My new book - A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain

My new book, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain, has just come out in Open Humanities Press' Media : Art : Write : Now series, edited by Joanna Zylinska. 

The abstract for the book is below. But it's my attempt to explain why I do some of the things I do. It’s also even angrier than usual if you can imagine such a thing. (It is what it says on the tin in that respect.) But then there's a lot to be angry about at the moment.

Another way of thinking about it would be as an unauthorized sequel to Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism?, especially its infamous chapter 14, with its critique of Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan et al.

A Stubborn Fury is available open access, no copyright. So please feel free to share.  

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Gary Hall, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain
London: Open Humanities Press, 2021
Series: Media : Art : Write : Now

E-version freely available on an open access, no copyright basis:
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/a-stubborn-fury/

Also available in paperback

Abstract

Two fifths of Britain’s leading people were educated privately: that’s five times the amount as in the population as a whole, with almost a quarter graduating from Oxford or Cambridge. Eight private schools send more pupils to Oxbridge than the remaining 2894 state schools combined, making modern Britain one of the most unequal places in Europe.

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 novel and the memoir, he investigates, in terms that are as insightful as they are irreverent, why so much literature 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 - especially 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. Experimentally ‘pirating’ McCarthy, Eribon and Louis, A Stubborn Fury 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 to the exclusion of more radically inventive writing, including that of working-class, BAME and LGBTQIAP+ authors? 

Contents

Preface: Stay Elite

Part I: Go to Settings (feat. Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis)

1. On Class and Culture in Elitist Britain
2. Bourgeois Theory
3. Memoirs, Memoirs, Memoirs

Part II : HOW LITERATURE WORKS © Tom McCarthy

4. This is All Pirated
5. Good and Bad Remixes, or The Importance of Having the Right Software
6. Who Speaks, Who Gets to Experiment and What Remains
7. ‘He Wants to Be Authentic, Is All’: Literature as Technological Prosthesis
8. Media Art and the Melancholy Impasse of the Anglo-American Novel

9. Conclusion: A Stubborn Fury

‘When Gary Hall, if he is indeed the author of this book, speaks, he listens, and in listening he writes and in writing he remixes. He, or whatever version of authorship he betrays, shows us how writing works: intuitively, intellectually and intensively. The end result is always illumination.’

Mark Amerika, Professor of Art and Art History, University of Colorado

‘Hall gives a stark account of how the English novel has emerged as a key technology for the reproduction of class inequality in Britain, and its seemingly inextricable connectedness to liberal humanism, anti-intellectualism and, worst of all, Oxbridge.’

Isabel Waidner, author of We Are Made of Diamond Stuff and co-founder of Queers Read This.