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Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature / Binding Violence: Literary Visions of Political Origins / The Limits of Ferocity: Sexual Aggression and Modern Literary Rebellion

Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature / Binding Violence: Literary Visions of... The novel . By Jonathan Jonathan Arac is passionately devoted to impurity. In his recent essays on the history of the novel, his brief against Pascal Casanova's The World Republic of Letters is shaped in large part by his distrust of the notion of literary autonomy. Such autonomy, rather than a consummation devoutly to be wished, seems to him both an elitist notion predicated on protecting cultural values from the demotic hordes and an equally depressing mark of literature's irrelevance. Anything easily made "autonomous" from the culture at large, he argues in a 2008 piece in New Literary History, is likely either an endangered species or already obsolete. Arac even offers up a creed: "If I must choose between high autonomy and low commerce, history teaches me to take the low road. I join the world in choosing low performers over the critics who looked down on them" (754). Does Impure Worlds make a passionate case against autonomy and for, as one of his section headings puts it, "Language and Reality in the Age of the Novel"? Well, yes and no. This is a collection of essays from a lifetime of learning: Arac has been a distinguished Americanist http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Literature Duke University Press

Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature / Binding Violence: Literary Visions of Political Origins / The Limits of Ferocity: Sexual Aggression and Modern Literary Rebellion

Dawes, J.
Comparative Literature , Volume 64 (4) – Sep 21, 2012
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright © Duke Univ Press
ISSN
0010-4124
eISSN
1945-8517
DOI
10.1215/00104124-1891450
Publisher site
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Abstract

The novel . By Jonathan Jonathan Arac is passionately devoted to impurity. In his recent essays on the history of the novel, his brief against Pascal Casanova's The World Republic of Letters is shaped in large part by his distrust of the notion of literary autonomy. Such autonomy, rather than a consummation devoutly to be wished, seems to him both an elitist notion predicated on protecting cultural values from the demotic hordes and an equally depressing mark of literature's irrelevance. Anything easily made "autonomous" from the culture at large, he argues in a 2008 piece in New Literary History, is likely either an endangered species or already obsolete. Arac even offers up a creed: "If I must choose between high autonomy and low commerce, history teaches me to take the low road. I join the world in choosing low performers over the critics who looked down on them" (754). Does Impure Worlds make a passionate case against autonomy and for, as one of his section headings puts it, "Language and Reality in the Age of the Novel"? Well, yes and no. This is a collection of essays from a lifetime of learning: Arac has been a distinguished Americanist

Journal

Comparative Literature – Duke University Press

Published: Sep 21, 2012

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