Just published in UK! Due in USA and India in Autumn/Winter 2024!
The Literary Agenda
- Presents a new and provocative interpretation of how literature is a distinctive, agnostic mode of thinking about the world
- Engages carefully but without jargon in debates about religion and fundamentalism
- Concludes with a powerful ‘call to literature’ to address the crisis of the humanities
Acclaimed novelist and academic Tabish Khair argues that literature as a distinct mode of thinking can counteract fundamentalism.
Literature is a mode of thinking, stories being one of the oldest thinking ‘devices’ known to humankind. The ways in which literature enables us to think are distinctive and necessary, because of the relationships between its material (‘language’) and its subject matter (‘reality’). Although present in oral literature, these relationships are exposed in their full complexity with the rise of literature as a distinct form of writing. Literature Against Fundamentalism argues that literature enables us to engage with reality in language and language in reality, where both are mutually constitutive, constantly changing, and partly elusive.
Tabish Khair defines this mode of engagement as essentially an agnostic one, resistant to simple dogma. Hence, literature can provide an antidote to fundamentalism. Khair argues that reading literature as literature—and not just as material for aesthetic, sociological, political, and other theoretical discourses—is essential for humanity. In the process, he offers a radical re-definition of literature, an illuminating engagement with religion and fundamentalism, a revaluation of the relationship between the sciences and humanities, and, finally, a call to literature as in ‘a call to arms’.
You can purchase the book at Oxford University Press.
Reviews:
