If "event" is a proper name we reserve for monumental changes, crises, transitions and ruptures that are by their very nature unnameable or unthinkable, then this volume is an attempt to set up an encounter between such eventhood as it comes to have a bearing on literary works and the work of reading literature.
As the event continues to provide a valuable analytical paradigm for work undertaken within the newer subdisciplines of literary and critical theory, including close reading, bio- politics, world literature, and eco- criticism, this volume makes a concerted effort to update the scholarship in this area and foreground the recent resurgence of interest in the concept. The book provides both a retrospective appraisal of the significance of events to literary studies and the literary humanities, as well as contemporary and prospective appraisals of the same, and thus would appeal scholars and instructors in the areas of literary theory, comparative literature and philosophical aesthetics alike.
Along with a specialist focus on thinkers such as Derrida, Badiou, Deleuze and Malabou, the essays in this volume read a wide corpus of literature ranging from Han Kang, Homer, Renee Gladman, Proust and Flaubert to Yoruba ideophones, Browning, Anne Carson, Jenichiro Oyabe and Ben Lerner.
'Mantra Mukim is an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies (Warwick), where his research focuses on global modernism and precariousness. His research articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Journal of Modern Literature, Interventions, Textual Practice, and Irish Studies Review.'
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Derek Attridge
is Emeritus Professor at the University of York. His publications span such topics as the history of poetry, South African literature, James Joyce, poetic form, and literary theory. His theoretical works include Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Cornell, 1988, reissued by Routledge in 2004), The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2004; reissued as a Routledge Classic in 2017), Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction’s Traces (Edinburgh, 2010), and The Work of Literature (Oxford, 2015). He co-edited Post-structuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge, 1987), Theory after "Theory" (Routledge, 2011), and The Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2021), and edited Jacques Derrida's Acts of Literature (Routledge, 1992). He is a Fellow of the British Academy
