative analysis of international political writing. * Nick Hubble, Professor of Modern and Contemporary English, Brunel University London, *
Kohlmann and Perica’s edition offers a most welcome resource, in one volume, shoring up the contemporary in relation to prior understandings of the 'political uses' of literature. Portable, and providing expert (suitably targeted) coverage, The Political Uses of Literature leads its emerging field by virtue of effective consolidation. * Stuart Christie, Professor of English Language and Literature, Hong Kong Baptist University, China *
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Introduction Ivana Perica (University of Vienna, Austria) and Benjamin Kohlmann (University of Regensburg, Germany) Part I: Revolution, Internationalism and Literary Politics: Interwar Paradigms 1. Marxists Out of Work: Literature and the Useless in Interwar India Benjamin Conisbee Baer (Princeton University, USA) 2. Politics and Literature on the Peruvian Periphery: Realism and Experimentation in the Works of César Vallejo and José Carlos Mariátegui Juan E. De Castro (The New School, USA) 3. Reusing Artaud? On the Contemporaneity of Messages révolutionnaires (1936) Sandra Fluhrer (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and University of California-Berkeley, USA) 4. On the German Popular Front and the Novel in Historical and International Context Hunter Bivens (University of California-Santa Cruz, USA) 5. Narrative Struggle: "Good" and "Bad" Uses of Literature in the Committed Novel of the 1930s (Aragon, Dos Passos) Aurore Peyroles (University of Regensburg, Germany) 6. Moscow, 1934 – Yan’an, 1942: The Manifesto as Lived Experience Steven Lee (University of California-Berkeley, USA) Part II: Politicizing Theory and Literary Practice in the Global 1960s: Inflection Points 7. Militant Structures of Feeling: Raymond Williams, Claude Lefort, and Workers' Inquiry Daniel Hartley (Durham University, UK) 8. Solidarity in Black and White J. Daniel Elam (University of Hong Kong) 9. Notes from the Underground, or: Why and How Was Non-Marxist Theory Resisted by Non-Marxists in a Totalitarian Society Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary University of London, UK) 10. Workshops of Abolition: Attica Print Culture and Small Press Poetry Mark Nowak (Manhattanville College, USA) 11. An Autofictional Intervention into Working-Class Literature: Karin Struck’s Klassenliebe and the Werkkreis Literatur der Arbeitswelt Christoph Schaub (University of Vechta, Germany) 12. Feminism and Progressive Writing in Twentieth-Century India Ulka Anjaria (Brandeis University, USA) Section III: The Political Uses of Literature Today: Legacies and Departures 13. Cultural Politics after the Arab Spring: A New Lotus for a New World? Maryam Fatima (University of Massachusetts-Amherst, USA) 14. Segments of a Larger Narrative: Political Formalism and Working-Class Story Cycles Dirk Wiemann (University of Potsdam) 15. Sedimented Reading Habits? The Future Utopia in Contemporary African Science and Speculative Fiction Peter Maurits (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany) 16. Literary Activism in Contemporary Africa: Praxis, Publics and the Shifting Landscapes of the ‘Literary’ Madhu Krishnan (University of Bristol, UK) Notes of Contributors Index
