Surrealpolitik: The Event of Literature

New Haven: Yale University Press (2013, first published in 2012)

Quick Summary

I love this book. It's a hilarious and clear-headed analysis of postmodernism in all its strengths and weaknesses, particularly insofar as it affects literary theory (or as it is often known, simply 'theory'). He traces current preoccupations with "post-colonialism, ethnicity, sexuality and cultural studies" to an earlier preoccupation with "semiotics, post-structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis and the like" and concludes that "What has taken place by and large is a shift from discourse to culture -- from ideas in a somewhat abstract or virginal state, to an investigation of what in the 1970s and '80s one would have been rash to call the real world."

Quotes

There are 2 quotes currently associated with this book.

Post-colonialism, ethnicity, sexuality and cultural studies are not, of course, innocent of theory. nor do they simply date from its decline. It is rather that they have emerged in full force in the wake of 'pure' or 'high' theory, which for the most part they have put behind them. Not only put behind them, indeed, but served to displace. In some ways, this is an evolution to be welcomed. Various forms of theoreticism (though not of obscurantism) have been cast aside. What has taken place by and large is a shift from discourse to culture -- from ideas in a somewhat abstract or virginal state, to an investigation of what in the 1970s and '80s one would have been rash to call the real world. As usual, however, there are losses as well as gains. Analysing vampires or Family Guy is probably not as intellectually rewarding as the study of Freud and Foucault. (page ix-x)
Tags: [Humor, Postmodernism, Culture]

Yet you do not have to be a former papist or ex-Oxbridge don to appreciate the oddness of a situation in which teachers and students of literature habitually use words like literature, fiction, poetry, narrative and so on without being at all well equipped to embark on a discussion of what they mean. Literary theorists are those who find this as strange, if not quite as alarming, as encountering medics who can recognise a pancreas when they see one but would be incapable of explaining its functioning. (page xi-xii)
Tags: [Politics & Novels, Humor, Postmodernism, Culture]