Khair T., Doubinsky S. Reading Literature Today: Two Complementary Essays and a Conversation

SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd., 2011. — xii+167 p. — ISBN: 978-81-321-0688-3.A path-breaking intervention in current debates on reading and literature, the two complementary essays - one on literature and the other on reading - focus largely on texts in English and French, but also refer to other literatures. The authors propose a way of reading literature that not only synthesizes some earlier tendencies and puts them in context, but also propounds a revolutionary understanding of the nature of literature and reading. The writers taken up for discussion include William Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Marcel Proust, Charles Baudelaire, Franz Kafka, William Burroughs, Dylan Thomas, Attia Hosain, Albert Wendt, Zadie Smith, Philip Hensher, Mohsin Hamid and many others.Preliminary Note
AcknowledgementsLiterature and the Limits of Language: An Essay on Silences and Gaps
Tabish KhairOne The Death of the Reader of Gaps and Silences
Two What Can Be Said and What Cannot Be Said
Three The Fissured Surface of Literature
Four What Is Written and What Is Not Written‘In the Mind of the Bourgeois Reader’: An Essay on Reading as an Uncomfortable Experience (Translated Partly from French by the Author)
Sébastien DoubinskyOne Impermanence and Deception
Two Readers and Readers
Three Identifi cation and Adherence
Four Reading the Unreadable
Five Last WordsA Discussion of Realism, Magic Realism, Consumerism, Publishing, Reading and Writing
Tabish Khair and Sébastien DoubinskySelect Bibliography

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