The discipline of literary studies has a long tradition of borrowing the concepts and methods of related disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences, while also itself exerting a significant influence on other disciplines. In this book, 15 literary scholars hailing from five different countries consider these processes of mutual enrichment from various critical perspectives.

What is the current state of literary studies, and what does the future of this many-faceted field look like? How can the approach of, or trend within, literary studies that each of these scholars represents contribute to literary studies in general? The chapters of the book are revised versions of papers given in June 2016 at a conference entitled “The Future of Literary Studies” at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Oslo. Demonstrating that literary studies constitutes a remarkably active and strikingly diverse area of study and research, the chapters confirm that the field of literary studies is dynamic and open-minded, receiving impulses from other disciplines yet conscious of the characteristics, demands and possibilities appropriate to a discipline in its own right. The book has an introduction by the editor and an afterword by Frederik Tygstrup, University of Copenhagen.

“It is refreshing that this book, situated between ‘state of the art’ and ‘where do we go from there?’ revisits the many approaches to literature that have for long been the staple of the field, simultaneously with due respect and a critical edge. Taking on board the more recent attention to issues of inequality and injustice so rampant in the contemporary world, the tense of this book seems to be ‘the future is now.’”


Mieke Bal

Cultural analyst, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, video artist and occasional curator; former Academy Professor of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.


Jakob Lothe is professor of English literature at the University of Oslo.


Contents

Acknowledgments

Jakob Lothe
Introduction

Robert Crawford
Life, Writing

Kjersti Bale
Reading Literature Historically

Johan Schimanski
Reading from the Border

Elleke Boehmer
The Politics and Poetics of Postcolonial Critique

Michael Lundblad
The Future of Reading: Animality, Illness, and the Politics of Critique

Thomas Pavel
Literature, Ideals, and Values

Henrik Skov Nielsen
Fictionality as Intentionally Signaled Invention in Communication

James Phelan
The Explanatory Power of Rhetorical Poetics

Hanna Meretoja
Narrative Hermeneutics and the Ethical Potential of Literature

Unni Langås
Literary Studies and the Challenge of Trauma

Ellen Mortensen
Re-Orientations in Feminist Theory

Erik Tonning
Genetic Manuscript Studies and the Archival Reader

Paul B. Armstrong
Embodied Cognition and the Nature of Narrative

Cassandra Falke
Everything its Own: Readers, Freedom and Class

Asbjørn Grønstad
Remediation, Ethics and the Transaesthetic

Frederik Tygstrup
Afterword

Contributors

Index


ISBN 978-82-7099-900-2, 245 pp., hard cover
Format: 16x22 cm, weight 0,6 kg, year of publication 2017, language: English