Communism by the Letter: Doris Lessing and the Politics of Writing

A human-centred approach to the environment is leading to ecological collapse. One of the ways that speculative realism challenges anthropomorphism is by taking non-human things to be as valid objects of investivation as humans, allowing a more responsible and truthful view of the world to take place. Brian Willems uses a range of science fiction literature that questions anthropomorphism both to develop and challenge this philosophical position. He looks at how nonsense and sense exist together in science fiction, the way in which language is not a guarantee of personhood, the role of vision in relation to identity formation, the difference between metamorphosis and modulation, representations of non-human deaths and the function of plasticity within the Anthropocene. Willems considers the works of Cormac McCarthy, Paolo Bacigalupi, Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, Doris Lessing and Kim Stanley Robinson are considered alongside some of the main figures of speculative materialism including Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux and Jane Bennett.

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Discovering Doris Lessing

American Journal of Islam and Society ◽

10.35632/ajiss.v33i2.247 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 33 (2) ◽

pp. 25-49

Author(s):

Md. Mahmudul Hasan

Keyword(s):

Women's Rights ◽

Sexual Relationships ◽

Doris Lessing ◽

Women’S Rights ◽

Education Literature ◽

Islamic Perspective ◽

Literary Reputation ◽

Islamic Thought

The 2007 Nobel literature laureate Doris Lessing (1919-2013) is one of the twentieth century’s most prolific and versatile British writers. Her literary career is marked by the robustness and diversity of her ideas. The plurality of voices in her work makes room for discovering a very different Lessing from how she is usually construed and for discussing some of her views in a new and somewhat unusual light. In this study, I intend to look at her thoughts on education, literature, racism, and women’s rights and locate possible commonalities between them and certain facets of Islamic thought. As she is considered a humanist, a secular writer of great stature, the “grande dame” of British writing of her time, and handlesexplicit sexual relationships, a sense of remoteness and incomprehension is perhaps palpable in any attempt to discover an “Islamic Doris Lessing.” However, given that she is known for her courage and outspokenness, as well as for making unconventional moves and iconoclastic statements sometimes at the expense of her literary reputation, it will be interesting to see her ideas from an Islamic perspective.

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Discrepant Solace

10.1093/oso/9780198789758.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

David James

Keyword(s):

Literary History ◽

Doris Lessing ◽

Kazuo Ishiguro ◽

Joan Didion ◽

Julian Barnes ◽

Ethical Implications ◽

History Of ◽

Late Twentieth ◽

Ian Mcewan ◽

Affective Meanings

Consolation has always played an uncomfortable part in the literary history of loss. But in recent decades its affective meanings and ethical implications have been recast by narratives that appear to foil solace altogether. Illuminating this striking archive, Discrepant Solace considers writers who engage with consolation not as an aesthetic salve but as an enduring problematic for late twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and memoir. Making close readings of emotion crucial to understanding literature’s work in the precarious present, David James examines writers who are rarely considered in conversation, including Sonali Deraniyagala, Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy, W.G. Sebald, Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Julian Barnes, Helen Macdonald, Ian McEwan, Colm Tóibín, Kazuo Ishiguro, Denise Riley, and David Grossman. These figures overturn critical suppositions about consolation’s kinship with ideological complaisance or dubious distraction, producing unsettling perceptions of solace that shape the formal and political contours of their writing.

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Art, History, and Postwar Fiction

10.1093/oso/9780198824459.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Kevin Brazil

Keyword(s):

Visual Arts ◽

Art History ◽

Visual Art ◽

New Left ◽

Doris Lessing ◽

William Gaddis ◽

Continuity And Change ◽

Historical Developments ◽

The Cold War ◽

The Relationship

Art, History, and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which novelists responded to the visual arts from the aftermath of the Second World War up to the present day. If art had long served as a foil to enable novelists to reflect on their craft, this book argues that in the postwar period, novelists turned to the visual arts to develop new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between literature and history. The sense that the novel was becalmed in the end of history was pervasive in the postwar decades. In seeming to bring modernism to a climax whilst repeating its foundational gestures, visual art also raised questions about the relationship between continuity and change in the development of art. In chapters on Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger, and W. G. Sebald, and shorter discussions of writers like Doris Lessing, Kathy Acker, and Teju Cole, this book shows that writing about art was often a means of commenting on historical developments of the period: the Cold War, the New Left, the legacy of the Holocaust. Furthermore, it argues that forms of postwar visual art, from abstraction to the readymade, offered novelists ways of thinking about the relationship between form and history that went beyond models of reflection or determination. By doing so, this book also argues that attention to interactions between literature and art can provide critics with new ways to think about the relationship between literature and history beyond reductive oppositions between formalism and historicism, autonomy and context.

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