How Literature Comes to Matter

Abstract

How Literature Comes to Matter revolves around the central question of how “matter comes to matter” (Barad) in literature. The book offers an interdisciplinary encounter between literary criticism and post-anthropocentric theory such as new materialist and object-oriented studies. Through a rethinking of the relationship between the subject and object, the human and the nonhuman, the book shows how literature and post-anthropocentric theory can illuminate each other in mutually productive ways. Focusing on how the study of literature is an underdeveloped field within ‘the material turn’, the introduction and each of the eleven chapters examine how new materialist and object-oriented theory opens the study of literature in new ways and generates new dimensions of reading as they demonstrate the deep entanglements in literature of human and nonhuman agencies and realities. The collection includes critical perspectives from narratology, feminism, queer studies, postcolonialism, capitalist criticism and Anthropocene criticism. It contains an afterword by Timothy Morton and hands-on literary analyses and close readings of individual works by such diverse writers as Hans Christian Andersen, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Plath, Georges Perec, Ayi Kwei Armah, Jeanette Winterson and Paolo Bacigalupi. The introduction gives a general overview of the material turn and a focused introduction to central post-anthropocentric concerns and key concepts within New Materialism and Object-Oriented Ontology, highlighting their philosophical backdrops and interventions, their differences and similarities as well as their relevance to the study of literature.