Literary Culture in a World Transformed: A Future for the Humanities - Hardcover

Paulson, William

9780801439148: Literary Culture in a World Transformed: A Future for the Humanities

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801439140 ISBN 13: 9780801439148

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2001

Literary studies are in danger of being left behind in the twenty-first century. Print culture risks becoming a thing of the past in the multimedia age; meanwhile, human life and society are undergoing rapid changes as a result of new technologies, the intensification of global capitalism, and the effects of human actions on the environment.

In this transformed world, William Paulson argues for a radical renewal of literary studies. Modern literary culture has defined itself, in opposition to science, politics, and commerce, as a protected sphere of democratic and free inquiry, but today that autonomy may lead to isolation from the real dynamics of cultural and global change. Paulson clearly and convincingly demonstrates the need for literary studies to embrace both the unfashionable literary past and the technologically saturated future, and to train not a countersociety of cultural critics but citizens of the world who can communicate the irreducible strangeness and multiplicity of literature to a society on hyperdrive. His series of concrete proposals, ranging from a closer connection between literature and everyday language to the restructuring of undergraduate and graduate education, will immeasurably enrich current discussions of the humanities' role in the life of the world.

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About the Author:

William Paulson is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. His books include The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information, also from Cornell, and Sentimental Education: The Complexity of Disenchantment.

Review:

"His book convincingly argues that a skilled literary professional can be (at best, perhaps, must be) an amateur. As such, though it is very much written from the center, it outlines a radical openness to new modes of thought, new protocols of reading, writing, and teaching."

(Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association)

"Paulson seeks a role for literary kinds of reading, steering between reactionaries on the one hand and radicals on the other.... His diagnoses and advice... are well balanced and clearly presented.... His book is one of the better examples of its kind, worthy of attention from anyone with a stake in the humanities, from upper-division undergraduates through faculty."

(Choice)

"Paulson brings together some of the world's larger issues―a changing world in terms of economy and ecology, science and technology―and smaller issues: the effect of increasing electronic and audiovisual media on institutions of the book and the role of literary study in the academy."

(Book News)

"Paulson clearly and convincingly demonstrates the need for literary studies to embrace both the unfashionable literary past and the technologically saturated future.... His series of concrete proposals... will immeasurably enrich current discussions of the humanities' role in the life of the world."

(Rene Audet Fabula)

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