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)

This essay explains what Blanchot understands as writing and the space of literature. For Blanchot, writing is the place where the impossible interruption of the destiny of things is put into play, an interruption that world-formation needs but negates and conceals. Writing belongs to an excess outside of language, an otherness of language. The need to write is linked to the point at which nothing can be done with words. Writing is contrasted with dialectical language and the totalizing aim of (...) the Hegelian system. The essay explains the connection between the disaster of writing (after the holocaust), the neuter and fragmentary style of writing and the passivity of writing. (shrink)

This is the first book-length attempt to find the answer, by one author, since Sartre in his 1948 book with the same title.

The relationship of words to the things they represent and to the mind that forms them has long been the subject of linguistic enquiry. Joseph Graham's challenging book takes this debate into the field of literary theory, making a searching enquiry into the nature of literary representation. It reviews the arguments of Plato's Cratylus on how words signify things, and of Chomsky's theory of the innate "natural" status of language (contrasted with Saussure's notion of its essential arbitrariness). In the process, (...) Graham explores the issues of meaning and intentionality in representation, and questions of how the mind represents the world. Graham's use of linguistic theories and models leads him to a new response to Wimsatt's notion of the verbal icon, Stanley Fish's concept of literature as self-consuming artifact, and de Man's idea of its function as an allegory of reading. In showing them in fact to be complementary, he transcends the current controversies among literary theorists, arguing that the solution lies not in epistemology or philosophy, but in psychology and the study of how literature teaches and why humans learn best by example. (shrink)

The paper argues that there is a proper place for literature within aesthetics but that care must be taken in identifying just what the relation is. In characterising aesthetic pleasure associated with literature it is all too easy to fall into reductive accounts, for example, of literature as merely “fine writing”. Belleslettrist or formalistic accounts of literature are rejected, as are two other kinds of reduction, to pure meaning properties and to a kind of narrative realism. The idea is developed (...) that literature—both poetry and prose fiction—invites its own distinctive kind of aesthetic appreciation which far from being at odds with critical practice, in fact chimes well with it. (shrink)

This new edition of "What is Literature?" also collects three other crucial essays of Sartre's for the first time in a volume of his.