Download or read book Ending and Unending Agony written by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published posthumously, Ending and Unending Agony is Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s only book entirely devoted to the French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003). The place of Blanchot in Lacoue-Labarthe’s thought was both discreet and profound, involving difficult, agonizing questions about the status of literature, with vast political and ethical stakes. Together with Plato, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Heidegger, Blanchot represents a decisive crossroads for Lacoue-Labarthe’s central concerns. In this book, they converge on the question of literature, and in particular of literature as the question of myth—in this instance, the myth of the writer born of the autobiographical experience of death. However, the issues at stake in this encounter are not merely autobiographical; they entail a relentless struggle with processes of figuration and mythicization inherited from the age-old concept of mimesis that permeates Western literature and culture. As this volume demonstrates, the originality of Blanchot’s thought lies in its problematic but obstinate deconstruction of precisely such processes. In addition to offering unique, challenging readings of Blanchot’s writings, setting them among those of Montaigne, Rousseau, Freud, Winnicott, Artaud, Bataille, Lacan, Malraux, Leclaire, Derrida, and others, this book offers fresh insights into two crucial twentieth-century thinkers and a new perspective on contemporary debates in European thought, criticism, and aesthetics.
Download or read book Ending and Unending Agony written by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Understanding Blanchot Understanding Modernism written by Christopher Langlois and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maurice Blanchot occupies a central though still-overlooked position in the Anglo-American reception of 20th-century continental philosophy and literary criticism. On the one hand, his rigorous yet always-playful exchanges with the most challenging figures of the philosophical and literary canons of modernity have led thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault to acknowledge Blanchot as a major influence on the development of literary and philosophical culture after World War II. On the other hand, Blanchot's reputation for frustrating readers with his difficult style of thought and writing has resulted in a missed opportunity for leveraging Blanchot in advancing the most essential discussions and debates going on today in the comparative study of literature, philosophy, politics, history, ethics, and art. Blanchot's voice is simply too profound, too erudite, and too illuminating of what is at stake at the intersections of these disciplines not to be exercising more of an influence than it has in only a minority of intellectual circles. Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism brings together an international cast of leading and emergent scholars in making the case for precisely what contemporary modernist studies stands to gain from close inspection of Blanchot's provocative post-war writings.
Download or read book Look Round for Poetry written by Brian McGrath and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry is dead. Poetry is all around us. Both are trite truisms that this book exploits and challenges. In his 1798 Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth anticipates that readers accustomed to the poetic norms of the day might not recognize his experiments as poems and might signal their awkward confusion upon opening the book by looking round for poetry, as if seeking it elsewhere. Look Round for Poetry transforms Wordsworth’s idiomatic expression into a methodological charge. By placing tropes and figures common to Romantic and Post-Romantic poems in conjunction with contemporary economic, technological, and political discourse, Look Round for Poetry identifies poetry’s untimely echoes in discourses not always read as poetry or not always read poetically. Once one begins looking round for poetry, McGrath insists, one might discover it in some surprising contexts. In chapters that spring from poems by Wordsworth, Lucille Clifton, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, McGrath reads poetic examples of understatement alongside market demands for more; the downturned brow as a figure for economic catastrophe; Romantic cloud metaphors alongside the rhetoric of cloud computing; the election of the dead as a poetical, and not just a political, act; and poetic investigations into the power of prepositions as theories of political assembly. For poetry to retain a vital power, McGrath argues, we need to become ignorant of what we think we mean by it. In the process we may discover critical vocabularies that engage the complexity of social life all around us.
Download or read book On the Horizon of World Literature written by Emily Sun and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the Horizon of World Literature compares literary texts from asynchronous periods of incipient literary modernity in different parts of the world: Romantic England and Republican China. These moments were oriented alike by “world literature” as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. World literature thus provided—and continues to provide—a condition of possibility for conversation between cultures as well as for their mutual provincialization. The book offers readings of a selection of literary forms that serve also as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms of life. The literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel function as testing grounds for questions of both literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages and activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang explore the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds. Sun’s book brings to light the disciplinary-historical impact world literature has had in shaping literary traditions and practices around the world. The book renews the practice of close reading by offering the model of a deprovincialized close reading loosened from confinement within monocultural hermeneutic circles. By means of its own focus on England and China, the book provides methods useful for comparatists working between other Western and non-Western languages. It establishes the critical significance of Romanticism for the discipline of literary studies and opens up new paths of research in global Romanticism and global nineteenth-century studies. And it offers a new approach to analyzing the cosmopolitan character of the literary and cultural transformations of early twentieth-century China.
Download or read book Infectious Liberty written by Robert Mitchell and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Infectious Liberty traces the origins of our contemporary concerns about public health, world population, climate change, global trade, and government regulation to a series of Romantic-era debates and their literary consequences. Through a series of careful readings, Robert Mitchell shows how a range of elements of modern literature, from character-systems to free indirect discourse, are closely intertwined with Romantic-era liberalism and biopolitics. Eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century theorists of liberalism such as Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus drew upon the new sciences of population to develop a liberal biopolitics that aimed to coordinate differences among individuals by means of the culling powers of the market. Infectious Liberty focuses on such authors as Mary Shelley and William Wordsworth, who drew upon the sciences of population to develop a biopolitics beyond liberalism. These authors attempted what Roberto Esposito describes as an “affirmative” biopolitics, which rejects the principle of establishing security by distinguishing between valued and unvalued lives, seeks to support even the most abject members of a population, and proposes new ways of living in common. Infectious Liberty expands our understandings of liberalism and biopolitics—and the relationship between them—while also helping us to understand better the ways creative literature facilitates the project of reimagining what the politics of life might consist of. Infectious Liberty is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.
Download or read book Middling Romanticism written by Zachary Sng and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Romanticism is often understood as an age of extremes, yet it also marks the birth of the modern medium in all senses of the word. Engaging with key texts of the romantic period, the book outlines a wide-reaching project to re-imagine the middle as a constitutive principle. Sng argues that Romanticism dislodges such terms as medium, moderation, and mediation from serving as mere self-evident tools that conduct from one pole to another. Instead, they offer a dwelling in and with the middle: an attention to intervals, interstices, and gaps that make these terms central to modern understandings of relation.
Download or read book Shibboleth written by Marc Redfield and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working from the Bible to contemporary art, Shibboleth surveys the linguistic performances behind the politics of border crossings and the policing of identities. In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European languages, shibboleth has come to mean a hard-to-falsify sign that winnows identities and establishes and confirms borders. It has also acquired the ancillary meanings of slogan or cliché. The semantic field of shibboleth thus seems keyed to the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility—to the proliferation of technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion and inclusion that saturate modern life. The various phenomena we sum up as neoliberalism and globalization are unimaginable in the absence of shibboleth-technologies. In the context of an unending refugee crisis and a general displacement, monitoring and quarantining of populations within a global regime of technics, Paul Celan’s subtle yet fierce reorientation of shibboleth merits scrupulous reading. This book interprets the episode in Judges together with Celan’s poems and Jacques Derrida’s reading of them, as well as passages from William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Doris Salcedo’s 2007 installation Shibboleth at the Tate Modern. Redfield pursues the track of shibboleth: a word to which no language can properly lay claim—a word that is both less and more than a word, that signifies both the epitome and the ruin of border control technology, and that thus, despite its violent role in the Biblical story, offers a locus of poetico-political affirmation.
Download or read book New Critical Nostalgia written by Christopher Rovee and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Critical Nostalgia weighs the future of literary study by reassessing its past. It tracks today's impassioned debates about method back to the discipline’s early professional era, when an unprecedented makeover of American higher education with far-reaching social consequences resulted in what we might call our first crisis of academic life. Rovee probes literary study’s nostalgic attachments to this past, by recasting an essential episode in the historiography of English—the vigorous rejection of romanticism by American New Critics—in the new light of the American university’s tectonic growth. In the process, he demonstrates literary study’s profound investment in romanticism and reveals the romantic lyric’s special affect, nostalgia, as having been part of English’s professional identity all along. New Critical Nostalgia meticulously shows what is lost in reducing mid-century American criticism and the intense, quirky, and unpredictable writings of central figures, such as Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and W. K. Wimsatt, to a glib monolith of New Critical anti-romanticism. In Rovee’s historically rich account, grounded in analysis of critical texts and enlivened by archival study, readers discover John Crowe Ransom’s and William Wordsworth’s shared existential nostalgia, witness the demolition of the “immature” Percy Shelley in the revolutionary textbook Understanding Poetry, explore the classroom give-and-take prompted by the close reading of John Keats, consider the strange ambivalence toward Lord Byron on the part of formalist critics and romantic scholars alike, and encounter the strikingly contemporary quantitative studies by one of the mid-century’s preeminent poetry scholars, Josephine Miles. These complex and enthralling engagements with the romantic lyric introduce the reader to a dynamic intellectual milieu, in which professionals with varying methodological commitments (from New Critics to computationalists), working in radically different academic locales (from Nashville and New Haven to Baton Rouge and Berkeley), wrangled over what it means to read, with nothing less than the future of the discipline at stake.
Download or read book The Location of Experience written by Adela Pinch and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We tend to feel that works of fiction give us special access to lived experience. But how do novels cultivate that feeling? Where exactly does experience reside? The Location of Experience argues that, paradoxically, novels create experience for us not by bringing reality up close, but by engineering environments in which we feel constrained from acting. By excavating the history of the rise of experience as an important category of Victorian intellectual life, this book reveals how experience was surprisingly tied to emotions of remorse and regret for some of the era’s great women novelists: the Brontës, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and Elizabeth Gaskell. It shows how these writers passed ideas about experience—and experiences themselves—among each other. Drawing on intellectual history, psychology, and moral philosophy, The Location of Experience shows that, through manipulating the psychological dimensions of fiction’s formal features, Victorian women novelists produced a philosophical account of experience that rivaled and complemented that of the male philosophers of the period.
Download or read book The Play of Light written by Ann Smock and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing from five contemporary French poets—Jacques Roubaud, Emmanuel Hocquard, Danielle Collobert, Anne Portugal, and Jacques Jouet—Ann Smock juxtaposes them and provides a milieu suitable for philosophical reflection on identity, on not-being and being, on communication, and on secrets. Smock also includes thinkers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Giorgio Agamben, who contribute to the conversation, as do Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot. Though the poems considered here are often thought difficult, Smock maintains a light touch throughout. She writes in an accessible, even pleasurable style while contributing to the scholarly study of literature at the border shared by poetry and philosophy
Download or read book Time in Exile written by Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2020-03-01 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proposes a theoretically rich treatment of temporality within exile as “gerundive” time. This book is a philosophical reflection on the experience of time from within exile. Its focus on temporality is unique, as most literature on exile focuses on the experience of space, as exile involves dislocation, and moods of nostalgia and utopia. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback proposes that in exile, time is experienced neither as longing back to the lost past nor as wanting a future to come but rather as a present without anchors or supports. She articulates this present as a “gerundive” mode, in which the one who is in exile discovers herself simply being, exposed to the uncanny experience of having lost the past and not having a future. To explore this, she establishes a conversation among three authors whose work has exemplified this sense of gerundive time: the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot, and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. The book does not aim to discuss how these authors understand the relation between time and exile, but presents a conversation with them in relation to this question that reflects new aspects in their work. Attempting to think and express this difficult sense of time from within exile, Time in Exile engages with the relation between thought and language, and between philosophy and literature. Departing from concrete existential questions, Sá Cavalcante Schuback reveals new philosophical and theoretical modes to understand what it means to be present in times of exile. “It is very rare that one can find in philosophy a book that has been written neither as a commentary, nor as an exegesis of the authors in question, but rather as an original and thought-provoking reflection in which the author is the main philosophical voice in the book.” — María del Rosario Acosta López, coeditor of Aesthetic Reason and Imaginative Freedom: Fredrich Schiller and Philosophy
Download or read book The Scene of the Voice written by Michael Eng and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2023-03-01 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The recent turns to affect and aesthetics in the humanities and the interpretive social sciences have been productive for reflecting on the crucial role sensibility plays in the constitution of the social. However, these scholarly developments construct their interventions by dismissing the attention to language that was central to the linguistic and cultural turns of previous eras and by claiming that language is an obstacle to experiencing the reality of difference to which they maintain only sensibility can grant access. By analyzing the figure of the voice in the work of Martin Heidegger and the continental thinkers who follow him, The Scene of the Voice shows that the dismissal of language in favor of sensibility requires overlooking their common connection in the problem of mimesis. As this book ultimately argues, artificially separating language and sensibility results in a failure to encounter affect, the relation to difference affect is said to name, and the experience of thinking affect is taken to provoke.
Download or read book Nancy Blanchot written by Leslie Hill and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-09-30 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of community is one of the most frequently used and abused of recent philosophical or socio-political concepts. In the 1980s, faced with the imminent collapse of communism and the unchecked supremacy of free-market capitalism, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (in The Inoperative Community) and the writer Maurice Blanchot (in The Unavowable Community) both thought it essential to rethink the fundamental basis of “community” as such. More recently, Nancy has renewed the debate by unexpectedly attacking Blanchot’s account of community, claiming that it embodies a dangerously nostalgic desire for mythic and religious communion. This book examines the history and implications of this controversy. It analyses in forensic detail Nancy’s and Blanchot’s contrasting interpretations of German Romanticism, and the work of Heidegger, Bataille, and Marguerite Duras, and examines closely their divergent approaches to the contradictory legacy of Christianity. At a time when politics are increasingly inseparable from a deep-seated sense of crisis, it provides an incisive account of what, in the concept of community, is thought yet crucially still remains unthought.
Download or read book Expectation written by Jean-Luc Nancy and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Expectation is a major volume of Jean-Luc Nancy’s writings on literature, written across three decades but, for the most part, previously unavailable in English. More substantial than literary criticism, these essays collectively negotiate literature’s relation to philosophy. Nancy pursues such questions as literature’s claims to truth, the status of narrative, the relation of poetry and prose, and the unity of a book or of a text, and he addresses a number of major European writers, including Dante, Sterne, Rousseau, Hölderlin, Proust, Joyce, and Blanchot. The final section offers a number of impressive pieces by Nancy that completely merge his concerns for philosophy and literature and philosophy-as-literature. These include a lengthy parody of Valéry’s “La Jeune Parque,” several original poems by Nancy, and a beautiful prose-poetic discourse on an installation by Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani that incorporates the Faust theme. Opening with a substantial Introduction by Jean-Michel Rabaté that elaborates Nancy’s importance as a literary thinker, this book constitutes the most substantial statement to date by one of today’s leading philosophers on a discipline that has been central to his work across his career.
Download or read book Maurice Blanchot and Psychoanalysis written by Joseph D. Kuzma and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-07-29 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work offers an exploration and critique of Blanchot’s various engagements with psychoanalysis, from the early 1950s onward. Kuzma highlights the political contours of Blanchot’s writings on Freud, Lacan, Leclaire, Winnicott, and others, ultimately suggesting a link between these writings and Blanchot’s broader attempts at rethinking the nature of human relationality, responsibility, and community. This book makes a substantive contribution to our understanding of the political and philosophical dimensions of Blanchot’s writings on madness, narcissism, and trauma, among other topics of critical and clinical relevance. Maurice Blanchot and Psychoanalysis comprises an indispensable text for anyone interested in tracing the history of psychoanalysis in post-War France.
Download or read book Phrase written by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1940–2007) is widely acknowledged in his native France and in the English-speaking world as one of the most important philosophers of his generation and an exceptionally rigorous reader of Heidegger, Hölderlin, Benjamin, Blanchot, and Celan. An astute thinker of the political and a far-reaching and decisive analyst of the place of theater and music in Western metaphysics, Lacoue-Labarthe also had another, clandestine passion for something called "poetry" or "literature," though he would remain deeply suspicious of these words. Phrase is his most original work, a sequence of texts both autobiographical and philosophical, written in lucid prose and in free verse over a period of more than twenty-five years. Published here in its entirety for the first time in English, Phrase is a profoundly moving meditation on the relationship between love and mortality, language and embodiment, writing and inspiration, memory and hope, loss and recompense, and music and silence. At its heart is a probing awareness of the mysterious gift of language itself, and of the perpetually elusive yet obsessive "phrase" that informs all human existence and provides the book with its lapidary title and distinctive signature. This translation also includes a postface by Jean-Christophe Bailly, one of Lacoue-Labarthe's most long-standing friends and interlocutors, and incorporates a number of translator's notes that will facilitate access to Lacoue-Labarthe's sometimes allusive writing. There is no better introduction to Lacoue-Labarthe's thought than Phrase, and no more compelling proof of the enduring significance of his thinking than this uniquely powerful text.
