Afterword: new horizons in materiality and literature
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Afterword: new horizons in materiality and literature Simon C. Estok1,2 Accepted: 20 October 2020 / Published online: 18 November 2020 © Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2020
Abstract This article is an afterword (in every sense of that word) on a special collection about “materiality and literature.” It follows up on a promise that Thomas Bremer makes at the end of the Introduction to the special issue, where he acknowledges that there are “new horizons” waiting to be explored in theorizing about the topic. Most prominently visible on these new horizons, but not mentioned in the articles themselves, is what has been called “the new materialism.” This article explores very briefly the contributions of this burgeoning field, touching on matters relating with the current Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and the state of the humanities itself. Keywords New materialism · Agency · Material entanglement · Genetic materialism Thomas Bremer ends his elegant introduction to this special issue on “Materiality and literature” by speaking of how “the materiality of and in literature [… is] opening new horizons in comparative literary studies,” and it is these new horizons with which I must begin this Afterword. On the new horizons of which Bremer speaks is what has been called the “New Materialism.”1 It is an area that has developed a very large body of scholarship in a very short period of time. The enormity of scholarship over the past fifteen years or so in this area demands attention. There are several reasons for this. One of the most obvious of these is that because so much of the work in the New Materialism is necessarily inter- and transdisciplinary, comparative literary studies simply cannot afford to ignore it. Equally important is that much of this work engages with (and forces literary studies to engage with) what is perhaps the most pressing of material crises humanity has ever faced: climate change. Climate change 1 I use the singular (the New Materialism) throughout to specify a broad field of study rather than to imply that there is a single new materialism. There are indeed many new materialisms in this original and developing area of scholarship.
* Simon C. Estok [email protected] 1
Sichuan University, Chengdu, China
2
Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
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is actually a set of crises, and these crises now determine what Bremer describes as the materiality in literature (a thematic issue) and the materiality of literature (relations, materials, means, and modes of production). The New Materialism is a movement away from what Bremer describes as a “more hermeneutical proceeding” to a recognition of what Jane Bennett has called “a political ecology of things.”2 It is a movement toward a kind of scholarship that is more actively engaged with the materials of the world, perhaps a bit further away from the oft-pilloried Ivory Tower than is abstract theorizing. Indeed, the New Materialism is a response to a felt need for engagement with the materiality
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