The Work of Literature

"Attridge at his best, raising difficult and perennial dilemmas and addressing them without evasion or recourse to jargon. The institution of literature requires perceptive, responsible, and sincere critics and theorists - like Attridge himself." --Rafe McGregor, Critical Quarterly"Attridge at his best, raising difficult and perennial dilemmas and addressing them without evasion or recourse to jargon. The institution of literature requires perceptive, responsible, and sincere critics and theorists - like Attridge himself." --Rafe McGregor, Critical Quarterly

Publications range across many areas, including poetic form, literary theory, and Irish and South African writing. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. Work translated into Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, etc. After obtaining degrees in his native South Africa and at Cambridge, he was Research Fellow at Oxford. . Recent visiting fellowships include All Souls College, the Ste

In other chapters it explores the issue of cultural difference in responses to literature, discusses the working of metaphor, questions the attribution of knowledge to literary works, and addresses the topics of affect and hospitality. Although the focus of the book is on literature, the arguments are relevant to all the arts, and engage with the thought of major aesthetic theorists in a number of traditions.. Beginning with an extended cross-examination in the form of an interview addressing a range of topics relating to the work of literature (understood both as the activity of the writer and as the text itself) and the practices of literary reading and literary criticism, it asks what it means to 'do justice to' a work of literature, provides