I’ll come clean: from what I’ve read of the Oulipo’s output, I’m a bit ambivalent. A case in point would be Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual. I first read this book completely naively, unaware that its plot was modelled on a sequence of chess moves mapped by a mathematician. I enjoyed it immensely. But as soon as I knew how it had come about, it lost its allure. I couldn’t read it without being reminded of what seemed like an annoying authorial trick, a self-congratulatory gimmick. Of course, the fault was entirely mine; my reading of Perec was weighed down by my own presuppositions about how literary works should behave. But it’s worth being clear, when it comes to the Oulipo, that I’m neither an expert nor necessarily a believer. Fortunately, Daniel Levin Becker is both…

read the full review at Berfrois

Eagleton’s broad brush strokes are both a strength and a weakness. They’re a strength in that they enable him to uncover the commonalities between a diverse set of thinkers and theorists. But, here as elsewhere, Eagleton has a weakness for straw men. At his most glib, Eagleton isn’t as funny as he thinks he is: ‘if the theorists are open-neck-shirted, the philosophers of literature rarely appear without a tie,’ runs one dreary routine. A more serious shortcoming is that his rhetoric of robust ‘common sense,’ which deploys everyday counter-examples against the confusions of theorists and philosophers alike, often only holds up at this anecdotal level. In such cases, when Eagleton ranges competing ideas against each other, it’s pretty clear that he’s the one pulling the puppet strings.

read the rest at Review 31

Groys’ book begins with an inventive metaphilosophical argument. Philosophy, he claims, is conventionally characterised as a ‘pursuit of universal truth,’ purified from everyday experience. In contrast, ‘antiphilosophy’ arises to problematise such pursuits, ascribing philosophical value to events and sensations routinely encountered in the lifeworld. It insists that philosophy isn’t our sole, privileged point of access to ‘philosophical’ content, which is instead embedded in ‘ordinary practices’ like laughter (for Bakhtin) and gift-giving (Mauss), among other examples. The originality of Groys’ approach lies in an asserted analogy between antiphilosophy and post-Duchampian ‘anti-art…’

read the review at Mute

The book’s conclusion puts it boldly: ‘art can and does have a particular relation to the real’. As always though, such arguments raise the question of whose reality is being evoked, and whether it is ‘really’ real, or merely a prop underwriting the rhetoric that resorts to it. Literary Deleuzianism is often marred by a kind of confirmation bias: its misapplications of substance monism too easily render everything analogous of everything else. For all that, Thinking in Literature represents a rare and robust attempt to reformulate the aesthetic and cognitive characteristics of modernism. One only wonders whether a category error isn’t at work when criticism bolsters its claims about literature by entailing claims about ontology.

read the review in Textual Practice 26:2

The first fragment, ‘The Last Walk,’ focuses on an image. Vladislavic recalls how his eyes once alighted on a photograph, now well-known, of Robert Walser lying dead in the snow. Here the death of the author brings about the birth of writing, with Walser’s fallen, frozen figure stirring Vladislavic to ‘write a story about the last days, hours, minutes of a writer.’ But the story dies on its feet, first dispersing into digressions, then disappearing completely, just as Walser’s footprints ‘break off in mid-sentence,’ and his collapse ‘carries him onto the silence of a blank page.’ Writing is like dying and being born both at once. Like the photograph, the scene of writing is static but perfectly preserved: a circular, synchronic world in which ‘there is not much else besides snow and the body.’

read the rest at 3:AM Magazine

Literature is hard to have done with, and Iyer isn’t the first to exaggerate a report of its death. But if Dogma doesn’t fully succeed in failing to be literature, what, in its failed failure, might it begin to become? Iyer has elsewhere espoused the idea that writers should cultivate their ‘legitimate strangeness.’ Well, what Dogma does is deepen the strangeness of Spurious. Instead of resolving the earlier work’s contradictions, it only makes them more involved, more intractable. We’ve seen how it sets itself up to fail, then fails to do that. In so doing, it doesn’t so much plumb the depths as discover a deeper depthlessness.

read the rest at The Rumpus

winner of an Electric Literature Critical Hit award, April 2012

Skomsvold’s book is nothing but a voice whose horizons coincide with those of a mind. And in its inmost intransitivity this voice finds its bedrock in what Mathea terms “totality.” Her problem is that she feels estranged from this totality, yet yearns to return to it. “Perhaps I should stop seeing myself as an individual and start identifying myself with the totality,” she thinks, “but . . . I’m about as far away from it as you can get.” Skomsvold doesn’t need to explain her character’s sense of estrangement, because the limits of the book are those of Mathea’s mind. After all, no one ever really knows why they are the way they are.

read the rest at The Quarterly Conversation

Nietzsche plays on our narcissism. His writing wants us, as Bull puts it, to “read for victory”. Nietzsche always admired the Homeric hero, set on a circular journey of self-discovery. Yet the reader is the real hero of Nietzsche’s narratives, enticed into seeing him or herself as uniquely receptive to their radical arguments. We want to be just like Nietzsche, and Nietzsche knows this, which is why he encourages us to join him in enjoying fictional forms of strength, superiority, and self-expression. Faced with a choice between man and Superman, we naturally want to relate to the latter, even if Nietzsche’s Übermensch is as unreal as any literary character. But if that’s the case, how can readers resist the temptation to take Nietzsche’s bait?

read the full essay at The New Inquiry