Habermas and Literature

The Public Sphere and the Social Imaginary

Dr Geoff Boucher (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

288 Seiten

2023
Bloomsbury Academic USA (Verlag)
978-1-5013-6977-3 (ISBN)

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Although Habermas has written about the cultural role of literature and about literary works, he has not systematically articulated a literary-critical method as a component of either communicative reason or post-metaphysical thinking. Habermas and Literature brings Habermasian concepts and categories into contact with aesthetic and cultural theories in and around the Frankfurt School, and beyond. Its central claim is that Habermas’ contribution to literary and cultural criticism is the concept of literary rationality and the notion that literature performs a key role in the formation of the modern social imaginary.

Habermas and Literature maintains that literary works have “two faces” – discursive intervention in the public sphere and personal integration of imaginative disclosures – that depend upon two modalities of literary reception: critique and identification. It develops the resulting literary theory through detailed discussion of the theories advanced by Habermas, followed in each case by synthetic and reconstructive argumentation that brings the framework of communicative reason into dialogue with literary methods, aesthetic theories and psychoanalytic categories. It does so through close engagement with debates around aesthetic rationality, world disclosure, social imaginaries, post-secular society and the utopian demand for happiness articulated by artworks. In the process, the Habermasian position is critically reconstructed when necessary, with reference to psychoanalytic and literary theories, and tested, in relation to demanding fiction and popular works.

Geoff Boucher is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University, Australia. He is the author of number of books on continental philosophy, including Understanding Marxism (2012), Adorno Reframed (2012) and (with Matthew Sharpe) Zizek and Politics (2010).

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Adorno’s Social Philosophy
2. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory
3. Habermas’s Social Theory
4. The Literary Discourse of Modernity
5. The Nature of Critique
6. Silenced Needs, Hidden Desires
7. Habermas and the Devil: Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus
8. Imaginative Disclosure and Literary Identification
9. Literary Visions and the Social Imaginary
10. The Phoenix and the Serpent: JK Rowling’s Harry Potter Series
References
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	11.01.2023
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie der Neuzeit
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-5013-6977-6 / 1501369776
ISBN-13	978-1-5013-6977-3 / 9781501369773
Zustand	Neuware