Provocation and Negotiation [antikvár]

Foreword Timothy Mathews This book explores the idea that the artistic turn, the resort to the imagination demands critical attention in its own right. The life experience of people making cultural artefacts and interpreting them produces its own kind of understanding, which in turn illuminates other understandings and is illuminated by them. The commitment in the book to the artistic turn is also a re-turn. The involvement of all the arts in philosophy, in politics, in investigations of the psyche as well as everyday life at large, is familiar from Romanticism to Modernism; from Coleridge to Proust, as well as in writers such as W.G. Sebald, Milan Kundera and Orhan Pamuk in recent times. As Wolfgang Iser showed, the formal life of works of art in whatever medium, their capacity to affirm their own fictionality, allows them to reach out to the social issues of their time and of times to come. Why do times of crisis demand the creation of texts that can be read as texts, rather than as other kinds of communication? What is the nature of the understanding offered by artefacts to the writers, artists and filmmakers who make them, and the readers and viewers who engage with them? In responding, Provocation and Negotiation: Essays in Comparative Criticism explores moments of transition, transformation and crisis spanning different eras, continents and languages. Texts and artefacts from South America to Japan, in languages including Hebrew and Portuguese, and addressing the Old Testament as well as Richard Dawkins' God Delusion are taken as starting points in investigating the slippery primacy of the point of view. If knowledge is made in the absorption and reconstruction of experience, what can literary response tell us not just about reaching across boundaries but also about being enclosed within them? About the reactions which take place behind the invisible partitions of contextual and cultural attachments?