1 May 2023
Andrea Lupi, Università di Pisa
Mena Mitrano, Literary Critique, Modernism and the Transformation of Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022)
Paraphrasing Nietzsche, the current debates around literary studies could be summarised in the following proposition: ‘Literary criticism is dead. Literary criticism remains dead. And we have killed it. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?’. Yet, reflections on how theory affects the reading of texts and culture are still prominent in academia. Far from seconding movements arguing ‘[t]he end of the English major’[1], Mitrano’s book engages with the current situation of literary theory and its trends, mostly postcritique, to recover a fascination for the literary text. Moving away from the negative affects and the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’[2] that have come to characterise the field, the author’s exploration of major key terms – among which critique, theory, language, and tradition – opens with the allure of South Korean artist Airan Kang and her Digital Book Project.
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