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| Literary Communication as Dialogue. Responsibilities and Pleasures in Post-Postmodern Times. Selected Papers 2003-2020. Roger D. Sell Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2020
| Book Synopsis
As traced by Roger D. Sell, literary communication is a process of
community-making. As long as literary authors and those responding to
them respect each other’s human autonomy, literature flourishes as an
enjoyable, though often challenging mode of interaction that is truly
dialogical in spirit. This gives rise to author-respondent communities
whose members represent existential commonalities blended together with
historical differences.
These heterogeneous literary communities
have a larger social significance, in that they have long served as
counterweights to the hegemonic tendencies of modernity, and more
recently to postmodernity’s well-intentioned but restrictive politics of
identity. In post-postmodern times, their ethos is
increasingly one of pleasurable egalitarianism. The despondent
anti-hedonism of the twentieth century intelligentsia can now seem
rather dated.
Some of the papers selected for this volume develop
Sell’s ideas in mainly theoretical terms. But most of them offer
detailed criticism of particular anglophone writers, ranging from
Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and other poets and dramatists of the early
modern period, through Wordsworth and Coleridge, to Dickens, Pinter, and
Rushdie.
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Please note that members of FILLM's Member Associations are entitled to a 30% discount on volumes in the FILLM Book Series, FILLM Studies in Languages and Literatures.
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