Professor%20Patrick%20Hayes: List of publications

In Plato's Republic, Socrates spoke of an 'ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy' which he offered to resolve once and for all by banning the poets from his ideal city. Few philosophers have taken Socrates at his word, and out of the ancient quarrel there has emerged a long tradition that has sought to value literature chiefly as a useful supplement to philosophical reasoning. The fiction of J.M. Coetzee makes a striking challenge to this tradition. While his writing has frequently engaged philosophical subjects in explicit ways, it has done so with an emphasis on the dissonance between literary expression and philosophical reasoning. And while Coetzee has often overtly engaged with academic literary theory, his fiction has done so in a way that has tended to disorient rather than affirm those same theories, wrong-footing the normal processes of literary interpretation. This volume brings together philosophers and literary theorists to reflect upon the challenge Coetzee has made to their respective disciplines, and to the disciplinary distinctions at stake in the ancient quarrel. The essays use his fiction to explore questions about the boundaries between literature, philosophy, and literary criticism; the relationship between literature, theology, and post-secularism; the particular ways in which literature engages reality; how literature interacts with the philosophies of language, action, subjectivity, and ethics; and the institutions that govern the distinctions between literature and philosophy. It will be of importance not only to readers of Coetzee, but to anyone interested in the ancient quarrel itself.

Web 2.0 has made it very easy to write online. Whereas Lejeune’s Web 1.0 bloggers needed at least some basic familiarity with internet programming to set up their sites and begin posting, Facebook enables anyone with a mouse and keyboard to set up their own slickly produced magazine-style webpage for free in a matter of minutes. And as this much more accessible interface took off, for many groups of people online life-writing ceased to be a wholly optional part of life, as it was for Lejeune’s bloggers.

When we try to find words to express our most visceral and primary responses to literature, we are often inclined to speak of its power. But in academic contexts, that intuitive feeling for the vividness, energy, and special intensity of literary experience is all too often subdued, and exchanged for a supposedly more sophisticated discussion of its ethical or political significance. Philip Roth has long thumbed his nose at the 'virtue racket', as one of his characters called it, and his fiction has repeatedly satirised the moralistic idiom that tends to rule the public discussion of literature. In doing so he has earned the disapproval of an unusually wide range of university teachers and intellectuals. Philip Roth: Fiction and Power argues that Roth's importance derives precisely from his revaluation of what counts as sophisticated and serious in our response to literature. As well as examining how Roth emerged as a writer, and defining the main lines of influence on him, the book measures his impact on the dominant ways of thinking about literary value in post-war America. Attention is given to particular questions: about the place of emotion and affective experience, the nature and value of tragedy, the relevance of art to life, the relationship between literature and the unconscious, the concept of the author, the idea of a literary canon, and the ways that fiction illuminates America's complex post-war history. The book will be of importance to readers of modern American literature, and indeed to anyone interested in why literature matters.