Toril Moi, "Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell" (U Chicago Press, 2017)
New Books in Literary Studies
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The Importance of Reading Literature
For literature, I think of literary works as utterances on a par with as expression and action and intervention. They come out in it that someone creates them at a certain time, in a certain place - which means they can be historicized. To read literature is to try to see what the text is trying to do, what it's trying to do with the reader, and then to respond to it. That's why we need new readings of classics, like You Work on Shakespeare. In writing something about to work, you show who you are, and that can feel risky, right? Absolutely it can.
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