Interviews & Conversations
A TEXT IS NOT literary — or non-literary — by essence. It becomes literary when readers let it wo... more A TEXT IS NOT literary — or non-literary — by essence. It becomes literary when readers let it work as literature, when they do justice to it. This is what the emeritus professor of English at the University of York Derek Attridge brilliantly argues in "The Work of Literature", published by Oxford University Press in 2015. Though focused on the specificities of the literary, his inquiry does not resort to any essentialistic conceptions of literature. It is in the individual act of reading that we put a text to work and can share something of its literary power. Attridge had proposed the main line of his theory in "The Singularity of Literature" (Routledge, 2004), but his recent achievement presents a richer and more articulated argument, one that also takes into account critical responses to the previous book. Paying attention to the developments of the current debate in literary criticism and theory, our conversation spontaneously gravitated toward the issues of form(s) and formalism(s) that are giving rise to much discussion in the United States these days. Attridge, one of the world-leading thinkers of singularity, situates his own long commitment to literature in relation to this context.
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Interviews & Conversations