Ways of Re-Thinking Literature is a collection of inspiring, thoughtful, creative and critical essays by leading scholars and writers, including Helene Cixous. It examines the connections and dialogue between the critical and creative in literary studies, showing that the interaction between these two spheres provide moments of extraordinary creativity in literary as well as theoretical terms.

Tom Bishop is the Florence Lacaze Gould Professor of French, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University (NYU), USA. For fifty years, he served as Chair of the department of French at NYU and Director of the Center for French Civilization and Culture. Amongst his many publications are: From the Left Bank: Reflections on the Modern French Theater and Novel (1997) and Pirandello and the French Theater (1960, 1970).

Donatien Grau is a Guest Curator at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, USA. He holds a doctorat in French and comparative literature from the Sorbonne, France, and a DPhil from the University of Oxford, UK. He was twice a Guest Resarch Researcher at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; a Florence Gould Lecturer, New York University; a Special Guest of French Studies, Cornell University; a Visiting Scholar, Stevanonich Institute for the Formation of Knowledge, University of Chicago; a teaching fellow, Sorbonne and Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France.

Introduction

Tom Bishop and Donatien Grau

Prelude: Golden Discount

John Ashbery

Part I: Literary Narratives

1. The Disappearing Avant-Garde

Tom Bishop

2. The Critical Life: Rethinking Biography in an Experimental Mode

Emily Apter

3. What Literature Can Do

Philippe Artières

4. Some Notes Towards a Literary Conception of Literature

Donatien Grau

Part II: Literature and the Novel

5. The Installation as Novel

Boris Groys

6. History of New Novels

Adam Thirlwell

7. What becomes of the novel when the gods are coming back

Tristan Garcia

Part III: Literature and the Poetic

8. The Varieties of Literary Experience

Peter Schjeldahl

9. Intellection, Cognition, Contradiction

Laurent Dubreuil

10. Heiner Müller's Lyric Loneliness and the Mythical Body

Stathis Gourgouris

11. The Route of the Impossible

Paul Audi

Part IV: A New Subjectivity

12. Re-thinking, re-feeling literature

Camille Laurens

13. Hoarding as Écriture

Dodie Bellamy

14. Corpse Pose

Wayne Koestenbaum

15. The Shelley Jackson Vocational School for Ghost Speakers and Hearing-Mouth Children

Shelley Jackson

16. Some Fragments

Maël Renouard

17. Fictional Habitation

Camille de Toledo

18. Act two: Why I am a destiny

Vanessa Place

Conclusion: Ay yay! The Cry of Literature

Hélène Cixous

Index