Literary Materialisms

How do we today define literary studies as an academic discipline and literature as a relevant, discrete object of study? Beyond arguments that insist upon the continued importance of literature via the broad category of culture on the one hand and nostalgic, traditionalist oppositions to materialist study of literature aimed to safeguard the autonomy of literature from the social, the economic, and the political on the other, Literary Materialisms gathers thirteen essays by established and emerging scholars that trace the medially and disciplinarily specific future of literary studies in an updated and newly historicized attention to materialism.

Mathias Nilges is Associate Professor of English and Critical Theory at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada. He has published on contemporary American, multiethnic literature, Marxism, critical theory, and media studies in collected editions and journals such as Mediations, Postmodern Culture, and Callaloo. With Nicholas Brown, Neil Larsen, and Joshua Robinson he is the co-editor of a forthcoming collection of essays titled Marxism and the Critique of Value (MCM', 2013). He is currently finishing a monograph titled Nostalgia for the Future: Forms of American Literature('s) Now.

Emilio Sauri is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA. His research focuses on the relationship between US and Latin American literature, and the relationship of each to transformations in the political configuration of the global economy. His work has appeared in MLN, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Mediations, and he is currently completing a book entitled, Boom and Bust: Nation, Crisis, and Literary Form in the Long Twentieth Century.

Introduction: Materialism and Literature Revisited; Mathias Nilges and Emilio Sauri
PART I: READING AND INTERPRETATION
1. Reading Dialectically; Carolyn Lesjak
2. Marxist Criticism, Then and Now; Imre Szeman
3. Literature, Immanent Critique and the Problem of Standpoint; Neil Larsen
4. The Bio-Political Unconscious: Toward an Eco-Marxist Literary Theory; Leerom Medovoi
PART II: THE ONTOLOGY AND FUNCTION OF LITERATURE
5. Work as Art and Art as Life; Sarah Brouillette
6. How to Subsume Difference, or World Reduction in Delany; Kevin Floyd
7. Defining the World; Peter Hitchcock
8. Close Reading and the Market; Nicholas Brown
PART III: FORM AND GENRE
9. Form(alism's) Now; Mathias Nilges
10. Objective Form: Reflections on the Dialectic of Roguery; Roberto Schwarz
11. Marxism and Melodrama; Bruno Bosteels
12. Creativity, Character and the Making of the American Middle-Class; Jason Potts
13. The Ends of Culture; or, Late Modernism, Redux; Phillip E. Wegner