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Podcast: New Books in Politics and Polemics
Episode: Tabish Khair, "Literature Against Fundamentalism" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Description: Acclaimed novelist and academic Tabish Khair argues that literature as a distinct mode of thinking can counteract fundamentalism.Literature is a mode of thinking, stories being one of the oldest thinking 'devices' known to humankind. The ways in which literature enables us to think are distinctive and necessary, because of the relationships between its material ('language') and its subject matter ('reality'). Although present in oral literature, these relationships are exposed in their full complexity with the rise of literature as a distinct form of writing. Literature Against Fundamentalism (Oxford UP, 2024) argues that literature enables us to engage wi...