Critical modesty in contemporary fiction / Thom Dancer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dancer, Thom, author.

Series:

Oxford scholarship online.

Oxford scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

English fiction--21st century--History and criticism.

Genre:

Literary criticism.

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (224 pages).

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford, UK : Oxford University Press, [2021]

Summary:

From climate catastrophe to pandemics and economic crises, the problems facing humanity can feel impossible to solve. 'Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction' argues that contemporary fiction helps those who may feel despair at the enormity of such problems - not, as usually assumed, through the ambitious search for grand solutions but rather by cultivating a temperament of modesty. This new temperament of critical modesty locates the fight for freedom and human dignity within the limited and compromised conditions in which we find ourselves.

Contents:

Cover

Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Contents

Introduction to Critical Modesty

Temperament and Disposition

Plan of the Book

1: Modesty in the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene Context

Fiction Confronts the Anthropocene

Criticism Confronts the Anthropocene

Pragmatism and Critical Modesty

The Literary Latour

Part 1: Modest Temperaments

2: Ian McEwan's Redescriptions

John Banville and Critical Immodesty

Forms of Immodesty

Immodesty and Science in Saturday

McEwan's Material Humanism (against Social Determinism)

McEwan and the Redescription of Sciences

3: Zadie Smith's Partnerships

The Critic-as-Artist

Difficult Partnerships: Readers, Writers, Authors

Partnership as Encounter

A Model of the Critic-as-Artist: Smith Reading Forster

Thinking with On Beauty about Criticism

Part 2: Modest Practices

4: J. M. Coetzee's Weakness

Coetzee in the Anthropocene

Coetzee's Modesty and the Politics of Privacy

Conceptions of Agency: Critical Distance and Mutual Criticism

Speaking without Authority in Fiction

5: David Mitchell's Inefficiency

Aesthetics of Scale in Anthropocene Fiction

Mitchell's Weird Realism

Inefficient Causality

Collage and the Narrative Form of Possibility

Conclusion: Becoming Weightless

Coda: Temperament and Critique

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

This edition also issued in print: 2021.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-19-264536-6

0-19-191459-2

0-19-264535-8

OCLC:

1265461478