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Veering: A Theory of Literature (The Frontiers of Theory)
Veering A Theory of Literature - The Frontiers of Theory Author:Nicholas Royle In this book, one of our most astute and imaginative contemporary literary critics offers a powerful analysis of the perceived demise of 'theory' and rise of 'creative writing' in literary and cultural studies. Nicholas Royle foregrounds and meddles with assumptions concerning what is conventionally thought to be 'theory', 'autobiography', and '... more »literature'. Providing an extended meditation on the word and concept, veering, as it appears in literature and theory Royle explores the writings of Montaigne, Dryden, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Nabokov, for example, as well as Lucretius, Freud, Bloom, Guy Debord, Cixous, Barthes, Derrida and Nancy. The notion of veering bears within it an intractable ambiguity about agency: bound up with chance and uncertainty, it poses the question of control and organization. It entails kinds of turn that draw together a fascinating assemblage of words and images, terms and ideas, across different disciplines and discourses, including verse, vertigo, the clinamen, detournement, transversality, environmentalism, the linguistic, the ethical and the political turn, as well as what, in a surprising and provoking move, Royle here calls the literary turn. Key features: *A new approach to thinking about literature *Proposes 'the literary turn' as a new term for understanding post-1960s cultural and intellectual history *Lucid and unusually detailed readings of a range of canonical literary works, from Dryden to Nabokov, as well as of thinkers such as Lucretius, Freud, Derrida and Cixous *A provocative and path-breaking account of the perceived demise of 'theory' and rise of 'creative writing' in literary and cultural studies« less