Missing Literature

Missing Literature

A few thoughts (to be developped) as part of my address to the Second CounterText conference on “The Post-Literary”, in Valletta (6 April 2018)

  1. The future of literature is… post-literary?

post-literary, post-literary, post-literary – supersession, critique, deconstruction/rewriting

  • from “literature” to literature “without x”… (L minus)
  • literature, the renewal: once again with… (the revenge of the literary)
  • literature “in deconstruction”, ongoing… (différance)
  • literature, or “business” as usual (basically)… (institutional changes)
  • literature “plus”: literature 2.0, hypertext, generalised “writing”… (remediation)
  • non-literature, or we have never been “literary”: there is no literature… (as such)
  • literature (is) “elsewhere”… (or “elsewhen”)
  1. The “ends” of literature
  • the “end” of literature I (following the “literature of silence”)
  • the “end of literature II (literature without narrative)
  • the “end” of literature III (literature without “us”)
  • the “end” of literature IV (science fiction)
  • the “end” of literature V (cli-fi, eco-fiction, planetary writing…)
  • the “end” of literature VI (literature without language)
  1. Posthumanist literature?
  • a literature of the posthuman, posthuman literature, or posthumanist literature?
  • post-literary or post-literate? Does “post-literacy” mean that literature is losing its “readers”?
  • if literature = fiction, what does non- or post-literary fiction(ality) look like?
  • the literary “experience” – can it be replicated/translated/remediated?
  • literature as “something else”: discourse, medium, way of life, Kulturtechnik, anthropotechnics (technique of “domestication”, “hominization”…), survival strategy (evolution, paleopoetics, “mind sharing”…), data (digital humanities…)…
  • literature “(dis/embodied”: new subjectivities, cyborg writing, machine writing…
  • literature “before” literature…
  1. Countertextuality, or lit-crit despite itself…
  • literature (fiction), the other (ethics) and invention (politics) “in our time”
  • literature and “commitment” – political writing “in our time”
  • psychoanalysis – reading for symptoms of… in/humanity?
  • intertextuality – intermediality – intertissuality?
  • detachment: the “temporality”, “materiality” , “technicity”, “biopolitics”… of literature