There is no shortage of testimony to literature's puzzling, unsettling, intoxicating, affecting, delighting powers. Nor has there been a shortage of attempts to define literature as a concept, a body of texts or a cultural practice. However, no definition has been able to pin down the peculiarity of literature or to chart our experience of the literary. In this volume, Derek Attridge ask us to confront with him the resistance to definition in order to explore afresh the singularity of literature. (...) In seeking new purchase on the elusive "literary", the author finds himself reflecting upon the history of Western art as a practice and as an institution. At its heart he finds a closely linked trinity of crucial issues: innovation or invention , the uniqueness or singularity of the artwork and, underlying these, the concept of otherness or alterity. Calling for a type of reading that does justice to these aspects of the literary work, he explores literature as event or performance and brilliantly retheorizes its place in the realm of the ethical. The author acknowledges the impossibility of definition and rather offers us an account of his particular "living-through" of the literary in the terms above and invites us to share with him the insights it might offer. The insights in this case are invaluable, as we are offered not only an original framework within which to consider texts, but a clear case for the ethical value of the literary institution to a culture. Never losing sight of the pleasures and potency of our experience of literature, The Singularity of Literature is itself a delight to read. Returning to arguments begun in his influential volume Peculiar Language , Derek Attridge here energizes discussion of the literary by forever shifting the terms of debate and offering new perspectives on questions that haunt every reader. (shrink)
Recent developments in literary theory, such as structuralism and deconstruction, have come under attack for neglecting history, while historically-based approaches have been criticized for failing to take account of the problems inherent in their methodological foundations. This collection of essays is unique in that it focuses on the relation between post-structuralism and historical (especially Marxist) literary theory and criticism. The volume includes a deconstructive reading of Marx, essays that relate history to the philosophical and institutional context, and a number of (...) studies of particular texts, literary and non-literary, which pose the question of history and literary theory with particular force. (shrink)
The Philosophy of Literature offers an opportunity to consider the gap between the analytic and the continental traditions of aesthetics. In particular, Lamarque's survey fails to take account of the possibility that literature is an institution and a practice that challenges the conventions of instrumental rationality, a position held by a number of continental philosophers who have written on art. It also pays little attention to the reader's experience of the inventiveness of the literary work, preferring to represent the reading (...) of literature as a matter of conventions confirmed. An alternative understanding of the literary work as an event that opens up new possibilities for the reader, put forward in the author's recent book, The Singularity of Literature, is sketched. (shrink)
In an important lecture on the function of the Humanities, ‘The University without Condition’, Jacques Derrida asks what it means to ‘profess’ the truth and advocates a commitment to the oeuvre – the work that constitutes an event rather than just a contribution to knowledge. I examine a few phrases from the lecture, focusing on questions of the unconditional, the ‘as if’, singularity, the future, and the impossible.
In The Singularity of Literature, Derek Attridge gives us a brilliant and engaging reflection on how to think literature in terms of the singularity of its event, an event which happens as a complex relating between the work and its reading/ interpretation. The virtues of this smart and impressive book are many, and not least among them is the clarity and accessibility of Attridge's writing, which lets his text appeal not just to scholars of literature and literary theory but also (...) to undergraduates and even an interested wider public. As the title suggests, the book's focus is on what makes literature singular, that is, different from other arts but also from other forms of writing; in short, Attridge is interested in what gives literature and the experience of reading and interpreting it their specificity, that is, their "literariness" or literary character. On the other hand, the title also indicates the parameters of Attridge's definition of the literary work as an always singular event of its reading. The view proposed by Attridge underscores the verbal happening or enactment, which characterizes the literary work. The work of literature is to be seen as an event, which involves the text and its reader(s) in a complicated and creative cultural, historical, and temporal relating. (shrink)
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. (shrink)
