Summary
Contents
Subject index
Reading Literature Today is a path-breaking intervention in current debates on reading and literature. This is a book of criticism that attempts to rescue literature from both the materialism of the market and the convoluted dryness of academia.
The two complementary essaysone on literature and the other on readingfocus largely on texts in English and French, but also refer to other literatures. The authors propose a way of reading literature that not only synthesizes some earlier tendencies and puts them in context, but also propounds a revolutionary understanding of the nature of literature and reading.
The writers taken up for discussion include William Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Marcel Proust, Charles Baudelaire, Franz Kafka, William Burroughs, Dylan Thomas, Attia Hosain, Albert Wendt, Zadie Smith, Philip Hensher, Mohsin Hamid and many others.
Written in the great and dying tradition of literary essays on literature and criticism, this is a bold and ground-breaking book by two exciting writers who believe in reading literature.
What Can Be Said and What Cannot Be Said
What Can Be Said and What Cannot Be Said
Let us look at other examples of how literature presses against the historical and ontological limits of language. Let us take, for instance, one of the simplest ways in which a literary text can press the borders of language: the statement of a ‘reality’ that cannot be really put in words. O. Henry's much-anthologised short story, ‘The Gift of the Magi’, works on that basis.
Jim and Della are a young couple with very little money to buy each other a Christmas present. The story begins with that which is lacking in their relationship, money:
One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in ...
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