What is Romance Studies? What could it be? This book is a sustained attempt to define—indeed, invent—the field, both in theory and in practice. It is therefore both a manifesto for Romance Studies as a discipline that may be an antidote to bureaucratic reason and, more broadly, a provocative but accessible introduction to methods of reading literature beyond national boundaries. Romance Studies: Manifesto and Method is thus both a disciplinary provocation as well as a set of actual “lessons” that have been designed for the uninitiated.
Romance Studies proceeds via a tasting menu of representative novels from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries originally written in the Romance languages: French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, and Romanian. From Marcel Proust to Georges Perec, María Luisa Bombal to Javier Cercas, Clarice Lispector to Elena Ferrante, it argues that these texts betray and exceed tradition, as well as constitute an assemblage that is also a minor literature, a war machine set against the neo-imperial tendencies of contemporary culture. The book opens up a world of difference in which new concepts, new habits may arise.
Ultimately, Beasley-Murray intends not to construct a discipline like others, but to come up with something different and distinctive, something beyond discipline. The book outlines a Romance Studies that is a vector of deterritorialization, flight, and betrayal that subverts the hegemony of a perverse global monolingualism for which “world literature” can only come into being in English. Romance Studies: Manifesto and Method is thus also an intellectual history that calls for its own deconstruction so that something else can emerge, offered in the form of twenty-eight lectures with drinks pairings. What happens when you read a novel (or poem) with an eye to the beverages it contains? There is a history to be told in the objects taken for granted, the things we absent-mindedly consume, and the minor details of the material world that a text conjures up. Enjoy!