Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel

The twenty-first century has been marked by a series of crises in which life's vulnerability was brutally exposed. As a result, care has moved to the forefront of ethical and political debates. Narrative Care shows that care is also an aesthetic issue: through close-readings of J.M. Coetzee's Slow Man, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions, and Tom McCarthy's Remainder, it investigates how literary representations of care are shaped by and have helped shape discussions about the welfare state and pastoral care; about the concentration camps and bare life; about Sadism and the realist aesthetic; and about how the rise of the novel as a genre is related to all of the above.

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's Slow Man as "a Biologico-Literary Experiment" / Chapter Two: Bare Life and the Camps in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go / Chapter Three: Life-Writing in Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions/ Chapter Four: "Just Being": On Tom McCarthy's Remainder / Conclusion: Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her as a Narrative of Care / Bibliography / Index