[spectre] A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works in Elitist Britain – free book in MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series

[Joanna Zylinska]

Dear All,

Together with Open Humanities Press, I am delighted to announce a new 
publication in my series, MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW.

A STUBBORN FURY: HOW WRITING WORKS IN ELITIST BRITAIN
By Gary Hall
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/a-stubborn-fury/

Two fifths of Britain’s leading people were educated privately: that’s 
five times the amount as in the population as a whole, with almost a 
quarter graduating from Oxford or Cambridge. Eight private schools send 
more pupils to Oxbridge than the remaining 2894 state schools combined, 
making modern Britain one of the most unequal places in Europe.

In A Stubborn Fury, Gary Hall offers a powerful and provocative look at 
the consequences of this inequality for English culture in particular. 
Focusing on the literary novel and the memoir, he investigates, in terms 
that are as insightful as they are irreverent, why so much writing in 
England is uncritically realist, humanist and anti-intellectual. Hall 
does so by playfully rewriting two of the most acclaimed contributions 
to these media genres of recent times. One is that of England’s foremost 
avant-garde novelist Tom McCarthy, and the importance he attaches to 
European modernism and antihumanist theory. The other is that of the 
celebrated French memoirists Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis, and their 
attempt to reinvent the antihumanist philosophical tradition by 
producing a theory that speaks about class and intersectionality, yet 
generates the excitement of a Kendrick Lamar concert. Experimentally 
pirating McCarthy, Eribon and Louis, A Stubborn Fury addresses that most 
urgent of questions: what can be done about English literary culture’s 
addiction to the worldview of privileged, middle-class white men, very 
much to the exclusion of more radically inventive writing, including 
that of working-class, BAME and LGBTQIAP+ authors?

Like all Open Humanities Press books, A Stubborn Fury is freely 
available at:
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/a-stubborn-fury/

Previous books in the series include:
-    Remixing Persona: An Imaginary Digital Media Object by MALK (Mark 
Amerika and Laura Kim)
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/remixing-persona/

-    AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams by Joanna Zylinska
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/ai-art/

Warm wishes,

Joanna

-- 
Professor Joanna Zylinska
Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies
Goldsmiths, University of London

http://www.joannazylinska.net