Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Advertisement
- 1 Casting Off
- 2 Reading a Novel
- 3 Reading a Poem
- 4 Drama: An Aside
- 5 The Essay: A Note (On Being Late)
- 6 On Critical and Creative Writing
- 7 The Literary Turn
- 8 Veerer: Where Ghosts Live
- 9 Veerer: Reading Melville's ‘Bartleby’ A Small Case of Civil Disobedience
- 10 Veering with Lawrence
- Appendix: A Note on Nodism
- Index
1 - Casting Off
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Advertisement
- 1 Casting Off
- 2 Reading a Novel
- 3 Reading a Poem
- 4 Drama: An Aside
- 5 The Essay: A Note (On Being Late)
- 6 On Critical and Creative Writing
- 7 The Literary Turn
- 8 Veerer: Where Ghosts Live
- 9 Veerer: Reading Melville's ‘Bartleby’ A Small Case of Civil Disobedience
- 10 Veering with Lawrence
- Appendix: A Note on Nodism
- Index
Summary
Like glass, the illusion shattered: a car hummed like a hornet towards them, veered, showed its scarlet tail-light, streaked away up the road.
(Elizabeth Bowen)Strange, the sort of loyalty that reading gives birth to in us.
(Maurice Blanchot)This book is a twisted love story. It is also a theory of literature. Mostly it is about the love of one word: ‘veering’. This word does not occur with enormous frequency, either in literature or in everyday language, but that is perhaps part of its charm. In the pages that follow I explore ‘veering’ as a sort of pivot for thinking about literature and its relation to the world.
It may seem an odd or unpropitious time to be offering a theory of literature. It is the sort of thing one associates with fifty years ago, with the writings of Roland Barthes (Theory of the Text) or Harold Bloom (The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry). Theory has, as they say, had its day. Books with titles such as After Theory and Post Theory have been around for some time. Indeed there are not a few people who suppose that literature, also, has had its day. The love of literature is thus perceived to be in decline, if not actually doomed. More passion is aroused by film, television, the internet, gaming and so on. As a subject of study, literature seems to have become largely absorbed into a broader, more diffuse area, sometimes given the name ‘cultural studies’ or ‘cultural history’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- VeeringA Theory of Literature, pp. 1 - 12Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011