In her book, Reading with Hannah Arendt. Literature, Criticism, Theory (Bloomsbury, 2026), Andrea Timár (School of English and American Studies, Department of English Studies) examines the literary relevance of Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy.

Hannah Arendt is one of the major thinkers of the political of the last century. Scholars have recently begun to explore her significance for the humanities, with special attention paid to the political and ethical relevance of her concept of storytelling. This book wishes to contribute to this ongoing dialogue by critically discussing the possible implications of Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy for contemporary literary studies. It establishes conversations between Arendt’s political philosophy, contemporary critical theory and literary works to propose an Arendtian approach to literature and a literary approach to Arendt and argue for Arendt’s significance to today’s literary and critical studies. 

It aims to explore the following questions: 

What could an Arendtian approach to literature mean? Can we establish a dialogue between Arendt’s engagements with literature and her political thought? Can a rereading of Arendt’s writings and imagined conversations between Arendt and her 21st-century interpreters (Judith Butler, Bonnie Honig, Adriana Cavarero, Jacques Rancière, Roberto Esposito, or Saidiya Hartman) inspire new readings of literary texts? Can these readings offer new insights into Arendt’s political philosophy? 

Departing from the literary relevance of the unstable opposition Arendt establishes between compassion and representative thinking, the book revisits some of Arendt’s own discussions of literature (Melville’s Billy Budd, Brecht’s ballads, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Nathalie Sarraute’s The Golden Fruits), reconsiders a major work that inspired Arendt-criticism (Euripides’ The Bacchae) and offers new, “Arendtian” readings of literary texts (e.g. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Dori Lessing’s The Grass is Singing and Dezső Kosztolányi’s Anna Édes). Based on Arendt’s seminar notes and a conversation with one of her ex-students, the book argues that the literature seminar, fostering open discussion, students’ attentive engagement with the singularity of the literary texts and the exercise of plurality and representative thinking may model the Arentian political space.