Politics of literature
By: Jacques Rancière ; translated by Julie Rose
Contributors: Rose, Julie, 1952-
Publisher: Polity
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Cambridge; Malden, MA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 215
ISBN-13: 9780745645308; 9780745645315
Subjects: Literature; Philosophy; Politics and literature
Work titles: Politique de la littérature
Description: The politics of literature is not the same as the politics of writers and their commitments, nor does it concern the way writers represent social structures or political struggles. The expression 'politics of literature' assumes that there is a specific connection between politics as a form of collective practice and literature as a historically determined regime of the art of writing. It implies that literature intervenes in the parceling out of space and time, place and identity, speech and noise, the visible and the invisible, that is the arena of the political. This book seeks to show how the literary revolution shatters the perceptible order that underpinned traditional hierarchies, but also why literary equality foils any bid to place literature in the service of politics or in its place. It tests its hypotheses on certain writers: Flaubert, Tolstoy, Hugo, Mallarmé, Brecht and Borges, to name a few. It also shows the consequences of this for psychoanalytical intepretation, historical narration and philosophical conceptualization. -- Publisher description.
Notes: First published in French as : Politique de la littérature.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

In English translated from the French.
Table of contents: title: Hypotheses. The politics of literature ; Literary misunderstanding; title: Figures. The putting to death of Emma Bovary : literature, democracy, and medicine. On the battlefield : Tolstoy, literature, history ; The intruder : Mallarmé's politics ; The gay science of Bertolt Brecht ; Borges and French disease; title: Crossings. The truth through the window : literary truth, Freudian truth ; The historian, literature and the genre of biography ; The poet at the philosopher's : Mallarmé and Badiou.