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Chapter 3 entertains the idea that children’s literature might also be called a literature for minors, and even a minor literature as conceptualized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Children are legally minors, but adults can be minors too, culturally if not also legally. Such an understanding of children’s literature broadens our sense of its purpose. The chapter begins with Walter Benjamin’s attention to childhood and children’s forms as a baseline for critical thinking about “minors.” It then traces the reception history of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, the Anglophone children’s classic that most closely approaches recognition as theory. Finally, the chapter explores the idea that some children’s literature functions as queer theory for kids, discussing a wide range of texts including A Series of Unfortunate Events. The chapter concludes with a reading of Alison Bechdel’s memoir Are You My Mother?, seemingly for adults but preoccupied with queer childhood.

This chapter explores the notion of territory in the works of both Gilles Deleuze and Martin Heidegger. It examines whether race and its minor theatre want a dwelling place and investigates whether there is a political potential within the body without organs (BWO) which offers a resistance to the homely conception of dwelling. It provides a contextualisation of this future theatre in the Deleuzo-Guattarian project of minor literature as a whole and questions the practicality of the schizo-stroll and the BWO. It also discusses the notion of Heideggerian deterritorialisation.

The collision of the poetic-textual experiments of 1916 and the deliberate use of chance in the creation of new works produced one of the earliest of the Zurich Dada innovations to be formally named: the simultaneous poem. The scoring and performance of the poem ‘L’amiral cherche une maison à louer’ is accorded centrality in this chapter, which goes beyond tired accounts of linguistic seizure to propose series of linguistic contestation ranging minorisation and multilingualism. The chapter draws also on the interests of James Joyce (who was in Zurich busily drafting Ulysses in 1916) in accounting for this literary intervention that occupies a unique place in Dada history.

The author links the purview of the “new-consciousness” novel to Edward Said’s conceptualization of “decentered consciousness,” a term he uses to describe postcolonial cultural and intellectual efforts that aim at disrupting constituencies and ideologies of dominance and essentialism. Following a historical approach to understanding the emergence of novelistic genres, this chapter reviews the historical conditions surrounding the production of several Egyptian novels—from Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Zaynab to what Sabry Hafez calls the “New Egyptian Novel” of the 1990s—to exhibit how the novel, in responding to its historical moment, defies definitional stability due to the dialectical process of historical change. The socio-political and cultural context underlying the rise of the new-consciousness novel is similarly analyzed to detect the homologies and disjunctures it has with its antecedent counterparts as well as highlight its new distinct and cohesive semantic and formal features of heteroglossia and what it achieves as a corpus.

This chapter discusses the relationship between the writer and a people under the assumption of a “minor literature.” Consider the writer as a “solitary bachelor”—one that could be likened to Proust’s narrator multiplicity, which in turn produces a collective assemblage of enunciation, i.e. literature. Deleuze and Guattari deny the individuality of the writer, by positing that the writer is a “bachelor” in subjective terms, but is objectively part of the collective assemblage. Within this context Deleuze and Guattari define minor literature as the state of the literary machine in which the more singular the writer’s expression becomes, the more the relationship between the writer and a people (in this case always meaning a virtual people) will become an intensive zone of mutual becoming, particularly in the way that new literary statements are sometimes taken up to express new possibilities of collective enunciation.

Doris Lessing's late twentieth-century fiction has often provoked and discomfited. Some readers of The Fifth Child (1988), its sequel Ben, in the World (2000) and Lessing's 1999 novel Mara and Dann were disturbed by her appropriation of racially marked stereotypes of the animal, the primitive and the atavistic. Such imagery has controversial implications in relation to ideas about ‘race’ and nation. Moreover, Lessing deploys what might be termed the ‘minor’ genres of urban gothic, picaresque and disaster narrative in her late twentieth-century work in unfamiliar and disturbing ways. In analysing Lessing's late twentieth-century ‘fabular’ fictions in relation to ideas about genre and ‘race’, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's discussion of ‘minor’ literature proves instructive. Deleuze and Guattari define minor literature as exhibiting three main characteristics: ‘the deterritorialisation of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation’. Thus, minor literature has a partial relation to nationality both linguistically and generically. Lessing's resistance to territoriality is the overriding concern of her 1987 collection of four short essays, Prisons we Choose to Live Inside.

The everyday and the racial form of Asian Americans both depend on the non-sublime awareness of large numbers in the context of capitalist modernity. The modern everyday consists in a sense of scale and a particular experience of time as empty repetition. Asian American writing can be considered a form of realism because of its concern with the modern everyday. This book reads for the everyday as a structure of feeling.

This chapter focuses in detail on the main period of French decadence, namely the 1880s. After a brief terminological consideration of its variant names (‘decadism’ and ‘decadentism’), it develops a theory of decadence as a ‘minor literature’, understood as the exact opposite of the three main characteristics outlined by Deleuze and Guattari: decadence emerges as reterritorializing, apolitical, and atomistic. The chapter then focuses on the year 1884 as the high point of decadent style: Huysmans’ÀRebours is the inevitable centre-piece of the discussion, but reference is also made to a range of other texts including Paul Verlaine’s poetry and Élémir Bourges’ novel Le Crépuscule des dieux. What emerges in particular from the discussion is the importance of the decadent rhetoric of condensation, saturation, and distillation, whereby the search for ‘essence’ becomes emblematic of the quest for a late sublime.

The chapter shows how bloggers mix of elements drawn from high and low varieties (Mixed Arabic) and foreign languages to develop new literary styles. It adopts Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of ‘minor literature’ (1983) to illuminate the subversive nature of bloggers’ literary practices. The concept of ‘minority’ sheds light on the collective and political value of this literature, as it is produced by writers who publish their personal life-stories on the Internet to distance themselves from mainstream, state-owned media, to connect with each other and push the boundaries for freedom of expression. Besides, ‘minority’ allows to understand the use of mixed varieties of Arabic as a ‘deterritorialized language’, that is, a new, subversive literary style coined by a young generation of writers who feels alienated in respect to the national standardized written language. This chapter is based on the analysis of the six blogs chosen as case studies, but it includes examples drawn from the larger sample of blogs. It combines theories drawn from sociolinguistics and literary studies. Furthermore, it shows some examples of editorial choices made concerning this style when blogs are turned into books.

This chapter investigates how discourses on disability may assist the reconsideration of Deleuze’s understanding of sexual pleasure. Deleuze critiques the hierarchal organisation of bodies and their facialisation through social, political and gendered functions, and yet, a closer look at the rerouting of sexual pleasures of anomalous bodies suggests that his rejection of the orgasm rests also on ableist assumptions about how bodies work. Employing Deleuzian concepts such as becoming and faciality, this chapter analyses the ‘disabling’ of sexuality, that is, the way that sexual pleasure is hijacked by cultural, political, commercial and medical discourses. At the same time, reading Deleuze through discourses on disability makes it possible to ask if bodies that, in different ways, fail to function according to predetermined standards can express more productive relations between the orgasm and the body than the one Deleuze envisions.

This chapter considers how the practice of non-translation has implications for the development and critical practice of ‘world literature’, taking the ‘Eumaeus’ episode of Joyce’s Ulysses as its focal point. In particular, non-translation offers a route to re-read two related and important literary-historical models that have been influential in conceptualizing world literature: the idea of a ‘minor literature’, as elaborated initially by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and that of a ‘dominant language’ within a ‘world history of literature’, elaborated by Pascale Casanova. It is important to do so because, remarkably enough, despite the obvious relevance of non-translation, neither model addresses the phenomenon of plurilingual, macaronic writing. The matter of non-translation offers an illuminating index through which to consider, and revise, these influential literary-historical models. The chapter also examines the contemporary context of language reform exemplified by the Society for Pure English.

This chapter analyzes the image of the thought as envisioned in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. In this book, the term “rhizome” appears to determine the particular “image of thought” in Kafka’s writing, which is proposed in relation to the experimental method of reading Kafka: the method of “anti-interpretation.” The underlying principle of this method of “anti-interpretation” is that, in the form of the rhizome, thought gives itself over to experimentation, which is to say, it does not know what it is looking for in advance. In Kafka, the vegetal realm of the rhizome is also a “burrow,” which is to say a vegetal realm with the animal-logos concealed inside. This tension defines the readings of Deleuze and Guattari of Kafka’s writings as an echo of Proust’s concept of a multiplicity produced from a whole.

Traditional approaches to children’s literature attempt to position the child within ideological discourses and focus on the creation or silencing of the child’s voice. This chapter addresses the paradox of children’s literature in which an adult author must write in their capacity as a child and focuses on the child in children’s literature which succeeds in minorising language and making language stutter. This chapter considers the surfaces of sense on which nonsense words are created and concludes with a call to recognise the zeroth voice of the molecular child: a voice called out of the reading of texts which forms as (non)sense is created.

This chapter outlines the Yiddish American writer Jacob Glatstein’s understanding of world literature, which rejected conventional modes of translation and was increasingly suspicious of Euro-American institutions of literary value. Glatstein repeatedly critiqued other Yiddish writers, including Asch, who, he believed, wrote for translation rather than as part of what Glatstein found to be a more valuable, even more worldly, vernacular project. Modeled on aspects of Anglo-American and global modernism yet fiercely loyal to Yiddish vernacular creativity, Glatstein proposed a world literature to-come, in which capitulation to market demands would be deferred in favor of a particularism shared across seemingly peripheral literary cultures. The chapter traces Glatstein’s belief in the inherent worldliness of Yiddish writing—despite or even because of its obscurity—from the 1930s to the postwar period, in his literary criticism, poetry, and fiction.

The Introduction examines Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go to explore how the modest and minor mode of thinking practiced in it might be broadened to an emerging set of contemporary fiction, criticism, and theory. Drawing on the work of philosophical pragmatism, the Introduction argues that modesty as a temperament in novels entails the principle that fiction holds no special position outside the world from which to speak about it, and therefore, it frames novelistic expression as a process of thinking. Crucially, recognizing the novel as a process of thinking with the world requires a reciprocal critical modesty in which we understand critical work as something that happens in collaboration with the novel rather than to it. Critical modesty is not a theory or method to be applied but a temperament sourced from the ways texts model their own relations. Thus, the Introduction offers an account of the book’s key terms that follow from the ways that novelists and critics practice critical modesty.