Key Essays

Mapping the Contemporary in Literature and Culture

Johnny Rodger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000450552
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Any level of study within literature and culture requires an engagement with a wider scope of themes, issues and discourses, and these debates are often centred around key 'essays'. This book examines a wide range of these essays on topics such as posthumanism, racism, feminism, necropolitics, the Anthropocene, gender, Global North/South, neo- and de-colonialism, universals, borders and limits, interspecies relations, blackness, cosmopolitics, epistemology, addiction.

The essays selected represent scholars from a range of disciplines, ethnicities, nationalities and genders, and offer readings relevant across the arts and humanities. Each chapter explains why the essay is of vital importance in our contemporary era, introduces and explains the key themes and theories with which it engages, demystifies any complex content and positions it within wider current debates.

Covering all of the essential debates that students and academics must engage with, alongside a close analysis and critique of contemporary seminal essays in the debate, this book will be an essential read for students of literature and culture across the arts and humanities.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Keytexts – the contemporary essay
• 1. Junkspace: On ‘Junkspace’ by Rem Koolhaas (2002)
• 2. Blackness matters: On ‘1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞’ by Denise Ferreira da Silva (2017)
• 3. The superpositioning of cuteness: On ‘The Cuteness of the Avant Garde’ by Sianne Ngai (2005)
• 4. How matter matters: On ‘Posthumanist Performativity’ by Karen Barad (2003)
• 5. Posthumanism: On ‘Posthuman Humanism’ by Rosi Braidotti (2013)
• 6. Companion species: On ‘Unruly Edges’ by Anna Tsing (2012)
• 7. Feminism and happiness: On ‘Killing Joy’ by Sara Ahmed (2010)
• 8. The pharmacopornographic pandemic: On ‘Learning from the Virus’ by Paul Preciado (2020)
• 9. Epistemologies of the Global South: On ‘Public Sphere and Epistemologies of the South’ by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2012)
• 10. Counter-forensics: On ‘Open Verification’, Eyal Weizman (2019)
• 11. Necropolitics: On ‘Necropolitics’ by Achille Mbembe (2003)
• 12. The undercommons: On ‘The University and the Undercommons’ by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2004)
• 13. Cosmopolitics: On ‘Cosmopolitics’ by Emily Apter (2018)
• 14. Comrades of time: On ‘Comrades of Time’ by Boris Groys (2009)
• 15. The mentality of the Anthropocene: On ‘The Brain of History, or, The Mentality of the Anthropocene’ by Cathérine Malabou (2017)
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index