Ranging from Radclyffe Hall to Martin Amis, these papers once more question the political and artistic relevance of such a dialectics. They thus aim at shedding light on the complex imperative of literary integrity, whether it be formal or ethical.
Literature is consequently defined as a space of interpellation, at the junction of words and reality, where language becomes accountable to our often conflicted sense of the human. Commitment is no doubt one of the most ubiquitous categories there is when applied to literature.
More often than not, the notion is conjured up in a dialectical tension with its seemingly opposite, autonomy. Needless to say, such entrenched binarism has come under critical flack from theoreticians intent on highlighting the complex interaction between form and ideology.
As Christine Reynier and Jean-Michel Ganteau remind us, 20th—century British literature has constantly redefined that line of formal resistance meant to differentiate autonomy and commitment:. If autonomy, both from the socio-historical context and the literary context or intertext, is unthinkable, does it mean that literature is necessarily synonymous with commitment, responsibility, accountability? Reynier and Ganteau 10— Colonial Women Writers in London, , have irrevocably altered our conception of literary commitment.
In the introductory chapter to British Fiction after Modernism. Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire. In it, she undoes the mechanisms of a class-consciousness that gnaws at literature and traps it in contradiction. We can help England very greatly to bridge the gulf between the two worlds [that of the public school and that of the village school] if we borrow the books she lends us and if we read them critically. We have got to teach ourselves to understand literature.
