New Directions in Philosophy and Literature

David Rudrum is a Senior Lecturer in Literature at the University of Huddersfield. He is the author of Stanley Cavell and the Claim of Literature (Johns Hopkins, 2013). He is co-editor of Supplanting the Postmodern (Bloomsbury, 2015), Literature and Philosophy: A Guide to Contemporary Debates (Palgrave, 2006). Ridvan Askin is Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow in American and General Literatures at the University of Basel. His recent publications include two co-edited volumes, Aesthetics in the 21st Century, a special issue of Speculations (2014), and Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives (Narr, 2015). Frida Beckman is Professor of Comparative Literature at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her books include Control Culture: Foucault and Deleuze after Discipline (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) and Culture Control Critique: Allegories of Reading the Present (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016). She has also published extensively on Deleuze, where her books include Gilles Deleuze: A Critical Life (Reaktion Books, 2017), Between Desire and Pleasure: A Deleuzian Theory of Sexuality (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and the edited collection Deleuze and Sex (Edinburgh University Press, 2011).

This collection definitively demonstrates, from a wide range of philosophical traditions and international perspectives, that the so-called 'death of theory' has been greatly exaggerated. New Directions in Philosophy and Literature offers us just that – bold new ways to think about the ancient quarrel between the poets and the philosophers. Highly recommended.

• AcknowledgementsEditors’ PrefaceGeneral Introduction: Opposition of the Faculties, Philosophy’s Literary ImpossibilityClaire ColebrookPart I: Beyond the Postmodern: Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of the ContemporaryEditor’s Introduction David Rudrum1. The Polymodern Condition: A Report on Cluelessness David Rudrum 2. Metamodernism: Period, Structure of Feeling, and Cultural Logic – A Case Study into Contemporary Autofiction Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons and Timotheus Vermeulen3. The Ends of Metafiction, or, The Romantic Time of Egan’s Goon Squad Josh Toth4. Virtually Human: Posthumanism and (Post-)postmodern Cyberspace in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story Nicky GardinerPart II: Beyond the Subject: Posthuman and Nonhuman Literary CriticismEditor’s Introduction Ridvan Askin5. Hélène Cixous’s So Close; or, Moving Matters on the Subject Birgit Mara Kaiser6. Meillassoux, the Critique of Correlationism, and British Romanticism Evan Gottlieb7. Fictional Objects Fictional Subjects Graham Priest8. On the Death of Meaning R. Scott BakkerPart III: Beyond the Object: Reading Literature through Actor-Network Theory, Object-Oriented Philosophy, and the New MaterialismsEditor’s Introduction Ridvan Askin9. Neither Billiard Ball nor Planet B: Latour’s Gaia, Literary Agency, and the Challenge of Writing Geohistory in the Anthropocene Moment Babette B. Tischleder10. Three Problems of Formalism: An Object-Oriented View Graham Harman11. A Field of Heteronyms and Homonyms: New Materialism, Speculative Fabulation, and Wor(l)ding Helen Palmer12. Emerson’s Speculative Pragmatism Ridvan AskinPart IV: Ordinary Language Criticism: Reading Literature through Anglo-American PhilosophyEditor’s Introduction David Rudrum13. Two Examples of Ordinary Language Criticism: Reading Conant Reading Rorty Reading Orwell – Interpretation at the Intersection of Philosophy and Literature Ingeborg Löfgren [Available on Open Access, see Resources]14. Stanley Cavell and the Politics of Modernism R.M. Berry15. Inferentialist Semantics, Intimationist Aesthetics, and Walden Bryan VescioPart V: Embodiment as Ethics: Literature and Life in the AnthropoceneEditor’s Introduction Frida Beckman16. Living to Tell the Story: Characterisation, Narrative Perspective, and Ethics in Climate Crisis Flood Novels Astrid Bracke17. Contemporary Anthropocene Novels: Ian McEwan’s Solar, Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Year of the FloodRobert P. Marzec18. The Day of the Dark Precursor: Philosophy, Fiction, and Fabulation at the End of the World – A Ficto-Critical Guide Charlie Blake19. So to Speak Adrian ParrPart VI: Politics after Discipline: Literature, Life, ControlEditor’s Introduction Frida Beckman20. Literature’s Biopolitics Rey Chow 21. We Have Been Paranoid Too Long to Stop Now Frida Beckman and Charlie Blake22. Securing Neoliberalism: The Contingencies of Contemporary US FictionDavid Watson23. Automatic Art, Automated Trading: Finance, Fiction, and PhilosophyArne De BoeverNotes on ContributorsIndex