The Aesthetics of Clarity and Confusion : Literature and Engagement since Nietzsche and the Naturalists

The Aesthetics of Clarity and Confusion : Literature and Engagement since Nietzsche and the Naturalists - Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature

Softcover reprint of the original 1st Edition 2016

Paperback (07 Jul 2018)

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Publisher's Synopsis

What should literature with political aims look like? This book traces two rival responses to this question, one prizing clarity and the other confusion, which have dominated political aesthetics since the late nineteenth century. Revisiting recurrences of the avant-garde experimentalism versus critical realism debates from the twentieth century, Geoffrey A. Baker highlights the often violent reductions at work in earlier debates. Instead of prizing one approach over the other, as many participants in those debates have done, Baker focuses on the manner in which the debate itself between these approaches continues to prove productive and enabling for politically engaged writers. This book thus offers a way beyond the simplistic polarity of realism vs. anti-realism in a study that is focused on influential strands of thought in England, France, and Germany and that covers well-known authors such as Zola, Nietzsche, Arnold, Mann, Brecht, Sartre, Adorno, Lukács, Beauvoir, Morrison, and Coetzee.


Book information

ISBN: 9783319825175
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan
Pub date:
Edition: Softcover reprint of the original 1st Edition 2016
Language: English
Number of pages: 279
Weight: 454g
Height: 210mm
Width: 148mm
Spine width: 16mm