“Precarity is everywhere today”, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu announced in a lecture in 1997 (qtd. in Springveld 26). “[P] recarity is not a passing or episodic condition, but a new form of regulation that distinguishes this historical time”, American philosopher Judith Butler writes in her foreword to German political theorist Isabell Lorey’s study State of Insecurity: Governme…
As recent discussions in medieval studies have demonstrated, however, the response of literature to history—the witness that literature provides within history—is never a straightforward one. It is, at this point, impossible to state flatly that texts such as the Decameron, Guillaume de Machaut’s Jugement dou Roy de Navarre, or William Langland’s Piers Plowman stand as “accu…
Somewhere in the period after the peak of deconstruction as a literary/ critical method of textual analysis, a trend towards interdisciplinary crosspollination occurred. This trend is buttressed by the academic tearing down – usually by humanities departments – of the special status heretofore accorded to texts produced by disciplines that utilize the scientific method as their primary sour…
he recognition that a literary text is embedded in a historical context that can be defined in cultural, political, and social terms has been common knowledge for sorne time. This insight, however, has not been fully appreciated in the examination of various forms of literary criticism-scholarly books and articles, journalistic essays, book reviews in newspapers, and the like. Yet studies…