Liam Kruger

The Uses of Tradition evaluates a recent spate of films and novels that demonstrate a nuanced engagement with works associated with the Western canon and considers those works in light of the Canon Wars. Its goals are threefold: to produce a formal and generic analysis of how these adaptations of the canon function; to contextualize these works and their reception by a global upper-middlebrow reading public as responses to literary-historical and institutional developments particular to the past twenty years; and to combine the work of close-reading and historical situation to produce a holistic periodization of these institutional developments with respect to wider world-systemic shifts that ultimately determine those more local manifestations. The project synthesizes formalist, literary-sociological, and historicist methods to arrive at its account of the pertinence of these new engagements of the canon. Kruger considers contemporary works of world literature and world cinema that are in explicit conversation with the canon, deliberately avoiding defaulting to either affirmation or critique. In turn, he argues that these texts explicitly cite the contested canon to pose the question of how to live with difference, especially difference that is uncomfortable and unsettled. What they produce, in Kruger's account, is a narrative about the progressive refinement of a mode of relating to difference, and to history, which is not tolerance, but amounts to the cultivation of a taste for the kind of encounter that pluralism offers.