Gayatri Spivak elaborates a mode of attention to and analysis of literature, writing, society that would form a utopia, political, futurist, planetary.
Genre: Books, Scholarship.
Full Title: Readings.
Author: Gayatri Spivak, University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press.
Place: Chicago, Illinois.
Description: In Readings, Gayatri Spivak takes up her career-long commitment to teaching her students and a wider public the value of developing an ethics of reading, with an additional aim of rigorously approaching the intractable problem of oppression in societies.
Part of her task here is to make clear and urgent a mode of attention to and analysis of literature, writing, and social concerns — a close and ethical reading practice that would prove essential to a future political utopia she describes, where her students and others may more successfully advance a peace-seeking social justice.
She writes:
“I urge students of English to understand that utopia does not happen, and yet to understand, also, their importance to the nation and the world.
“Indeed, I know how hard it is to sustain such a spirit in the midst of a hostile polity, but I urge the students to consider the challenge.”
For more see the book’s publication site at University of Chicago Press.
