This is a wide-ranging and engaging study that strikes countless sparks, and I cannot imagine a more useful or important book for our times. Jusdanis asks hard questions: Does literature matter? If so, why? He reaches back to the Greeks (and others, such as Kant and Schiller) to find answers, and they are thrilling ones. Art attends those boundaries between real and imagined, matter and mind, body and soul. Our imagined worlds profoundly affect our real ones, affording opportunities to change realities in significant ways. Indeed, art-literature, in particular-enables social transformation itself. -- Jay Parini * poet, novelist, critic, and author of Why Poetry Matters (2008) *
All in all, Jusdanis' insightful study offers a thought-provoking and important contribution to the debate on why literature matters. One of the strengths of the book lies in his lucid disentanglement of various conceptions subsumed under the slogan of art's death and his subsequent knowledgeable interrogation of these in light of the parabatic. His insightful observations invite further research as a wealth of other literary examples come to mind which could also be drawn on to substantiate his theses. -- Stella Butter
I read Fiction Agonistes with a sense of excitement and deep pleasure. Here is a critic engaged with issues of importance to any thinking person. Gregory Jusdanis asks hard questions: Does literature matter? If so, why? He reaches back to the Greeks (and others, such as Kant and Schiller) to find answers, and they are thrilling ones. Art, broadly defined, attends those boundaries between real and the imagined worlds, between matter and mind, body and soul. Our imagined worlds profoundly affect our real ones, affording opportunities to change realities in significant ways. Indeed, art-literature, in particular-enables social transformation itself. This is a wide-ranging and engaging study that strikes countless sparks, and I cannot imagine a more useful or important book for our times. -- Jay Parini * poet, novelist, critic, and author of Why Poetry Matters (2008) *
[Jusdanis] displays a wonderfully encyclopedic knowledge of criticism and literature from the ancient Greeks to contemporary postmodern and post-structuralist writers . . . Jusdanis has laid forth a provocative and interesting reflection on the current state of literature and its place in the world . . . [F]or anyone interested in the art of letters, [Fiction Agonistes is] a worthwhile read. -- Emily Manuel * Global Comment *
Fiction Agonistes is a formidable work: wide-ranging, erudite, and incisive in its entire range of argument. It represents a powerful effort to think through the issues that have surrounded the academic debate about the study of literature and to arrive at a full understanding of its centrality to the institutional processes of human life, and most especially to the reflective consciousness upon which any form of civilized life must depend. -- F. Abiola Irele * Harvard University *
In this well-written book Jusdanis defends art and literature in ways relevant to our own time. He takes into account the theoretical discussions of the last thirty years as well as our new social realities . . . Jusdanis does not hesitate either to take on large subjects or go against the current. -- Dimitris Tziovas
