Books by Sarah Brouillette
These are the page proofs from some stage of my first book, pub. 2007 by Palgrave (later in pbk w... more These are the page proofs from some stage of my first book, pub. 2007 by Palgrave (later in pbk with a new preface in 2011).
New Comparisons in World Literature, 2017
This book attempts to understand what ‘contemporary’ has meant, and should mean, for literary stu... more This book attempts to understand what ‘contemporary’ has meant, and should mean, for literary studies. The essays in this volume suggest that an attentive reading of recent global literatures challenges the idea that our contemporary moment is best characterized as a timeless, instantaneous ‘now’. The contributors to this book argue that global literatures help us to conceive of the contemporary as an always plural, heterogeneous, and contested temporality. Far from suggesting that we replace theories of an omnipresent ‘end of history’ with a traditional, single, diachronic timeline, this book encourages the development of such a timeline’s rigorous inverse: a synchronic, multi-faceted and multi-temporal history of the contemporary in literature, and thus of contemporary global literatures. It opens up the concept of the contemporary for comparative study by unlocking its temporal, logical, political, and ultimately aesthetic and literary complexity.
Papers by Sarah Brouillette
Anglistik, 2015
In his influential account of the rise of English literary studies, Terry Eagleton claims that li... more In his influential account of the rise of English literary studies, Terry Eagleton claims that literature is a key moral ideology for our post-secular modernity (1996, 27). The literary author's creative process provides an image of non-alienated labour, while the literary canon "appears as one of the few enclaves in which the creative values expunged from the face of English society by industrial capitalism can be celebrated and affirmed" (1996, 19). The idea that literature is an anti-industrial and non-alienated enclave is surprisingly tenacious. In her recent study of the battle between independent and chain bookstores, Laura Miller (2006) suggests the settled image of literary reading as something deeply humanizing and enlivening was activated by retailers resisting the rationalization threatened by big-box stores. They presented neighbourhoods supplied by "local" independents as holistic communities full of warm human beings eager to make connections with neighbours, whereas the big-box retailers were said to be suited only to strip-mall impersonality. They are all commercial enterprises, yet one side got to claim that encouraging the formation of authentic literary communities was primary amongst its lofty goals, while the other was presented as driven only by materialistic interests. Ted Striphas argues related points in his work on Amazon's expedient use of the idea that it is primarily a seller of good books. Literature's aura has been a clear cover for the company's real aims, which include revolutionizing the distribution of consumer goods-to be continued in a dramatic fashion when it starts using drones for deliveries-and affiliation with an elite roster of global technology and "digital utility" companies such as Google and Facebook. Striphas argues that via Kindle e-books in particular, Amazon has been working to turn the reading process into a "recordable, transmissible thing" (2010, 304)-a thing that can be mined and potentially used for productive processes like any other kind of user data. He connects these efforts to a broader transformation, in which "the widespread private ownership of saleable consumer goods" is giving way to the temporary licensing of intellectual properties via Digital Rights Management (DRM), and consumer capitalism is morphing into something that is-under banners of choice and interactivity-more controlled, patrolled, and delimited than ever before (Striphas 2009, 16). In this essay we comment briefly on how contemporary literary markets might be conceived in relation to the political-economic realities lately driving the ownership and controlled distribution of literary properties. Materialist studies of the literary field have often productively focused on a centre-periphery split and the exceptions to it: authors from the world's rural, remote, postcolonial, underdeveloped, or otherwise underprivileged peripheries are drawn into over-privileged centres of production, their work then being disseminated out first to readers at the centre and then unevenly to the distant peripheries from which they "originated" (Brouillette 2007; English 2005; Huggan 2001; Whitlock 2006). In the first part of our essay we discuss how concern about this process has been voiced by readers-in particular, by readers who identify with those peripheries and object to the concentration of power in the hands of those with access to elite capital and possessed of the will to succeed on the accepted terms. We look at the case of the reception of Aravind Adiga's prizewinning novel The White
Totality Inside Out, 2022
This contribution from Sarah Brouillette and Joshua Clover demonstrates how the separation of cla... more This contribution from Sarah Brouillette and Joshua Clover demonstrates how the separation of class from identity has become foundational to a particular mode of aesthetic theory, one that insists on the autonomy of the work of art. These theorists believe not only that can the work of art be separated from the social whole in which it was created but also that this very separation is source of art’s political force. Brouillette and Clover argue, instead, that capitalist value flows through art and culture in a dynamic way. This totalizing standpoint stresses the historical trajectory of capitalism’s development, de-development, eclipse, and the shifting forms of cultural expression that emerge and decline alongside it.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Jan 18, 2022
Textual Practice, 2024
This article discusses Emma Healey’s 2022 Best Young Woman Job Book as an instance of a contempor... more This article discusses Emma Healey’s 2022 Best Young Woman Job Book as an instance of a contemporary publishing picaresque: stories that track creative work in today’s conditions of acute scarcity and struggle, and that connect conditions for writers to a more generalised experience of economic struggle both in and beyond the creative industries. Healey deploys the picaresque as a politicised aesthetic, while ironising the figure of the struggling writer, and the structure of the bildungsroman, as forms engendering commitment to one’s own exploitation and unravelling. Her work partakes of and advances a broader antiwork wariness about the forms of complicity, compromise, self-silencing, and coercion required to get ahead given worsening conditions of literary work in its late age of destitution and disinvestment.
University of Toronto Quarterly, 2015
The article addresses US perceptions of subsidized pro-Soviet books and periodicals in India in t... more The article addresses US perceptions of subsidized pro-Soviet books and periodicals in India in the 1950s and the way that pro-US book programs, intended to counter the Soviet initiative, imagined that they might help to strengthen the hold of liberal capitalist democracy in the face of the threat of Soviet influence.
Totality Inside Out, 2022
People looking for work in cities are immersed in English as the lingua franca of the mobile phon... more People looking for work in cities are immersed in English as the lingua franca of the mobile phone and the urban hustlemore effective instigations to reading than decades of work by traditional publishers and development agencies. The legal publishing industry campaigns to convince people to scorn pirates and plagiarists as a criminal underclass, and to instead purchase copyrighted, barcoded works that have the look of legitimacy about them. They work with development industry officials to "foster literacy"meaning to grow the legal book trade as a contributor to national economic health, and police what and how the newly literate read. But harried cash-strapped audiences will read what and how they can, often outside of formal economies, and are increasingly turning to mobile phone platforms that sell texts at a fraction of the price of legally printed books.
Los Angeles Review of Books, 2020
This article studies the relative success of the mass-market romance industry. It argues that, in... more This article studies the relative success of the mass-market romance industry. It argues that, in conditions of general economic downturn, supports for the cultivation of literary reading have declined, while inducements to romance reading have strengthened. It considers the centrality of self-publishing to romance reading, and the styles of work available to romance writers, most of whom are women and are usually poorly remunerated. It considers, finally, the contemporary romance heroine, treating her as a figure of fantastical symbolic reconciliation: between a liberal ideal of independent empowerment and the reality of persistent compulsion toward coupledom and subservience.
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Books by Sarah Brouillette
Papers by Sarah Brouillette
Co-authored by Sarah Brouillette, Emilio Sauri, and Mathias Nilges
The Introduction to _Literature and the Global Contemporary_ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Read the complete Introduction here:
https://books.google.ca/books?id=r-M8DwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false