Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics
Christopher Breu
Abstract
This book engages with recent theories of materiality and biopolitics to provide a radical reinterpretation of experimental fiction in the second half of the twentieth century. In contrast to readings that emphasize the metafictional qualities of these works, this book examines this literature’s focus on the material conditions of everyday life, from the body to built environments, and from ecosystems to economic production. The book rethinks contemporary understandings of biopolitics, affirming the importance of forms of materiality that refuse full socialization and resist symbolic manipulat ... More
This book engages with recent theories of materiality and biopolitics to provide a radical reinterpretation of experimental fiction in the second half of the twentieth century. In contrast to readings that emphasize the metafictional qualities of these works, this book examines this literature’s focus on the material conditions of everyday life, from the body to built environments, and from ecosystems to economic production. The book rethinks contemporary understandings of biopolitics, affirming the importance of forms of materiality that refuse full socialization and resist symbolic manipulation. The text considers a range of novels that reflect questions of materiality in a biopolitical era, including William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Thomas Pynchon’s V., J. G. Ballard’s Crash, Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. Drawing from accounts of the emergence of immaterial production and biopolitics by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, this book reveals the confrontational dimensions of materiality itself in a world devoted to the idea of its easy malleability and transcendence.
Keywords:
materiality,
biopolitics,
experimental fiction,
economic production,
symbolic manipulation,
Michel Foucault,
Giorgio Agamben,
Roberto Esposito,
Michael Hardt,
Antonio Negri
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780816688913 |
| Published to Minnesota Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.5749/minnesota/9780816688913.001.0001 |
