Fiction Agonistes: In Defense of Literature

Jusdanis, who is not further identified, defends literature as a form of art, and art as a purveyor of beauty, and beauty as one of the necessary conditions for being human, one that has been neglected at best but too often heaped with facile praise or denigration in the jaded spheres of academe. He considers overture and themes, art's apology, two autonomies, art as parabasis, the line between living and pretending, and the future of a fiction. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Fiction Agonistes defends literature as a space where we experience the difference between living and imagining, life and life-like, reality and invention.
In this path-breaking new work, Gregory Jusdanis asks why literature matters. Why are we afraid to admit our pleasures of reading, to defend the arts to the school board, to discuss the importance of literature in life? Drawing on a wealth of references from Aristophanes to Eudora Welty, from Fernando Pessoa to Orhan Pamuk, from Cavafy to hypertext stories, Jusdanis reminds us that the arts have always been under attack. Instead of despair, however, he offers a pragmatic defense of literature, arguing that it performs a social function in dramatizing the break between illusion and reality, life and the life-like, permanence and metamorphosis. The ability to distinguish between the actual and the imaginary is essential to human beings. Our capacity to imagine something new, to project ourselves into the mind of another person, and to fight for a new world is based on this distinction. Literature allows us to imagine alternate possibilities of human relationships and political institutions, even in the watery world of the Internet. At once daring and lucid, Fiction Agonistes considers the place of art today with passion and optimism.