Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski, Toril Moi

Character : Three Inquiries in Literary Studies

Chicago University Press

20,00 $

160 p.

ISBN: 9780226658667

PRESENTATION

Over the last few decades, character-based criticism has been seen as either naive or obsolete. But now questions of character are attracting renewed interest. Making the case for a broad-based revision of our understanding of character, Character rethinks these questions from the ground up. Is it really necessary to remind literary critics that characters are made up of words? Must we forbid identification with characters? Does character-discussion force critics to embrace humanism and outmoded theories of the subject?

Across three chapters, leading scholars Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi reimagine and renew literary studies by engaging in a conversation about character. Moi returns to the fundamental theoretical assumptions that convinced literary scholars to stop doing character-criticism, and shows that they cannot hold. Felski turns to the question of identification and draws out its diverse strands, as well as its persistence in academic criticism. Anderson shows that character-criticism illuminates both the moral life of characters, and our understanding of literary form.  In offering new perspectives on the question of fictional character, this thought-provoking book makes an important intervention in literary studies.

SOMMAIRE

Introduction
Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi

Rethinking Character
Toril Moi

Identifying with Characters
Rita Felski

Thinking with Character
Amanda Anderson

REVIEWS

Deidre Shauna Lynch, Harvard University

“This trio of essays—punchy, polemical, and shrewd—refreshes literary studies by revealing the value of once tabooed character talk and persuading us to own up at long last to our multiple investments in character. Anderson, Felski, and Moi help us better understand the characters of fiction, both as objects of identification and as models of moral vision.”

Jennifer L. Fleissner, Indiana University

“This lively, timely, and thought-provoking volume gives three major critics room to explore what draws us to fictional beings. Genealogizing the formalist roots of literary critics’ abandonment of character, Anderson, Felski, and Moi make a vivid and persuasive case for characters’ distinct, fascinatingly intensified form of life.”

Yi-Ping Ong, Johns Hopkins University

“Character seeks to revive the full complexity and richness of our experience of fictional characters. Anderson, Felski, and Moi break with critical orthodoxies, offering a lucid and sophisticated account of the force of readerly engagement with character life. These insights into the aesthetic and ethical centrality of character will provoke debate for years to come.”