To think about the limits (of a text, of a being, of a place) is to think about adulteration. It is to recognise that, at their limits, things merge with other things.

This essay proposes that such thinking has taken on a particular urgency in our own time, an urgency that is at once biopolitical and geopolitical. The spread of a virus has forced us to examine our individual biopolitical limits, as the collapse of a geopolitical ideology – one which allied US capital to progressive democratisation – has forced us to examine the boundaries, between east and west, between north and south, that have shaped the global distribution of wealth and force.

Under these conditions there is a tendency to immerse ourselves in our own person, to withdraw from the porous limits of self, of household, of nation, to some ground zero of being. We look to the imagined grounds of a minimal life that is self-directed and self-sufficient, that is proof against contamination by whatever lies beyond its pale.

We might call this contracted state a condition of mere being – the mere being that remains when our political life, our being in relation to others, is attenuated or forsaken. But this essay suggests that close attention to literary accounts of mere being, from Henry James to Wallace Stevens to Samuel Beckett, helps us to see that poetic mereness is not a denial of shared being, but a particular means of imagining it, a means of approaching that place where we are conjoined with others. In tracing a poetic tradition of mere being, the essay argues that what we find in the dramatically denuded self is not a retreat from limits, but an encounter with them – an encounter which grants us a new way of imagining what Densher calls, in The Wings of the Dove, ‘our being as we are’.

Is happiness possible in the Anthropocene? If, as Sarah Ahmed suggests, happiness is the mark of an accommodation with the future, then what becomes of the possibility of happiness when our planetary relation to the future has become estranged?

This essay considers this question, in relation to two performances staged in the summer of 2021, a site specific piece entitled Beckett in Folkestone, and a production of Beckett’s Happy Days, directed by Trevor Nunn at the Riverside Studios.

Both pieces, staged as we were emerging from the Covid lockdown and in the midst of ecological and biopolitical crisis, conduct a forensic examination of how it is possible now to share each other’s lives, enter into collective futures, or look forward, like Beckett’s Winnie, to another happy day.

In reading the pieces together, the essay looks to the imaginative forms in which we can encounter happiness, not as an accommodation with the future, but as the expression of a radical hope.

At the heart of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel Klara and the Sun is a singular act of imitation, in which Klara, a synthetic human, is asked to take the place of her owner, the sick child Josie.

This essay addresses this moment, in order to ask how far the novel form is able to perform this kind of ventriloquism, to undertake acts of imitation that might replace or supersede those that they imitate.

In order to respond to this question, the essay suggests, we need to put Klara and the Sun in conversation with the rest of Ishiguro’s oeuvre, which is itself in conversation with the longer history of the novel form. From Artist of the Floating World to The Unconsoled to Klara, Ishiguro has been concerned with the capacity of art to become the reality it imitates, and particularly with the capacity of the novel voice to pass through the boundary between original and copy. Klara might suggest that contemporary technologies have made this boundary newly porous; but the essay argues that the novel form has always sat at the difficult junction between voice and its replications. When he makes an artificial being speak in the voice of its owner, Ishiguro does not depart from the protocols of narrative voice, but rather gains access to its interior mechanisms, in a way that is illuminating for the critical power of fiction under contemporary biopolitical conditions.

This introduction offers a theoretical model for reading the relation between the conditions that determine the possibility of literary expression, and those possibilities that literature itself invents. It is in the relation between these two forms of possibility, the introduction argues, that the politics of literary form resides.

The last two decades of critical thinking have seen a quite radical shift in our understanding of this relationship. The introduction traces these shifts, and places the essays collected in this volume (written over that two decade period) in the context of such theoretical and political transformations. The passage of literary thinking in the current century, the introduction argues, requires a new critical understanding of literary possibility, which it is the task of these essays to perform.

It is a key element of DeLillo’s late style, this essay argues, that the tautology becomes its dominant formal feature. We might think of The Body Artist: ‘The word for moonlight is moonlight’. Or we might think of Zero K: ‘The ceiling was low, the bed was bedlike, the chair was a chair’.

This essay asks what the function and effect of the tautology is in late DeLillo, as this relates to his relationship with history on one hand, and with the materiality of embodied being on the other. In one sense, the tautology might appear to be the mark of a loss of attachment to the world, or to a historical materialism. The tautology might enact the failure of language to refer to anything beyond itself. But if this is so, the essay suggests that the tautology is the mark not only of a kind of failure of reference in late DeLillo, but also a new kind of referential structure, a new way in which language refers both to the body and to history, both to space and to time.

This essay traces a tradition of what is here called ‘deathwriting’ as it stretches from Emily Dickinson, to Franz Kafka, to Samuel Beckett, to Cormac McCarthy. The work of all these writers, the essay argues, is driven by the urge to give a poetic form to the experience of death, to make death thinkable and narratable. Alongside this tradition of deathwriting, and interwoven with it, one can discern too, a fascination with ‘blind seeing’, an attempt to make darkness visible, or to overcome the distinction between the light and the dark, the visible and the invisible. In reading the connection between deathwriting and blind seeing as it runs from Dickinson to the contemporary, the essay argues that these writers allow us to glimpse a differently constituted relationship between the living and the dead, and between the perceptible and the imperceptible. At a contemporary moment when it has become urgent to rethink our apparatuses for world picturing, with the emergence of the Anthropocene as a critical context for all of our imaginings, the essay offers this history of deathwriting as a radically different way of seeing, without the aid of human light.

Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote has exerted a unique influence on the history of the novel, because it tests, more exhaustively than any other, the bonds that tie fiction to the world that it partly invents.

This essay argues that the work of J. M. Coetzee is shaped, to a significate degree, by his long dialogue with Cervantes, which turns around a critical examination of what is here called the ‘anatomy of realism’ – the capacity of realist works of art to enter into the structuring of our life worlds. Coetzee’s engagement with Cervantes can be felt throughout his writing career, but it comes into particularly sharp relief in his later work, and particularly in his 2013 novel The Childhood of Jesus. It is in this work, the essay argues, that Coetzee’s reanimation of Don Quixote is most productive, as it reaches towards a dramatically shifted conception of realism, and of the relation between the imagination and the world.

Increasing educational standards in the workforce have increased the use of experts throughout the economy, leading to processes that more closely resemble bureaucracies and stakeholder policymaking, with an increasing emphasis on culturally liberal values such as diversity, representation, and social responsibility. The guiding industries and workforces of the scientific and technology sectors have enabled a technocratic ethos in government and industry. Public opposition to technocracy and skepticism of meritocracy is growing among voters, allowing conservatism to brand itself as an opposition movement to the extension of government reach and the associated prevalence of “politically correct” messages and practices across educational institutions and in the workplace. The polarized American brand of politics now pervades internal debates across organizational sectors, enlarging the scope of activist politics beyond campaigns and government, especially where educational and cultural divides are strongest. The distinct styles of the culture war’s two conflicting sides have become more dissimilar at the national, state, and local levels, even in ostensibly apolitical arenas.

Increasing educational standards in the workforce have increased the use of experts throughout the economy, leading to processes that more closely resemble bureaucracies and stakeholder policymaking, with an increasing emphasis on culturally liberal values such as diversity, representation, and social responsibility. The guiding industries and workforces of the scientific and technology sectors have enabled a technocratic ethos in government and industry. But public opposition to technocracy and skepticism of meritocracy is growing among voters, allowing conservatism to brand itself as an opposition movement to the extension of government reach and the associated prevalence of “politically correct” messages and practices across educational institutions and in the workplace. The polarized American brand of politics pervades internal debates across organizational sectors, enlarging the scope of activist politics beyond campaigns and government, especially where educational and cultural divides are strongest. The distinct styles of the culture war’s two conflicting sides have become more dissimilar at the national, state, and local levels, even in ostensibly apolitical arenas.

Global trends in the rich world, filtered through America’s unique two-party system, have transformed each party’s coalition and reinforced contrasting views of expertise. Although the rise of social issues and the rising importance of education are transnational, they raise unique challenges for each major American party. Each side has responded by shifting its agenda and public image. Democratic politicians have balanced their instinctive reluctance to alienate culturally traditionalist voting blocs against internal pressure from party members for a socially progressive, intellectually erudite, and demographically diverse party leadership. Republicans have been compelled to defer to a popular conservative media apparatus that promotes aversion to social transformation and hostility to claims of expertise by nonconservative authorities. Barack Obama (the wonky advocate of social change) and Donald Trump (the plain-spoken, nostalgic nemesis of experts) both personify their respective parties. These party leaders repel as well as attract, reinforcing our two-sided politics.