Book Launch: The Possibility of Literature
Schedule
Thu Nov 21 2024 at 06:00 pm to 07:30 pm
UTC+00:00Location
Cambridge University Press Bookshop | Cambridge, EN
About this Event
Book Launch: The Possibility of Literature
Peter Boxall (University of Oxford) is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices in contemporary literary studies. We are thrilled to be hosting the book launch for his latest collection, The Possibility of Literature. Come along to hear him discuss the book with Professor Kasia Boddy (University of Cambridge)
Bringing together key compositions from the last twenty-five years, as well as several new pieces, the book demonstrates the changing fate of literary thinking over the first decades of the twenty-first century. Peter Boxall traces here the profound shifts in the global conditions that make literature possible as these have occurred in the historical passage from 9/11 to Covid 19. Exploring questions such as 'The Idea of Beauty', the nature of 'Mere Being', or the possibilities of Rereading, the author anatomises the myriad forces that shape the literary imagination. At the same time, he gives vivid critical expression to the imaginative possibilities of literature itself – those unique forms of communal life that literature makes possible in a dramatically changing world, and that lead us towards a new shared future.
a thought-provoking new book exploring the power of literature in our lives. Hosted at the Cambridge University Press Bookshop, this event promises to be a stimulating evening filled with discussions, insights, and of course, a celebration of the written word. Don't miss out on this opportunity to delve into the world of literature and engage with fellow book enthusiasts. See you there!
'The bracing lucidity of Boxall's prose can guide us, captivated, through books we may not know while bringing seasoned masterworks before us as if we'd never read them before-from the 'immensity' of the 'mere' in James to the Proustian corpus as its own model of rereading, from the ontological drama of tautology in late DeLillo to the implant and dismantlement of Dickensian realist scaffolds in post-millennial British novels. Even as its founding conditions are probed anew, literary writing-honoring the 'hinge' of Boxall's title-opens startling cognitive possibilities charted here in essays of high and liberating intelligence.'
Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of Iowa
'In this groundbreaking study, leading scholar of the novel Peter Boxall considers what makes literature possible-and what literature makes possible-at a time when the very survival of the planet looks increasingly impossible. The climate emergency, Boxall contends, puts in question the relation between culture and nature, human and inhuman, requiring an overhaul of existing critical and creative modes. Ranging widely from Cervantes to Maria Edgeworth to Emily Dickinson; from Herman Melville and W. B. Yeats, to Henry James, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf; from Philip Roth and Don DeLillo to James Kelman, Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith, Boxall argues that their writing presses against limits to open up a glimpse of possibility, however fleeting and ungraspable. 'This capacity of literary writing to exceed its own terms,' Boxall proposes, 'is the engine of literary possibility.''
Maud Ellmann, Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Distinguished Service Professor Emerita, University of Chicago
Accessibility Information
This event will be quite informal with space for attendees to mingle with one another in a relaxed setting. There will be a small number of seats made available for anyone who needs one. Please get in touch if you have particular needs that you would like us to consider in advance.
Access is via our main entrance on Trinity Street, by street level and there are not steps or ledges.
There are 2 single-person bathrooms, including one large enough to fit a wheelchair with the door closed.
Where is it happening?
Cambridge University Press Bookshop, 1-2 Trinity Street, Cambridge, United KingdomEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
GBP 0.00
