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.
Introduction: Literary Activism, Clarity and Confusion.- Chapter 1: "For Love of Clarity": Émile Zola, Practice, and the Political Potential of Realistic Literature.- Chapter 2: Grounds for Confusion: Nietzsche, Theory, and the Political Potential of Anti-Realism.- Chapter 3: Between Theory and Practice: Matthew Arnold, Thomas Mann, Julien Benda, and the Purpose of the Intellectual.- Chapter 4: "Different Kinds of Clarity": Science, Sense, and Utilitarian Realism in Bertolt Brecht.- Chapter 5: Pressing Engagement: Jean-Paul Sartre and the Aesthetic Problem of the Political.- Chapter 6: An Other Engagement: Simone de Beauvoir and the Ethical Problem of the Political.- Conclusion: Contemporary Engagements with Clarity and Confusion.- Works Cited.
Geoffrey A. Baker is Associate Professor of Humanities (Literature) at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. He is the author of Realism's Empire, in addition to articles on political aesthetics, realism, and other topics.
