-
Exhausted Literature: Work, Action, and the Dilemmas of Literary Commitment
- Philosophy and Literature
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 37, Number 2, October 2013
- pp. 291-313
- 10.1353/phl.2013.0018
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
This article examines Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of committed literature as a manifestation of the tendency in Western modernity of conceiving literature as a form of praxis anchored in work. Discussing an alternative idea of engagement formulated by Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, and Albert Camus, the essay develops a notion of exhausted literature that questions the prioritization of work and action in predominant models of commitment. Exhaustion is proposed as a politically and ethically motivated literary strategy of suspending the group-forming morality which, as a product of modern valorization of work and action, has accompanied literature of verisimilitude, activity, and oriented time.