Resisting Texts: Exploring Positions in a Complex Relationship

Resisting Texts offers twelve studies that analyse the complex dynamics of textual resistance, exploring fiction’s fundamental potential to resist against realities – and the way reality may resist against fictions. Grouped into four sections, the articles (1) focus on how fictional texts resist the dynamics of history by consciously rewriting it; (2) explore how texts resist the readers’ desire to witness an authentic act of origin and instead perform the past’s resistance against recovery; (3) describe cultural institutions and their rhetoric of resistance against mainstream views that nevertheless has potential for productive resistance go unused; and (4) offer new approaches to literary texts that are usually read as resisting a specific ideology but can be shown to resist in a more complex way. The ‘resisting texts’ in these studies include works by Thomas Bernhard, António Botto, Daniil Charms, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, Octavio Paz, W.G. Sebald, and Virginia Woolf.