Literature Against Fundamentalism Paperback / softback
by Tabish (Associate Professor, Associate Professor, Aarhus University) Khair
Part of the The Literary Agenda series
Paperback / softback
Description
Acclaimed novelist and academic Tabish Khair argues that literature as a distinct mode of thinking can counteract fundamentalism. Literature is a mode of thinking, stories being one of the oldest thinking 'devices' known to humankind.
The ways in which literature enables us to think are distinctive and necessary, because of the relationships between its material ('language') and its subject matter ('reality').
Although present in oral literature, these relationships are exposed in their full complexity with the rise of literature as a distinct form of writing.
Literature Against Fundamentalism argues that literature enables us to engage with reality in language and language in reality, where both are mutually constitutive, constantly changing, and partly elusive. Tabish Khair defines this mode of engagement as essentially an agnostic one, resistant to simple dogma.
Hence, literature can provide an antidote to fundamentalism.
Khair argues that reading literature as literature--and not just as material for aesthetic, sociological, political, and other theoretical discourses--is essential for humanity.
In the process, he offers a radical re-definition of literature, an illuminating engagement with religion and fundamentalism, a revaluation of the relationship between the sciences and humanities, and, finally, a call to literature as in 'a call to arms'.
Information
-
Pre-Order
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:144 pages
- Publisher:Oxford University Press
- Publication Date:18/07/2024
- Category:
- ISBN:9780198919582
Information
-
Pre-Order
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:144 pages
- Publisher:Oxford University Press
- Publication Date:18/07/2024
- Category:
- ISBN:9780198919582
