Fiction Agonistes In Defense of Literature [Hardcover]

In this path-breaking new work, Gregory Jusdanis asks why literature matters. Why are we afraid to admit our pleasures of reading, to defend the arts to the school board, to discuss the importance of literature in life? Drawing on a wealth of references from Aristophanes to Eudora Welty, from Fernando Pessoa to Orhan Pamuk, from Cavafy to hypertext stories, Jusdanis reminds us that the arts have always been under attack. Instead of despair, however, he offers a pragmatic defense of literature, arguing that it performs a social function in dramatizing the break between illusion and reality, life and the life-like, permanence and metamorphosis. The ability to distinguish between the actual and the imaginary is essential to human beings. Our capacity to imagine something new, to project ourselves into the mind of another person, and to fight for a new world is based on this distinction. Literature allows us to imagine alternate possibilities of human relationships and political institutions, even in the watery world of the Internet. At once daring and lucid,Fiction Agonistesconsiders the place of art today with passion and optimism. This is a wide-ranging and engaging study that strikes countless sparks, and I cannot imagine a more useful or important book for our times. Jusdanis asks hard questions: Does literature matter? If so, why? He reaches back to the Greeks (and others, such as Kant and Schiller) to find answers, and they are thrilling ones. Art attends those boundaries between real and imagined, matter and mind, body and soul. Our imagined worlds profoundly affect our real ones, affording opportunities to change realities in significant ways. Indeed, artliterature, in particularenables social transformation itself. All in all, Jusdanis' insightful study offers a thought-provoking and important contribution to the debate on why literature matters. One of the strengths of the book lies in his lucid disentanglement of various conceptions subsumed underl/