Literature, Autonomy and Commitment. Towards a Relational Paradigm

✍ Scribed by Aukje van Rooden

• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 167
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

It is often argued that a new form of committed literature is needed. Embracing the 18th-century Romantic idea of aesthetic autonomy, literature is believed to have turned its back to everyday social and political reality. One of the central questions occupying contemporary literary debates is therefore whether literary autonomy is essential to modern literature ('autonomism') or should be abandoned ('anti-autonomism').

Aukje van Rooden argues that the debate between autonomists and anti-autonomists cannot be anything but a fruitless tug-of-war, because it is based on a distorted historical picture. In order to make sense of the social relevance of contemporary literature, a new theoretical paradigm has to be formulated.

Literature, Autonomy and Commitment not only offers an historical-conceptual reconstruction of the Romantic paradigm and the theoretical impasse it has created, but also sketches the outline of a new paradigm, called 'the relational paradigm', based on the relational ontologies developed in 20th- and 21st-century philosophy.

✦ Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Preface
Introduction: The Autonomy Debate
Anti-autonomism
Against anti-autonomism
Tug-of-war
Breaking the deadlock
Chapter 1: The Romantic Paradigm
We are all Romantics
Romanticism as subjective emotional expression
The pursuit of the undivided
Revaluation of the social dimension of Romanticism
Romanticism and literary autonomy
Organic unity
The reception of Romanticism
Chapter 2: Janus-Faced Modernity
Unmasking the autonomous subject
The hermeneutic turn
Modern duality
The l’art pour l’art debate
A new status quo
Institutional separation
The dual heritage of Romanticism
Chapter 3: The Relational Paradigm
From antagonism to relationality
The forgetfulness of literature
Literature as a way of being in the world
The fragility of literature
Commitment: The ontic approach
Commitment: An ontological approach
Towards a new form of literary criticism
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Notes
Bibliography
Index

✦ Subjects

literary autonomy, social engagement, relationality