Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading: A Critical Conversation

Description

Introducing readers to a new theory of 'responsible reading', this book presents a range of perspectives on the contemporary relationship between modernism and theory. Emerging from a collaborative process of comment and response, it promotes conversation among disparate views under a shared commitment to responsible reading practices. An international range of contributors question the interplay between modernism and theory today and provide new ways of understanding the relationship between the two, and the links to emerging concerns such as the Anthropocene, decolonization, the post-human, and eco-theory. Promoting responsible reading as a practice that reads generously and engages constructively, even where disagreement is inevitable, this book articulates a mode of ethical reading that is fundamental to ongoing debates about strength and weakness, paranoia and reparation, and critique and affect.

Stephen Ross is Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Canada. He is Past-President of the Modernist Studies Association (2015/16) and General Editor of The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism Online.

Any reader of affect, cultural, feminist, and queer studies will find this book enlightening, and it should be praised for its critical move forward; modernist scholars in particular will want to read this book as it pushes modernist studies in a new direction. * Studies in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Literature *