By Arne De Boever
If the September eleven terror assaults unfolded an period of crises and exceptions of which we're but to determine the tip, it truly is possibly no longer unbelievable that care has emerged within the early twenty-first century as a key political factor. This e-book methods modern narratives of care during the lens of a turning out to be physique of theoretical writings on biopolitics. via close-readings of J.M. Coetzee's Slow Man, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never allow Me Go, Paul Auster's The e-book of Illusions, and Tom McCarthy's Remainder, it seeks to reframe debates approximately realism within the novel starting from Ian Watt to Zadie Smith as engagements with the novel's biopolitical origins: its relation to pastoral care, the camps, and the welfare country. inside such an knowing of the radical, what probabilities for a serious aesthetics of life does the modern novel include?
Read Online or Download Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel PDF
Similar literary theory books
This cutting edge publication unearths the entire quantity of electricity's value in 19th- and early-twentieth-century tradition. Ranging throughout an unlimited array of fabrics, Sam Halliday exhibits how electrical energy functioned as either a way of representing "other" things--from love and unity to embodiment and temporality--and as an item of illustration in its personal correct.
Fiction's Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation
Fiction writers and critics have interaction the cultured, political, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of latest fiction.
Discourse research is a time period that has come to have varied interpretations for students operating in several disciplines. For a sociolinguist, it truly is involved in general with the constitution of social interplay manifested in dialog; for a psycholinguist, it really is basically eager about the character of comprehension of brief written texts; for the computational linguist, it's involved in generating operational types of text-understanding inside hugely constrained contexts.
- The Poetics of Personification (Literature, Culture, Theory)
- Theory After 'Theory'
- Victorian Travel Writing and Imperial Violence: British Writing on Africa, 1855–1902
- The Non-National in Contemporary American Literature: Ethnic Women Writers and Problematic Belongings
- Landscapes of Writing in Chicano Literature
- Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women's Rewriting
Extra info for Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel
Example text
17 One hypothesis that should also be considered is that the issue of biopolitics and especially of care is simply more pressing in Western democracies, in which the rise of the welfare state and its subsequent 3 Introduction 23 destruction through neoliberal policies have slowly but surely contributed to the erosion of care. 18 Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power, trans. Ames Hodges (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010), 88. 19 See Isabelle Stengers, Au temps des catastrophes: Résister à la barbarie qui vient (Paris: La Découverte, 2009), esp.
It might not exactly be a defense of the welfare state, but it certainly is not anti-statism either. Instead, Foucault dismantles what he calls the “inflationary critique” of the state in order to call for a more careful analysis of actuality. Such a position suggests that he attributes some value, some currency, to the state—or at the very least to critique: to a critique that would not inflate the state but be able to see the difference between different forms of the state. The poison is thus not identical to the cure.
Reproduction and health, for example, rise to power’s center of attention. The question of modern health care, and of a state that takes care of the 38 Narrative Care health of its population—in other words, the question of the welfare state and its representatives, such as Mrs. Putts—can be traced back to these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century developments. But, Foucault asks in his fifth lecture, what are the origins of these developments? ”72 Foucault is interested in this “government of souls”73 as the origin of governmentality and, ultimately, biopolitics.