Literary Culture in a World Transformed: A Future for the Humanities by William Paulson

From the Publisher

The field of literary studies is in danger of being left behind in the twenty-first century, some say. Print culture risks becoming a thing of the past in the multimedia age; meanwhile, human life and society are undergoing rapid changes as a result of new technologies, the intensification of global capitalism, and the effects of human actions on the environment.

In this transformed world, William Paulson argues for a radical renewal of literary studies. Modern literary culture has defined itself, in opposition to science, politics, and commerce, as a protected sphere of democratic and free inquiry, but today that autonomy may lead to isolation from the real dynamics of cultural and global change. Paulson clearly and convincingly demonstrates the need for literary studies to embrace both the unfashionable literary past and the technologically saturated future, and to train not a countersociety of cultural critics but citizens of the world who can communicate the irreducible strangeness and multiplicity of literature to a society on hyperdrive. His series of concrete proposals, ranging from a closer connection between literature and everyday language to the restructuring of undergraduate and graduate education, will immeasurably enrich current discussions of the role of the humanities in the life of the world.

Booknews

Paulson (French, University of Michigan) brings together some of the world's larger issues<-->a changing world in terms of economy and ecology, science and technology<-->and smaller issues: the effect of increasing electronic and audiovisual media on institutions of the book and the role of literary study in the academy. Paulson sees a literary future that "refuses a fatalistic or providential view of technology, maintains cultural contact with the past, and whose teaching mission is not that of training an academic counter-society of cultural critics but that of making the strangeness and multiplicity of literary culture part of an always interdisciplinary or an a- disciplinary education of world citizens...." Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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