British Literature and the Life of Institutions
British Literature and the Life of Institutions
复制标题
英国文学与机构生活
DOI：
10.1093/oso/9780198836179.001.0001
复制
发表时间：
2021
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Benjamin Kohlmann
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Benjamin Kohlmann
《英国文学与制度生活》描绘了1900年前后英国福利国家的文学史前史，但它也标志着对当前关于批判和辩证想象的理论辩论的重大干预。通过将文学研究与政治理论、哲学和思想史进行对话，这本书重新使用了一种实质性的改良主义语言，而这种语言是我们自己所忽视的。这种改良主义的说法使人们有可能把国家想象成一种投机的、有抱负的想法--一种完全实现的生活形式，而不是一个令人沮丧的行政程序和官僚程序的集合。本卷追溯了这个习语从维多利亚时期到现代主义的共鸣，从玛丽奥古斯塔沃德，乔治吉辛，和HG威尔斯，到爱德华卡彭特和EM福斯特。与这种改良主义的语言相比，主导当前关于福利国家的辩论的经济主义标志着一种知识、文化和政治上的倒退。批评福利国家的缺点对我们来说是很自然的，但我们常常很难为它的原则和目标提供令人信服的辩护。本书通过敦促对批评有更丰富的理解来介入这些争论：这一具有挑衅性的新研究表明，投机并不意味着批评的取消，而是批评本身所固有的一个令人向往的时刻。科尔曼认为，如果我们想捍卫国家，我们需要学会重新思考。
British Literature and the Life of Institutions charts a literary prehistory of the welfare state in Britain around 1900, but it also marks a major intervention in current theoretical debates about critique and the dialectical imagination. By placing literary studies in dialogue with political theory, philosophy, and the history of ideas, the book reclaims a substantive reformist language that we have ignored to our own loss. This reformist idiom made it possible to imagine the state as a speculative and aspirational idea--as a fully realized form of life rather than as an uninspiring ensemble of administrative procedures and bureaucratic processes. This volume traces the resonances of this idiom from the Victorian period to modernism, ranging from Mary Augusta Ward, George Gissing, and HG Wells, to Edward Carpenter and EM Forster. Compared to this reformist language, the economism that dominates current debates about the welfare state signals an impoverishment that is at once intellectual, cultural, and political. Critiquing the shortcomings of the welfare state comes naturally to us, but we often struggle to offer up convincing defences of its principles and aims. This book intervenes in these debates by urging a richer understanding of critique: speculation, this provocative new study suggests, does not signify the cancellation of critique but an aspirational moment inherent in critique itself. If we want to defend the state, Kohlmann argues, we need to learn to think about it again.