Genealogy and Literature

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Lee Quinby
U of Minnesota Press, 1995 - Literary Criticism - 237 pages
Traditionalists insist that literature transcends culture. Others counter that it is subversive by nature. By challenging both claims, Genealogy and Literature reveals the importance of literature for understanding dominant and often violent power/knowledge relations within a given society. The authors explore the ways in which literature functions as a cultural practice, the links between death and literature as a field of discourse, and the possibilities of dismantling modes of bodily regulation. Through wide-ranging investigations of writing from England, France, Nigeria, Peru, Japan, and the United States, they reinvigorate the study of literature as a means of understanding the complexities of everyday experience. Contributors: Claudette Kemper Columbus, Lennard J. Davis, Simon During, Michel Foucault, Ellen J. Goldner, Tom Hayes, Kate Mehuron, Donald Mengay, Imafedia Okhamafe, Lee Quinby, Jose David Saldivar, and Malini Johar Schueller.

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Contents

III
5
IV
7
VI
13
VII
32
VIII
52
IX
73
X
75
XI
77
XV
112
XVII
109
XVIII
111
XIX
97
XXI
115
XXII
109
XXIII
89
XXIV
93

XII
87
XIII
94

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Page xviii - To make use of the polylingualism of one's own language, to make a minor or intensive use of it, to oppose the oppressed quality of this language to its oppressive quality, to find points of nonculture or underdevelopment, linguistic Third World zones by which a language can escape, an animal enters into things, an assemblage comes into play.
Page xxi - Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem.
Page xvi - Let us give the term genealogy to the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today.

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