Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 1. Crossing Borders 2. Collectivities 3. Planetarity Notes Index

Promotional Information

Spivak demonstrates how critics interested in social justice should pay close attention to literary form and offers new interpretations of classics such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. The book offers close readings of texts not only in English, French, and German, but also in Arabic and Bengali.

About the Author

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics; The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues; Outside in the Teaching Machine; and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present.

Reviews

"Spivak maps a new way of reading not only the future of literary studies but its past as well. This text is disorienting and reconstellating, dynamic, lucid, and brilliant in its scope and vision. Rarely has 'death' offered such inspiration." - Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley; "Death of a Discipline is not a lament but a promise. Professor Spivak invites us to imagine an inclusive comparative literature freed from its traditional national anchorings, a border-crossing discipline honed by careful reading that encourages linguistic competence and includes the languages of the Southern Hemisphere 'as active cultural media.' This is a visionary work that charts not only the possibility of a reformed discipline that opens itself to learning from many quarters, but also identifies emergent collectivities." - Jean Franco, Columbia University"