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Literature and Governmentality
Author(s) -
Marx John
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00772.x
Subject(s) - governmentality , scholarship , biopower , literary criticism , criticism , discipline , sociology , appeal , government (linguistics) , social science , political science , law , literature , politics , philosophy , linguistics , art
Recent scholarship on governmentality promises to reinvigorate literary critical analysis of how novels, poems, and plays help to organize the world’s populations as they interact. In turn, literary criticism helps to illuminate the global implications of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, published in English as Security, Territory, Population (2007) and The Birth of Biopolitics (2008). By privileging varied practice over unifying theory, Foucault’s approach leads scholars to examine the circulation of governmental techniques in conjunction with the circulation of governable populations. An emphasis on mobility and exchange should appeal particularly to specialists in immigrant, imperial, and postcolonial literature. While considering a range of literary critical and social scientific scholarship on governmentality, this essay also shows how literature itself authorizes discrepant forms of administration. I contend that literature and literary criticism engage in imaginative reformulations and reinventions of the art of government, and in so doing contribute to debates about governing that are every bit as cross‐disciplinary as they are transnational.