The Question of Literature: The Place of the Literary in Contemporary Theory

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Elizabeth Beaumont Bissell
Manchester University Press, 2002 - Literary Criticism - 236 pages
As literary theory has grown more influential, interdisciplinary and sophisticated, it has come to concern itself with a much greater range of issues and objects than those traditionally considered literary. It now addresses philosophy, history, psychology, politics and the media. Addressing a central and fundamental, but relatively neglected, issue in literary theory, this title seeks to recontextualise how theory has changed our understanding of literature and its questions by relating literature to the institution of the university, to ethical judgements and values, new media and computer technology and the nature of representative democracy.

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Contents

Introduction Elizabeth Beaumont Bissell
1
difference as definition Charles Altieri
19
literature invention and performance Derek Attridge
48
Sartre Camus and the questions of literature David Carroll
66
Literary force institutional values Timothy Clark
91
The literary as activity in postmodernity Marianne DeKoven
105
The question concerning literature Thomas Docherty
126
Literature as regime meditations on an emergence John Frow
142
Fiction and the experience of the other Peggy Kamuf
156
towards a poetics of hypertext fiction Adrian Page
174
literature under construction Bruce Robbins
190
Literature repeat nothing Robert Smith
207
Index
233
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About the author (2002)

Elizabeth Beaumont Bissell has researched modernist literature and literary theory at Exeter and Hertford Colleges, Oxford, and at Princeton University

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