Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel

Arne De Boever

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781628925241
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441144720
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

If the September 11 terror attacks opened up an era of crises and exceptions of which we are yet to see the end, it is perhaps not surprising that care has emerged in the early twenty-first century as a key political issue. This book approaches contemporary narratives of care through the lens of a growing body of theoretical writings on biopolitics. Through close-readings of J.M. Coetzee's Slow Man, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions, and Tom McCarthy's Remainder, it seeks to reframe debates about realism in the novel ranging from Ian Watt to Zadie Smith as engagements with the novel's biopolitical origins: its relation to pastoral care, the camps, and the welfare state. Within such an understanding of the novel, what possibilities for a critical aesthetics of existence does the contemporary novel include?

Table of contents

• FC
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Towards a Pharmacology of the Novel
• 1 J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man as “a Biologico-Literary Experiment”
• 2 Bare Life and the Camps in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
• 3 Life-Writing in Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions
• 4 “Just Being”: On Tom McCarthy’s Remainder
• Conclusion: Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her as a Narrative of Care
• Bibliography
• Index