Blurb for my forthcoming book: A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain
Tuesday, September 29, 2020 at 9:57AM Below is the blurb for my new book, which is forthcoming from Open Humanities Press in the MEDIA : ART: WRITE : NOW, edited by Joanna Zylinska.
Gary Hall, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain
In A Stubborn Fury Gary Hall offers a powerful and provocative look at the consequences of this inequality for English culture in particular. Focusing on the literary novel and the memoir, he investigates, in terms that are as insightful as they are irreverent, why so much writing in England is uncritically realist, humanist and anti-intellectual. Hall does so by playfully rewriting two of the most acclaimed contributions to these media genres of recent times. One is that of England’s foremost avant-garde novelist Tom McCarthy, and the importance he attaches to European modernism and antihumanist theory. The other is that of the celebrated French memoirists Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis, and their attempt to reinvent the antihumanist philosophical tradition by producing a theory that speaks about class and intersectionality, yet generates the excitement of a Kendrick Lamar concert. By experimentally pirating McCarthy, Eribon and Louis, Hall addresses that most urgent of questions: what can be done about English literary culture’s addiction to the worldview of privileged, middle-class white men, very much to the exclusion of more radically inventive writing, including that of working-class, BAME and LGBTQIAP+ authors?
In Masked Media, a follow-up to A Stubborn Fury which is also due to be published in the MEDIA : ART: WRITE : NOW series, Hall proceeds to show how our ways of writing and working can be reinvented to produce a more socially just future after the years of austerity and the coronavirus pandemic.
Like all Open Humanities Press books, A Stubborn Fury will be freely available to download.
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