The Berggruen Prize Winner’s Farewell to Literature When the Left enjoys the most active resurgence since the end of the Cold War thanks to the disasters of neoliberalism, The End of Modern Literature offers viewpoints or “parallax views” that enable the reevaluation of literature’s significance in society, an opportunity to reimagine what has been called “literature.” Sartre once conceived literature as the expression of people’s revolutionary subjectivity, but today there are no more global or even society-wide must-read novels. Everyone knows literature is dead, but no one knows how it died. Kojin Karatani, the author of Transcritique and The Structure of World History and the winner of the Berggruen Prize, examines the corpse, investigates the cause of death, and offers glimpses at its afterlives from multiple viewpoints of the theory of the novel, Sartre, the 18th century aesthetics, modernization of Japanese literature, and modern world system. To Karatani’s insightful analysis, this volume includes responses by Fredric Jameson, Bruce Robbins, Kenneth W. Warren, Gauri Viswanathan, Andrew Gibson, Young-il Cho, Yoshiki Tajiri, Michael K. Bourdaghs, and Joanathan E. Abel, along with an introduction that situates Karatani’s essay on literature in his theoretical oeuvre. Thinking on the end of literature is also thinking on something new that is different from literature, something that comes out of what once made literature possible and meaningful. "The premise of The End of Modern Literature , the collective volume edited by Karatani, is that everyone knows literature is dead, but no one knows how it died. Consequently, the volume reads like a supreme theoretical detective story, the anatomy of a murder: who did it, why, what are the consequences... Dozens of ideas popped up in my mind. No wonder the volume reads like a detective story since I think that today the only genre of literature that survived its death are detective stories written by women (like Tana French). Plus it seems to me clear that what comes after literature are high-quality TV series. You want to get even more idea? So read the volume - no excuse, no choice, just do it!" — Slavoj Žižek "Kojin Karatani might be a reluctant polemicist, indeed a reluctant literary theorist, but his quietly provocative thesis on what he characterises as the end of modern literature, itself full of fascinating insights into the historical career of the novel and its current crisis, has stimulated some remarkable responses, as assembled in this book. The collection is mandatory reading for anyone interested in the destiny of culture under the conditions of late capitalism." —Matthew Beaumont, Professor of English Literature, UCL Kojin Karatani is an internationally renowned Marxian theorist and philosopher. Previously, he was a Professor at Hosei University in Tokyo, Kinki University in Osaka, and Columbia University in New York. He is the author of Transcritique , The Structure of World History , and Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility , among others.