The End of Modern Literature

The Berggruen Prize Winner’s Farewell to Literature

When the Left enjoys the most active resurgence since the end of the Cold War thanks to the disasters of neoliberalism, The End of Modern Literature offers viewpoints or “parallax views” that enable the reevaluation of literature’s significance in society, an opportunity to reimagine what has been called “literature.”

Sartre once conceived literature as the expression of people’s revolutionary subjectivity, but today there are no more global or even society-wide must-read novels. Everyone knows literature is dead, but no one knows how it died. Kojin Karatani, the author of Transcritique and The Structure of World History and the winner of the Berggruen Prize, examines the corpse, investigates the cause of death, and offers glimpses at its afterlives from multiple viewpoints of the theory of the novel, Sartre, the 18th century aesthetics, modernization of Japanese literature, and modern world system.

To Karatani’s insightful analysis, this volume includes responses by Fredric Jameson, Bruce Robbins, Kenneth W. Warren, Gauri Viswanathan, Andrew Gibson, Young-il Cho, Yoshiki Tajiri, Michael K. Bourdaghs, and Joanathan E. Abel, along with an introduction that situates Karatani’s essay on literature in his theoretical oeuvre. Thinking on the end of literature is also thinking on something new that is different from literature, something that comes out of what once made literature possible and meaningful.Kojin Karatani is an internationally renowned Marxian theorist and philosopher. Previously, he was a Professor at Hosei University in Tokyo, Kinki University in Osaka, and Columbia University in New York. He is the author of Transcritique, The Structure of World History, and Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility, among others.