Narrative Care Biopolitics and the Novel [Paperback]

If the September 11 terror attacks opened up an era of crises and exceptions of which we are yet to see the end, it is perhaps not surprising that care has emerged in the early twenty-first century as a key political issue. This book approaches contemporary narratives of care through the lens of a growing body of theoretical writings on biopolitics. Through close-readings of J.M. Coetzee'sSlow Man, Kazuo Ishiguro'sNever Let Me Go, Paul Auster'sThe Book of Illusions, and Tom McCarthy'sRemainder, it seeks to reframe debates about realism in the novel ranging from Ian Watt to Zadie Smith as engagements with the novel's biopolitical origins: its relation to pastoral care, the camps, and the welfare state. Within such an understanding of the novel, what possibilities for a critical aesthetics of existence does the contemporary novel include?

Arne De Boever is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Director of the MA Program in Aesthetics and Politics in the School of Critical Studies, California Institute of the Arts, USA.

Acknowledgements / Introduction: Towards a Pharmacological Theory of the Novel / Chapter One: J.M. Coetzee'sSlow Manas a Biologico-Literary Experiment / Chapter Two: Bare Life and the Camps in Kazuo Ishiguro'sNever Let Me Go/ Chapter Three: Life-Writing in Paul Auster'sThe Book of Illusions
/ Chapter Four: Just Being : On Tom McCarthy'sRemainder /Conclusion: Pedro Almod?var'sTalk to Heras a Narrative of Care / Bibliography / Index

&his argument on the politics and ethics of narrative is bold, imaginative, and accessible to readers unfamiliar with philosophy and theory on biopolitics. Nicolette Bragg, College Literature,Vol. 41.3

'It is clear that we cannot go on as before' (142), Arne De Boever states in his paradigm shifting volume, Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel [&] De Boever's study carries on a tradition of Foucauldian literaryl£