The Idea of the Literary The Idea of the Literary. Edited by N icholas H arrison . Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh Press, 2005. vi + 121 pp. Pb £18.99

In his thought-provoking and considered introduction to this volume, Harrison asks if we need to rethink our idea of the literary in the light of recent views which suggest that literature's aesthetic dimension has been downplayed in favour of an advocacy of minority, colonial or gendered experience. Harrison argues that literature can accommodate the aesthetic and the political and this provides the impetus for his selection of articles, an impetus informed by a paradox: ‘an idea of the literary as both deeply politically involved and as irreducible to any determinate critical or political agenda’ (p. iv). Harrison is not concerned, however, to bring together a range of articles that are obediently consonant with this particular view on the literary but instead are sufficiently, and welcomingly, disparate in their treatment of an idea of the literary. The emphasis in this volume is not upon the pragmatic, paratextual markers that convey to the reader that the text they possess is literary. Instead, the literary is taken as a given and the emphasis in most of the contributions is upon the work of thought and tropes within literature and literature's potential to reconfigure how we interpret our world. Jean Bessière, for example, contends that the function of the literary is to question social representations and symbolization (p. 41). Alain Badiou suggests something similar arguing that literature's dynamic is constituted by both ‘the autonomous forces of language’ and the ‘immanent occurrence of a real’ (p. 38). And the real, for Badiou, is concerned with the human subject; its failings and weaknesses. Succinctly, he maintains that literature is a means by which we moderate the real and the real's failure to live up to the ‘Idea’ we have of how things should be. Simon Jarvis, by way of Hegel, invokes a form of ‘prosodic cognition’ and argues for forms of thinking and knowing that are non-linguistic and result from the prosodic aspect of poems (p. 69). An engaging piece but it might also have engaged with specific literary examples and pursued, rather than invoke, the possibilities of prosodic cognition. Corinna Russell and Derek Attridge offer close readings of canonical texts (Wordsworth and Shakespeare) that track the function of the literary trope as a way of engaging with the natural world but also as a form of taking leave of the observed world. Benita Parry's piece comes closest to the concerns and ideas delineated by Harrison. Drawing on ‘Marcuse's thinking on the emancipatory potential of the aesthetic dimension’ (p. 85), she offers a subtle and engaging reading of Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North that asserts its autonomy from Marcuse and stresses the transformative possibilities of literary ambiguity which, though internal to the text, is the result of an interplay between politico-cultural contexts and literary tropes. Yet, even where the political-cultural context is absent, literature, argues Jacques Rancière, can generate a dissensus that unsettles the habitual relation between words and states of being that lies at the heart of ‘political subject-formation’ (p. 100). The articles collected here are intelligent, rewarding and timely in their soundings of the idea of the literary and its imbrications of aesthetics and world.