Literary theory Books
Stanford University Press Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity
Book SynopsisThis book examines representations of modernity in Yiddish literature between the Russian revolution of 1905 and the beginning of the First World War. Within Jewish society, and particularly Eastern European Jewish society, modernity was often experienced as a series of incursions and threats to traditional Jewish life. Writers explored these perceived crises in their work, in the process reconsidering the role and function of Yiddish literature itself.The orientation of nineteenth-century Yiddish fiction toward the shtetl came into conflict with the sense of reality of young writers, who felt themselves part of a rapidly changing modern urban environment. This opposition between the generations was reflected in their principles of plot construction. The conservatives employed cyclical patterns, producing mythological schemes for incorporating the new experience into the traditional order. Modernists emphasized the uniqueness of the new, and therefore preferred a linear organTrade Review"Krutikov's work is a welcome addition to the growing field of Yiddish literary studies." -- The Russian Review"In this remarkably readable book, Krutikov constructs, with elegance and rigor, sturdy bridges built out of the disparate offerings of Yiddish litterateurs spanning the turbulent, shifting historical terrain between the Russian revolution in 1905 and the onset of World War I in 1914 . . . .This book is requisite for scholars and students of history, literary theory and criticism, and twentieth-century Yiddish literature. It will undoubtedly be captivating for the general reader as well." -- Religious Studies Review"His sophisticated deployment of Marxist theory and modern critical methodologies, coupled with his wide reading in several languages, has ensured that his study is not only stimulating in itself, but will create a seedbed for new approaches to Yiddish fiction." -- Journal of Modern Jewish StudiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Note on Translitcration Introduction: Conceptual Framework and Methodology llTe Economic Crisis The Crisis of Revolution The Crisis of Immigration Love and Destiny: The Crisis of Youth Conclusion: Yiddish Fiction Faces Modernity Biblioragphy Index
£52.70
Stanford University Press Fault Lines
Book SynopsisHow can a movement like Surrealism be transferred, transplanted, or transported from one culture to another, one language to another? This book traces the creative dialogue between France and Japan in the early 20th century, focusing on Surrealist and avant-garde writings that challenge and break apart clear and bounded conceptions of language, poetry, and meaning.Trade Review"Miryam Sas's Fault Lines is an important contribution to an area of Japanese studies that has been largely neglected, the Japanese avant-garde. . . . Sas's close readings of Japanese surrealist translations, poetry, and criticisms are compelling. . . . Fault Lines contains no shortage of insights into a diverse international movement." -- The Journal of Asian Studies"But for those who have been baptized by the force of a peculiar language that emerged a century ago, Surrealism, with its inherent violence, fault lines, and dreams, Sas's masterful analytical performance would appear like a luminous guiding post, simultaneously pointing toward the past and the future. We will remember this work." -- Harvard Journal of Asiatic StudiesTable of ContentsIllustrations A note on Japanese names Prologue: what is called surrealism 1. Introduction 2. Distant realities 3. On memory and doubt 4. Poetry and visuality, poetry and actuality 5. Eternities and surrealist legacies Epilogue: physical nostalgias Appendix Selected chronology Notes Bibliography Index.
£22.49
Stanford University Press Dead Time
Book SynopsisThis book explores how modernity gives rise to temporal disorders when time cannot be assimilated and integrated into the realm of lived experience. Inspired by Walter Benjamin''s description of the shock experience of modernity through readings of Baudelaire, the book turns to Baudelaire and Flaubert in order to derive insights into the many temporal disorders (such as trauma, addiction, and fetishism) that pervade contemporary culture.Through close readings of Baudelaire''s Flowers of Evil and Flaubert''s Madame Bovary, Elissa Marder argues that these nineteenth-century texts can, paradoxically, make us aware of aspects of present-day life that are not easily described or perceived. Following reflections by Benjamin, Jameson, and Lyotard, she shows that the ability to measure time increases in inverse proportion to the human ability to express it and create meaning through it. Although we have increased our ability to record events, we have become collectivelyTrade Review"This book is stunning in its ability to range widely and effectively over some of the most important, contested, and misunderstood regions of contemporary literary and cultural theory. A major and most welcome contribution to the study of two great canonical French authors, it is also a subtle but cogent intervention in the ongoing attempt to define and theorize a relation between the catchall concepts 'modernism' and 'postmodernism.'" -- Kevin Newmark * Boston College *
£84.15
Stanford University Press Dead Time
Book SynopsisThis book explores how modernity gives rise to temporal disorders when time cannot be assimilated and integrated into the realm of lived experience. Inspired by Walter Benjamin''s description of the shock experience of modernity through readings of Baudelaire, the book turns to Baudelaire and Flaubert in order to derive insights into the many temporal disorders (such as trauma, addiction, and fetishism) that pervade contemporary culture.Through close readings of Baudelaire''s Flowers of Evil and Flaubert''s Madame Bovary, Elissa Marder argues that these nineteenth-century texts can, paradoxically, make us aware of aspects of present-day life that are not easily described or perceived. Following reflections by Benjamin, Jameson, and Lyotard, she shows that the ability to measure time increases in inverse proportion to the human ability to express it and create meaning through it. Although we have increased our ability to record events, we have become collectivelyTrade Review"This book is stunning in its ability to range widely and effectively over some of the most important, contested, and misunderstood regions of contemporary literary and cultural theory. A major and most welcome contribution to the study of two great canonical French authors, it is also a subtle but cogent intervention in the ongoing attempt to define and theorize a relation between the catchall concepts 'modernism' and 'postmodernism.'" -- Kevin Newmark * Boston College *
£21.59
Stanford University Press The Flesh of Words
Book SynopsisThis new collection of challenging literary studies plays with a foundational definition of Western culture: the word become flesh. But the word become flesh is not, or is no longer, a theological already-given. It is a millennial goal or telos toward which each text strives.
£17.99
Stanford University Press Traces
Book SynopsisTraces, a masterwork of twentieth-century philosophy, is the most modest and beautiful proof of Bloch's utopian hermeneutics, taking as its source and its result the simplest, most familiar and yet most striking stories and anecdotes.Trade Review"...this is a literary masterpiece. Overall, it is a must for anyone interested in Bloch's work."—CHOICE"This is an important addition to the corpus of Bloch's writings in English." —Philosophy in Review/Comptes Rendus PhilosophiquesTable of Contents@fmct:Contents* @toc2:Not Enough* 000 Sleeping 000 Drawn out 000 Always in It 000 Mingling 000 Sing-Song 000 Slight Change 000 Lamp and Closet 000 Learning Good Habits 000 The "Mark!" 000 @toc1:Situation @toc2:The Poor 000 Filth 000 The Gift 000 Different Needs* 000 Games, Regrettably 000 The Useful Member 000 Shaker of Strawberries* 000 Bread and Games 000 Narrow-Minded Comrades* 000 Disturbing Whim 000 @toc1:Fate @toc2:Passing It Forward 000 The Negro 000 The Watershed 000 No Face 000 Comte de Mirabeau 000 Rich Devil, Poor Devil 000 The Kitten as David* 000 Triumphs of Misrecognition 000 Scribe at the Mairie* 000 The Beautiful Appearance 000 The Rococo of Fate 000 Spirit Still Taking Shape 000 The Motif of Parting 000 Supernaturalism, Stupid and Improved* 000 Strange Homeland, Familiar Exile* 000 Pippa Passes 000 The Long Gaze 000 Reunion Without Connection 000 The Muse of Restitution 000 Raphael Without Hands 000 @toc1:Existence @toc2:Just Now 000 Dark by Us 000 The Fall into the Now 000 The Spur of Work 000 No Free Lunch* 000 Ten Years' Jail, Seven-Meter Train* 000 Silence and Mirrors 000 Ways Not to Be Seen 000 Imminent Boredom 000 Moment and Image 000 Potemkin's Signature 000 Incognito to Oneself* 000 Motifs of Concealment 000 Just Knock 000 The Corner of the Blanket 000 Short Excursion 000 Terror and Hope 000 Excursus: Human and Wax Figure 000 Nearby: Inn of the Insane 000 Tableau with Curve* 000 Some Patterns from the Left Side 000 The Twice-Disappearing Frame 000 The Motif of the Door 000 @toc1:Things @toc2:Half Good 000 The Next Tree 000 Flower and Unflower* 000 The Leyden Jar 000 The First Locomotive 000 The Urban Peasant 000 The House of Day 000 Montages of a February Evening* 000 An Odd Fl'neur 000 Eating Olives Precisely* 000 Making a Point* 000 The Reverse of Things 000 Greeting and Appearance 000 Motifs of Temptation 000 Appendix: No Man's Land 000 A Russian Fairy Tale?* 000 The Clever Way out 000 Disappointment with Amusement* 000 The Invisible Hand 000 Tales of White Magic 000 Wonder 000 The Mountain 000 Dead and Usable* 000 The Pearl* 000 @toc4:Notes 000
£17.99
Stanford University Press Benjamins Ghosts Interventions in Contemporary
Book SynopsisThis book explores the implications for today's critical concerns of the work of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), one of the most powerful and influential thinkers of the 20th century.Trade Review“An ensemble of American and European scholars has produced a collective endeavor of the highest scholarly, conceptual, and essayistic quality throughout. There is an enormous storehouse of creativity in this volume that establishes definitively that contemporary academic study has risen to the considerable challenge furnished by the diverse writings of Walter Benjamin.”—Henry Sussman, SUNY, Buffalo
£28.80
Stanford University Press On Representation
Book SynopsisAt his death in 1992, the eminent philosopher, critic, and theorist Louis Marin left, in addition to a dozen influential books (including Sublime Poussin, Stanford, 1999), a corpus of some three hundred articles and essays published in journals and anthologies. A collection of twenty-two essays that appeared between 1971 and 1992, this book interrogates the theory and practice of representation as it is carried out by both linguistic and graphic signs, and thus the complex relation between language and image, between perception and conception.The essays are grouped in four parts that reflect the continuity and coherence of Marin''s interests in semiology, narrative, visuality, and painting. The interdisciplinary horizon of the book draws on multiple scholarly resourcesthe cultural history of the seventeenth century, the philosophy of language, the tools of discourse analysis, the history of art and aesthetics, the analysis of receptionto address a stunning diversity of
£112.20
Stanford University Press On Representation
Book SynopsisAt his death in 1992, the eminent philosopher, critic, and theorist Louis Marin left, in addition to a dozen influential books (including Sublime Poussin, Stanford, 1999), a corpus of some three hundred articles and essays published in journals and anthologies. A collection of twenty-two essays that appeared between 1971 and 1992, this book interrogates the theory and practice of representation as it is carried out by both linguistic and graphic signs, and thus the complex relation between language and image, between perception and conception.The essays are grouped in four parts that reflect the continuity and coherence of Marin''s interests in semiology, narrative, visuality, and painting. The interdisciplinary horizon of the book draws on multiple scholarly resourcesthe cultural history of the seventeenth century, the philosophy of language, the tools of discourse analysis, the history of art and aesthetics, the analysis of receptionto address a stunning diversity of
£28.80
Stanford University Press Wave Forms
Book SynopsisIn this daring book, the author proposes that artistic and literary forms can be understood as modulations of wave forms in the physical world. By the phrase "natural syntax," he means that physical nature enters human communication literally by way of a transmitting wave frequency.
£112.20
Stanford University Press The Book to Come
Book SynopsisFeaturing essays originally published in La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, this collection clearly demonstrates why Maurice Blanchot was a key figure in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy.Trade Review"Maurice Blanchot was without doubt one of the greatest Western critics of the 20th century, and his work was essential for the development of a wide range of contemporary and subsequent critics of widely different allegiances. I read most of these essays as they came out in La Nouvelle Revue Française and reading them again I am struck once more by their brilliance simply as literary criticism, by their indefatigable focus on the question of the nature of writing, and by the wide range of modern authors they discuss from Blanchot's special perspective."—J. Hillis Miller, University of California, IrvineTable of ContentsContents I. 1 2 II. 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 III. 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 IV. 21 22 23 24 25 26
£84.15
Stanford University Press The Book to Come
Book SynopsisDuring the last half of the twentieth century in France, Maurice Blanchot was a key figure in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. He developed early on a distinctive, limpid form of essay writing, and his essays, in form and substance, left their unmistakable imprint on the work of the most distinguished French theorists. The writings of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, for example, are hardly imaginable without Blanchot. The Book to Come gathers together essays originally published in La Nouvelle Revue Française; almost all of them appear in English for the first time. Not a random collection of essays, this book is organized into four sections: the secret of literature; literature as exigence and as meaning; literature and the novel; and the future of writing and of the book. The authors discussed constitute a veritable repertoire: Rousseau, Proust, Artaud, Brach, Musil, James, Beckett, Bataille, Mallarmé, Joubert, and Claudel, among otherTrade Review"Maurice Blanchot was without doubt one of the greatest Western critics of the 20th century, and his work was essential for the development of a wide range of contemporary and subsequent critics of widely different allegiances. I read most of these essays as they came out in La Nouvelle Revue Française and reading them again I am struck once more by their brilliance simply as literary criticism, by their indefatigable focus on the question of the nature of writing, and by the wide range of modern authors they discuss from Blanchot's special perspective."—J. Hillis Miller, University of California, IrvineTable of ContentsContents I. 1 2 II. 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 III. 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 IV. 21 22 23 24 25 26
£21.59
Stanford University Press Old Worlds
Book SynopsisThis book aligns ancient and early modern European travel narratives and historical surveys of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and Russia with texts that contributed to English ideas about those regions: Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Love's Labour's Lost, Milton's Paradise Lost and Muscovia, and Dryden's Aureng-Zebe.Trade Review"With this book Archer fills a longstanding niche in Renaissance and 17th-century studies by focusing on non-Western European countries as important locations with highly fraught significance in selected writings by Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. Examining accounts of travelers, works of geography, and especially literary treatments of these exotic locations, the author provides insightful, exciting, and persuasive interpretations concerning European perspectives on other cultures, emerging ideas about racial and sexual differences, and concepts of civilization and nationhood. . . . Most highly recommended for ambitious upper-division undergraduates through faculty" -- Choice"[Archer's] erudition on the subject is very impressive. He skillfully combines ample research data with his own insights and delights the reader with in-depth discussions." -- Seventeenth-Century News"Archer's impressive scholarly range and rigor, along with his critical acumen and theoretical sophistication, thus make a profound contribution to the cultural analysis of England's early relations with the complex region it labeled India." * Modern Language Quarterly *"Old Worlds is a superlative book in which John Michael Archer offers a thorough, scholarly analysis of veneration and condemnation that is contained in the representations of these several old worlds. Archer's prodigious reading, broad knowledge, and keen awareness of nuance make Old Worlds a welcome contribution to our knowledge of the specific locales taken up, to our understanding of the particular literary works critiqued, and to the scholarship of travel writing." * Sixteenth-Century Journal *"Archer's scholarship is impressive, and his timely and important new argument about the 'para-colonial,' as well as the materials he uncovers, will enrich the debate on, and our understanding of, early modern geographies, world views, and literatures." -- Ania Loomba * University of Illinois, Champaign *
£52.20
Stanford University Press Against Autonomy
Book SynopsisThis book investigates cultural instruments, meaning normative forms of analysis and practice that are central to Western culture and in the course of their history came to be ways of understanding and controlling different cultures. Examples are: notions of autonomy and the division of intellectual, social, cultural, and aesthetic practices; ideas of otherness (taking forms like Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft, négritude, and afrocentrism); cultural and aesthetic forms such as tragedy, mimesis, self, mind/body; certain modes of history and memory; and particular forms of discourse such as science, philosophy, and literature.The book explores the interlocking histories of cultural instruments from antiquity to the early Enlightenment and their instrumental use and reworking by different cultures, moving from Europe to Africa and the Americas, especially the Caribbean. In the process, the author gives close readings of works by a wide range of authors: Balboa, Balbuena, BrathTrade Review"This impressive piece of original research and analysis reframes numerous debates in literary studies (especially post-colonial and Third World literatures), presents alternative views on relationships among several literary areas, and serves as a vivid antidote to much humdrum or dogmatic work. It's a big book, and an important one, and for many it will be an essential one." -- Haun Saussy * Stanford University *"This is a magesterial study of the various cultural instruments (ideas, forms, discourses) used by the West to control other cultures as well as the reworkings of these instruments by cultures which creatively refashioned them to fit their own needs. With its broad coverage of periods and languages, its tremendous learning, and its radical challenge to Eurocentric aesthetics, it constitutes a model of global literary studies for the new century. For those interested in the operations of cultural exchange, this is an indispensable book." -- Vassilios Lambropoulos * University of Michigan *" . . . a courageous book like this, carefuly articulated and aresting on the absolute mastery of over three hundred primary sources, belongs on the shelves of everyone with a serious interest in the material covered in this journal." -- Renaissance Quarterly
£25.19
Stanford University Press Deconstruction and the Remainders of
Book SynopsisThe author argues that deconstruction is a form of radical, anti-scientific modernity, while in contrast poststructuralism is a type of postmodern theory inflected by changes in technology and the mode of information.Trade Review"This is a superbly strong work that will generate much discussion. There are no comparable books that have undertaken such a rereading of the development of French theory and its emergence in response to phenomenology. Most other studies tend to focus on just deconstruction or Derrida, and many of these are already dated. None have the extensive coverage and knowledge of the French intellectual scene exhibited here." -- David F. Ferris * University of Colorado at Boulder *"This book is a carefully crafted and extremely erudite study of the forgotten connections between existential phenomenology and French deconstruction....it represents a major contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century French intellectual history, and holds many rewards for readers possessing a prior knowledge of the subject." -- The Dalhousie Review
£25.19
Stanford University Press Wave Forms
Book SynopsisIn this daring book, the author proposes that artistic and literary forms can be understood as modulations of wave forms in the physical world. By the phrase "natural syntax," he means that physical nature enters human communication literally by way of a transmitting wave frequency.
£28.80
Stanford University Press Mirages of the Selfe
Book SynopsisThrough extensive readings in philosophical, legal, medical, and imaginative writing, this book explores notions and experiences of being a person from European antiquity to Descartes.Trade Review"Reiss has masterfully woven together various threads of personhood into a powerful work on the self . . . This is a work that readers will ponder long after they finish the final page." -- Comitatus
£66.60
Stanford University Press Acts of Narrative
Book SynopsisThis collection brings together essays that reflect on the nature of narrative, literary criticism and history from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, ranging from deconstruction, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, to narratology, technology, economics and aesthetics.Trade Review"Acts of Narrative explores different facets of narrative with historical and thematic breadth, and each of the essays is a remarkable narrative act in its own right. Taken as a whole, the collection is a powerful demonstration of how the intersections between psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and performative theory change our understanding of narrative and its function in cultural life." -Ewa Plonowska Ziarek,University of Notre DameTable of ContentsPreface: The Place of Narrative CarolJacobs ix 1 J. Hillis Miller and the Task of the Critic Henry Sussman 2 Lying Against Death: Out of the Loop J. Hillis Miller 15 3 Waiting in the Wings Diane Elam 31 4 Parting Words: Trauma, Silence, and Survival Cathy Caruth 47 5 The Other Day: The Interpretation of Daydreams Rachel Bowlby 62 6 Difference Behind Similarity: Focalization in Third-Person Center-of-Consciousness and First-Person Retrospective Narration Dan Shen 81 7 The "Telepathy Effect": Notes toward a Reconsideration of Narrative Fiction Nicholas Royle 93 8 Trackings Tom Cohen 110 9 The Rape of the Lock: A Jacobite Aesthetics? Ronald Paulson 130 10 The Serpent in the Wilderness: Space, Place, and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century W J. T Mitchell 146 11 Narrative Discourse and a New Sense of Value: Meaning and Purpose in the Neoclassical Economics of Alfred Marshall Ronald Schleifer 157 12 Sidney's Technology: A Critique by Technology of Literary History Alan Liu 174 13 "Le Parjure," Perhaps: Storytelling and Lying ("abrupt breaches of syntax") Jacques Derrida 195
£105.40
Stanford University Press Acts of Narrative
Book SynopsisThis collection brings together essays that reflect on the nature of narrative, literary criticism and history from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, ranging from deconstruction, psychoanalysis and trauma theory, to narratology, technology, economics and aesthetics.Trade Review"Acts of Narrative explores different facets of narrative with historical and thematic breadth, and each of the essays is a remarkable narrative act in its own right. Taken as a whole, the collection is a powerful demonstration of how the intersections between psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and performative theory change our understanding of narrative and its function in cultural life." -Ewa Plonowska Ziarek,University of Notre DameTable of ContentsPreface: The Place of Narrative CarolJacobs ix 1 J. Hillis Miller and the Task of the Critic Henry Sussman 2 Lying Against Death: Out of the Loop J. Hillis Miller 15 3 Waiting in the Wings Diane Elam 31 4 Parting Words: Trauma, Silence, and Survival Cathy Caruth 47 5 The Other Day: The Interpretation of Daydreams Rachel Bowlby 62 6 Difference Behind Similarity: Focalization in Third-Person Center-of-Consciousness and First-Person Retrospective Narration Dan Shen 81 7 The "Telepathy Effect": Notes toward a Reconsideration of Narrative Fiction Nicholas Royle 93 8 Trackings Tom Cohen 110 9 The Rape of the Lock: A Jacobite Aesthetics? Ronald Paulson 130 10 The Serpent in the Wilderness: Space, Place, and Landscape in the Eighteenth Century W J. T Mitchell 146 11 Narrative Discourse and a New Sense of Value: Meaning and Purpose in the Neoclassical Economics of Alfred Marshall Ronald Schleifer 157 12 Sidney's Technology: A Critique by Technology of Literary History Alan Liu 174 13 "Le Parjure," Perhaps: Storytelling and Lying ("abrupt breaches of syntax") Jacques Derrida 195
£26.99
Stanford University Press Just Being Difficult
Book SynopsisIs academic writing, particularly in the disciplines of literary theory and cultural studies, needlessly obscure? The claim has been widely circulated in the media and subject to passionate debate, but it has not been the subject of serious discussion. Just Being Difficult? provides learned and thoughtful analyses of the claim, of those it targets, and of the entire question of how critical writing relates to its intended publics and to audiences beyond them. In this book, a range of distinguished scholars, including some who have been charged with willful obscurity, argue for the interest and importance of some of the procedures that critics have preferred to charge with obscurity rather than confront in another way. The debate on difficult writing hovers on the edges of all academic writing that seeks to play a role in the public arena. This collection is a much-needed contribution to the discussion.Trade Review"This collection is a remarkable and rational contribution to a passionate contemporary debate. Is academic writing unjustifiably obscure? The claim has been widely made in media ranging from the Wall Street Journal to The New Republic and Philosophy and Literature. Just Being Difficult? offers a thoughtful, generally unpolemical, stimulating, and learned series of analyses of the claim, of those its targets, and of the entire question of how critical writing relates to its intended public and the audiences beyond it." -Richard Terdiman,University of California, Santa CruzTable of ContentsIntroduction: Dressing Up, Dressing Down 1 JONATHAN CULLER AND KEVIN LAMB Part 1. In Search of a Common Language; or, Language Debates and the History of Philosophy 1. Difficult Style and "Illustrious" Vernaculars: A Historical Perspective 15 MARGARET FERGUSON 2. Hume's Learned and Conversable Worlds 29 ROBIN VALENZA AND JOHN BENDER 3. Bad Writing and Good Philosophy 43 JONATHAN CULLER 4. The Metaphysics of Clarity and the Freedom of Meaning 58 JOHN MCCUMBER Part 2. Institutions, Publics, Intellectual Labor 5. Feminism's Broken English 75 ROBYN WIEGMAN 6. The Resistance of Theory; or, The Worth of Agony 95 REY CHOW 7. Styles of Intellectual Publics 106 MICHAEL WARNER Part 3. Modernist Poetics and Critical Badness 8. On Difficulty, the Avant-Garde, and Critical Moribundity 129 PETER BROOKS 9. Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics 139 ROBERT KAUFMAN 1O. Bad Writing 157 BARBARA JOHNSON Part 4. Address to the Other: Ethics and Acknowledgment 11. The Morality of Form; or,What's "Bad" about "BadWriting"? 171 DAVID PALUMBO-LIU 12. The Politics of the Production of Knowledge:An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 181 STUART J. MURRAY I3. Values of Difficulty 199 JUDITH BUTLER
£19.79
Stanford University Press Regimes of Description
Book SynopsisRegimes of Description responds to the perception-however imprecise-that forms of knowledge in every sector of contemporary culture are being fundamentally reshaped by the digital revolution.Table of ContentsIntroduction —John Bender and Michael Marrinan Description: Fantasies of General Knowledge Description by Omission: Nature Enlightened and Obscured —Lorraine Daston Nature's Unruly Body: The Limits of Scientific Description —Londa Schiebinger Mithridates in Paradise: Describing Languages in a Universalistic World —Jürgen Trabant Between Political Arithmetic and Political Economy —Mary Poovey Describing: Imagination and Knowing Problems of Description in Art: Realism —Wolfgang Klein Imagining Flowers: Perceptual Mimesis (Particularly Delphinium) —Elaine Scarry Not Seeing the Laocoön: Lessing in the Archive of the Eighteenth Century —Wolfgang Ernst Disparities between Part and Whole in the Description of Works of Art —Alex Potts The Undescribed: Horizons of the Known Between Mechanism and Romantic Naturphilosophie: Vitalizing Nature and Naturalizing Historical Discourse in the Late Enlightenment —Peter Hanns Reill Transparency and Utopia: Constructing the Void from Pascal to Foucault —Anthony Vidler Aesthetic Media: The Structure of Aesthetic Theory before Kant —David E. Wellbery
£22.49
Stanford University Press The Ends of Mourning
Book SynopsisThe Ends of Mourning explores from an interdisciplinary perspective the contemporary crisis of mourning. In an age skeptical of history and memory, we relate to the past only as a spectacle, a product to be consumed in the cultural marketplace.The book charts the emergence and development of the problem of mourning in the writings of Freud, Proust, and Freud''s successor Lacan. Freud''s idea of sorrow work and Proust''s concept of involuntary memory defined the terms of the classic modernist account of mourning in the fields of psychoanalysis and literature. Yet their insistence on the egotistical aspects of loss to the exclusion of all ethical and political considerations threatens the dissolution of the question of mourning.Trade Review"Alessia Ricciardi's The Ends of Mourning is a cogently argued and beautifully written work that deals with the fascinating and timely question of mourning. Ricciardi's book advances the existing body of work on trauma by considering the place of mourning in the transition from modernity to postmodernity. This place is, we learn, a missing place, for there is an important sense in which mourning is absent from the collective theoretical consciousness of our time; with a few exceptions, theory of the postmodern era has tended to promote a sense of the post-historical, as though we could somehow be simply free and clear of the past without ever having to mourn it. Ricciardi has set herself the task of uncovering just how mourning came to be evacuated from critical discourse in the era of late capitalism, and what the consequences of this gesture have been." -- Peter Connor Barnard College "Alessia Ricciardi's truly outstanding book makes a significant contribution to critical theory in general and to psychoanalytically informed cultural criticism in particular. In many respects, it will prove to be a landmark study... The End of Mourning is an extensive, brilliant, and brilliantly executed exposition of a complex and challenging theoretical and historical argument: that twentieth-century culture and thought has been impoverished-in spite of a fascination and indeed obsession with all things historical-by refusal to consider the implications of Freud's emphasis on mourning as a proper way of relating to the past." -- Ulrich Baer New York University
£21.59
Stanford University Press Production of Presence
Book Synopsis"Production of Presence" is a comprehensive version of the thinking of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. most consistently original literary It offers a personalized account of some of the central theoretical movements in literary studies and in the humanities over the past 30 years.Trade Review"...Production of Presence is focused and persuasive. [It} reflect[s] the intellectual, and physical, journey of a courageous and versatile thinker." -- Southern Humanities ReviewTable of ContentsContents User's Manual--xiii Materialities/The Nonhermeneutic/Presence: An Anecdotal Account of Epistemological Shifts--1 Metaphysics: A Brief Prehistory of What Is Now Changing--21 Beyond Meaning: Positions and Concepts in Motion--51 Epiphany/Presentification/Deixis: Futures for the Humanities and Arts--91 To Be Quiet for a Moment: About Redemption--133 Notes--155 Index--173 Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Aesthetics, Experience
£74.70
Stanford University Press Production of Presence
Book Synopsis"Production of Presence" is a comprehensive version of the thinking of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. most consistently original literary It offers a personalized account of some of the central theoretical movements in literary studies and in the humanities over the past 30 years.Trade Review"...Production of Presence is focused and persuasive. [It} reflect[s] the intellectual, and physical, journey of a courageous and versatile thinker." -- Southern Humanities ReviewTable of ContentsContents User's Manual--xiii Materialities/The Nonhermeneutic/Presence: An Anecdotal Account of Epistemological Shifts--1 Metaphysics: A Brief Prehistory of What Is Now Changing--21 Beyond Meaning: Positions and Concepts in Motion--51 Epiphany/Presentification/Deixis: Futures for the Humanities and Arts--91 To Be Quiet for a Moment: About Redemption--133 Notes--155 Index--173 Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Aesthetics, Experience
£17.99
Stanford University Press From Historicity to Fictionality
Book SynopsisThis is the first comprehensive work in English on the complex history and theory of traditional Chinese narrative. It describes the major Chinese conventions and strategies for interpreting narrative works, both historical and fictional, from the earliest narratives through those of the Ch''ing dynasty. For most of China''s recorded history, historical authenticity and factual accuracy were paramount in the production and reception of narrative texts. Fictional narratives were theorized and judged in accordance with the standards of historical narratives. In short, narrative was history, and fiction was defective history. Furthermore, the state made great efforts to control fiction by suppression (censorship) and disavowal (denigration and trivialization). It was only with the widespread popularity of novels in the Ming and Ch''ing dynasties that Chinese theorists were able to come to terms with fiction and dehistoricize the poetics of narrative by allowing and recognizing inventio
£22.49
Stanford University Press Aesthetic Democracy
Book SynopsisAesthetic Democracy argues that the possibility of social and political democracy depends primarily upon art and aesthetics, and that it is art which determines the possibilities of human freedom.Trade Review"Docherty has previously published a number of distinguished books, but this one might be seen as the culmination of his years of thought and work on the humanities and their social roles... The scope of Docherty's knowledge is truly amazing... [He] writes with a quite unusual combination of passionate commitment and temperate clarity about difficult matters." -J. Hillis Miller,University of California, IrvineTable of Contents@fmct:Contents @toc4:Preface iii Introduction iii @toc1:Section One The colonial condition of criticism @toc2:Chapter 1 On prejudice and forgetting 0 Chapter 2 On urgency and emergency; or, deconstruction not reading politics 000 Chapter 3 declining the west 000 @toc1:Section Two The Potential of Aestheticism @toc2:Chapter 4 Aesthetic education and the demise of experience 000 Chapter 5 The Passion of the Possible 000 Chapter 6 Potential European Democracy 000 @toc1:Section Three: Sovereign Democracy @toc2:Chapter 7 The Ethics of Hypocrisy 000 Chapter 8 Machiavelli and modernity 000 Chapter 9 Aesthetic Democracy: the one and the many 000 @toc4:Notes 000 Index 000
£18.99
Stanford University Press The Literary in Theory
Book SynopsisHas theory neglected literature? Often literary and cultural theory, which goes by the nickname Theory, has seemed to be the theory of everything except literature: theory of language, of sexuality, of history, of the body, of the psyche, of meaning (or meaninglessness), of politics, but not theory of literature.In this timely and wide-ranging book, Jonathan Culler, whose lucid analyses of structuralism, semiotics, and deconstruction have been prized by generations of readers, explores the place of the literary in theory. If theory has sometimes neglected literature, the literary has, Culler argues, retained a crucial if misunderstood role. Culler''s account of the fortunes of the literary in theory, of the resistance to theory, and of key theoretical conceptstext, sign, interpretation, performative, and omniscienceprovides valuable insight into today''s theoretical debates; and his analysis of various disciplinary practices explores the possibilities of theory for theTrade Review"In this wide-ranging study, Jonathan Culler gives us an engaging overview of the interdependency of 'literature' and 'theory' that configures the contemporary academic scene . . . I love this book, and highly recommend it to anyone interested in the literary and theoretical landscape of contemporary academia." -- John Dolis * Comparative Literature Studies *"This difficult yet interesting book asserts that theory is not dead, that theory is literature and literature theory . . . The book is throughout provocative in these and other defences of theory, and of literature." -- Modern Language Review"The Literary in Theory takes up questions that have been basic to the enterprise known as 'theory' with a fine mix of historical awareness, lively critical sense, and thoughtful advocacy. Culler's vision of literary studies is inclusive and cumulative: it reminds us that 'learning' is both a noun and a verb, both a result and a process. Is theory dead? This book shows that it has a pulse and a sense of humor." -- Haun Saussy * Yale University *"[Jonathan Culler's] ultimate aim, as his title suggests, is to make his readers aware of the literary (i.e., the special self-reflexive, questioning, skeptical attitude and practice which seeks to understand the conditions of its own possibility) within theory or Theory, which is an interdisciplinary undertaking informed by this attitude or practice. I would recommend this book to teachers and to students of literature for its clarity, excellent analyses and exemplifications, as well as for its critical attitude, in the sense of critique, of central issues confronting the humanities today." * Walter De Gruyter *Table of Contents@fmct:Contents @toc4:Acknowledgements iii @toc2:Introduction 000 @toc1:Theory @toc2:1 The Literary in Theory 00 2 The Novel and the Nation 00 3 Resisting Theory 00 @toc1:Concepts @toc2:4 Text: Its Vicissitudes 000 5 The Sign: Saussure and Derrida on Arbitrariness 000 6 The Performative 000 7 Interpretation: In Praise of Overinterpretation 000 8 Omniscience 000 @toc1:Critical Practices @toc2:9 Bad Writing and Good Philosophy 000 10 Writing Criticism 000 11 Doing Cultural Studies 000 12 Comparative Literature, at last 000 @toc4:Index 000
£81.90
Stanford University Press The Literary in Theory
Book SynopsisThis work explores the role of the literary in theory, with wide-ranging analysis of key concepts and disciplinary practices.Trade Review"In this wide-ranging study, Jonathan Culler gives us an engaging overview of the interdependency of 'literature' and 'theory' that configures the contemporary academic scene . . . I love this book, and highly recommend it to anyone interested in the literary and theoretical landscape of contemporary academia." -- John Dolis * Comparative Literature Studies *"This difficult yet interesting book asserts that theory is not dead, that theory is literature and literature theory . . . The book is throughout provocative in these and other defences of theory, and of literature." -- Modern Language Review"The Literary in Theory takes up questions that have been basic to the enterprise known as 'theory' with a fine mix of historical awareness, lively critical sense, and thoughtful advocacy. Culler's vision of literary studies is inclusive and cumulative: it reminds us that 'learning' is both a noun and a verb, both a result and a process. Is theory dead? This book shows that it has a pulse and a sense of humor." -- Haun Saussy * Yale University *"[Jonathan Culler's] ultimate aim, as his title suggests, is to make his readers aware of the literary (i.e., the special self-reflexive, questioning, skeptical attitude and practice which seeks to understand the conditions of its own possibility) within theory or Theory, which is an interdisciplinary undertaking informed by this attitude or practice. I would recommend this book to teachers and to students of literature for its clarity, excellent analyses and exemplifications, as well as for its critical attitude, in the sense of critique, of central issues confronting the humanities today." * Walter De Gruyter *Table of Contents@fmct:Contents @toc4:Acknowledgements iii @toc2:Introduction 000 @toc1:Theory @toc2:1 The Literary in Theory 00 2 The Novel and the Nation 00 3 Resisting Theory 00 @toc1:Concepts @toc2:4 Text: Its Vicissitudes 000 5 The Sign: Saussure and Derrida on Arbitrariness 000 6 The Performative 000 7 Interpretation: In Praise of Overinterpretation 000 8 Omniscience 000 @toc1:Critical Practices @toc2:9 Bad Writing and Good Philosophy 000 10 Writing Criticism 000 11 Doing Cultural Studies 000 12 Comparative Literature, at last 000 @toc4:Index 000
£20.89
Stanford University Press Beckett Derrida and the Event of Literature
Book SynopsisJacques Derrida's repeatedly stated admiration and professed inability to comment on the work of Samuel Beckett are the point of departure for this book's exploration of the relation between philosophy and literature.Trade Review"Those who live by the word have unfinished business with the achievement of Samuel Beckett. Asja Szafraniec's ambitious study, taking Derrida's elaborations as measures in turn measured by Beckett's corpus, is as clear and comprehensive and illuminating a progress with the complex of these performers as one might ask for. Near initiates of this region of crisscross between what is called philosophy and what literature, as well as experienced warriors within it, should find cause to be grateful for Asja Szafraniec's sure hand and expansive connections." —Stanley Cavell, Harvard University"This is a remarkable and valuable work in many respects, in particular because it is not only the first, to my knowledge, to systematically explore the relation between Derrida and Beckett, but also because it puts Derrida's vision of literature to the test in the context of a corpus of writings that does not belong to the canon of literature with which he has been involved." -- Rodolphe Gasché * SUNY Buffalo *"I know of no author who brings to the page such a deep understanding of Derrida's philosophy along with such a delicate, piercing awareness of the singularity of Beckett's text and its place in the literary institution." -- Peter T. Connor * Barnard College *"Szafraniec makes an important contribution to discussion on transactions and interconnections between Samuel Beckett and Jacques Derrida, two writers engaged in very different kinds of deconstructive operations That Beckett may have exposed the exhaustion of literature in order to evade the inevitable delusions that language engenders is an extraordinary thesis, which Szafraniec makes credible." -- CHOICETable of ContentsContents Acknowledgments xxx Introduction 1 1. The Question of Literature 000 2. A Singular Odyssey 000 3. Beckett, Derrida and the Ordinary 000 4. Beckett's "Exhausted" Archives 000 5. Singular Points of Transaction (I): The Subject 000 6. Singular Points of Transaction (II): "What Are Poets for?" The Authority of Literature 000 7. Singular Points of Transaction (III): "Wanting in Inanity." Negativity, Language and "God" in Beckett 000 Concluding Remarks 000 Notes 000 Bibliography 000 Index 000
£22.79
Stanford University Press Romanticism After Auschwitz
Book SynopsisRomanticism After Auschwitz reveals how one of the most insistently anti-romantic discourses, post-Holocaust testimony, remains romantic, and proceeds to show how this insight compels a thorough rethinking of romanticism.Trade Review"A good book about the pain of surviving." -- Marion Spies * Religion and the Arts. *"This is, moreover, a challenging and often contentious book that deserves to be viewed as a significant contribution to the question of the survival of Romanticism even where it seems to be disavowed most forcefully." -- Time Literary Supplement"At a time when studies of the field remain predominantly structured by historicist paradigms, Romanticism after Auschwitz demonstrates that romanticism cannot be bound by periodization, that it simply remains good to think with. Any reader of Guyer's sober, poignant argument that lyric figure bears witness to a survival that is neither redemptive nor privative will come away from this book both sadder and wiser." -- Stephen Goldsmith * University of California at Berkeley *"This is a bracing, brilliant book. In compelling fashion Guyer weaves back and forth between Romantic literature and culture in the aftermath of Auschwitz. She uncovers untold dynamics in texts we thought we knew—by Mary Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge—and provides precise and painstaking readings of Celan, Shakespeare and Resnais' Night and Fog. Altogether, a haunting book about haunting and testimony." -- Ian Balfour * York University *Table of Contents@fmct:Contents @toc4:Acknowledgments iii @toc2:Introduction: The Rhetoric of Survival 1 1. Romanticism, Testimony, Prosopopoeia 000 2. Naked Language, Naked Life: Wordsworth's Rhetoric of Survival 000 3. Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein 000 4. Anthropomorphizing the Human 000 5. The Rhetoric of Wakefulness 000 6. Breath, Today: Celan's Translation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 71 000 7. The Remains of Figure: Nuit et Brouillard, Nacht und Nebel 000 Ending in Romanticism 000 @toc4:Notes 000 Bibliography 000 Index
£52.70
Stanford University Press Critical Excess
Book SynopsisThis lucidly written book looks at the interpretative audacity of five major "overreaders"—Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Slavoj Žižek and Stanley Cavell—and asks what is at stake and what is to be gained by their approaches to literature and film.Trade Review"This is a book about how certain philosophers read works of literature and film, and whether literature and film become or can be shown to be themselves philosophical in virtue of this reading. But what sort of reading? The figures under study here—Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Slavoj Žižek, and Stanley Cavell—approach ('attack' might be a better word) literature and film in ways that we lack concepts to describe, and they do not hesitate to call their ways of reading (not to mention what they read) 'philosophy.' 'Overreading' is Colin Davis's covering term for how these philosophers work on their texts, but no one of them is like any of the others, so their ways of reading are to that extent untheorizable. Instead of large concepts Davis gives us close readings of their readings of particular texts or films—this against the background of lucid and accurate accounts of their particular philosophical or theoretical orientations. This is a fine and timely piece of work, and beautifully written in the bargain." -- Gerald Bruns * University of Notre Dame *"A superb book, at once lucid and passionate, arguing the case for the wise folly of willful, outrageous, and unconventional critical thinking, thanks to which we might learn new and valuable things about the world we live in. Davis is a friendly, learned, and judicious guide, and his commitment to the ethical possibilities of adventurous critical thought is nothing short of inspirational. Read!, he exhorts us, Watch!, and Think!—who knows what you might find out?" -- Martin Crowley * Cambridge University *"Critical Excess is an important book . . . Throughout Critical Excess, Davis choose interesting texts, not always the most obvious ones, in which to explore the given critics' practice . . . Colin Davis' examination of these radically divergent critical practices has much to teach us, or remind us, about the value of and necessity for over-reading or over-interpretation." -- Clint Burnham * Electronic Book Review *"This is an admirable book. Davis writes beautifully, and his readings are models of clarity and precision. They are also narrowly focused, and this is a strength rather than a weakness. Rather than surveying entire bodies of work, Davis examines just a few texts by each thinker—often texts that are not well known. The result is a study which is wide-ranging but not superficial." -- Robert Piercey * University of Regina, Philosophy in Review *"Davis's book demonstrates, in exemplary fashion, the extent to which practices of overreading have come to constitute one of the key techniques of the philosophical thinking that has emerged in the wake of the closure or deconstruction of metaphysics . . . Davis has produced a work of highly original and important literary theory that draws on the more modest techniques and scholarly protocols of what he rather self-deprecatingly dubs the 'pedestrian critic'. Yet, in so doing, he has demonstrated the extent to which the techniques of literary criticism and scholarship can make indispensable contributions to contemporary and philosophical debate." -- Ian James * French Studies *"These readings in praise of overreading are detailed, patient, and rewarding. At its core, Davis's overreading is an openness to the uncanny potential for works of art to be familiar and strange, far removed from a hermeneutics of suspicion, feeding and feeding on art's—and criticism's—capacity for surprise. In this excess lies criticism's chance to be interesting." -- Mark Robson * Modern Language Review *
£17.99
Stanford University Press The Game of Probability
Book SynopsisThere exist literary histories of probability and scientific histories of probability, but it has generally been thought that the two did not meet. Campe begs to differ. Mathematical probability, he argues, took over the role of the old probability of poets, orators, and logicians, albeit in scientific terms. Indeed, mathematical probability would not even have been possible without the other probability, whose roots lay in classical antiquity. The Game of Probability revisits the seventeenth and eighteenth-century probabilistic revolution, providing a history of the relations between mathematical and rhetorical techniques, between the scientific and the aesthetic. This was a revolution that overthrew the order of things, notably the way that science and art positioned themselves with respect to reality, and its participants included a wide variety of people from as many walks of life. Campe devotes chapters to them in turn. Focusing on the interpretation of games of cTrade Review"Wiggin's translation of this demanding critical text is clear and accessible."—Richard Langer, The Year's Work in English Studies"Campe's book is a recommendable and laudable cross-disciplinary enquiry into the aesthetic, theological, philosophical, literary and mathematical developments that circumscribe the notion of modern probability as a highly complex phenomenon."—Laura Søvsø Thomasen and Henrik Kragh Sørensen, British Journal for the History of Science"Readers who have studied other histories containing views of the probability of this period will find considerable, and refreshing, additional material here. For instance, Campe considers, as contributors to the probabilistic revolution, mathematicians, moral theologians, jurists, natural scientists, rhetoricians and logicians, the insurance industry, economists, and civil servants . . . [The Game of Probability] is a work that repays serious study with many illuminating moments, adding as it does not only to readers' probabilistic knowledge but also to their appreciation of the early novel. Campe sheds light on the emergence of probability as we now see it: not only its development from gaming, but also its necessary development through literature and jurisprudence. The book, exhibiting great scholarship, is not a history of probability and statistics, but nevertheless forms an important addition to works on that topic."—A. I. Dale, Mathematical Reviews"Rüdiger Campe's The Game of Probability lays out—for the first time and in all its complexity—a semantic field crucial to our modernity: to our social and juridical modernity, to our scientific and mathematical modernity, to our literary modernity. The breadth and depth of learning upon which this book rests will make it an invaluable resource for scholars across the historical-humanistic disciplines and the bright light generated by its readings will illuminate countless research projects. This marvelous book belongs among the most distinguished publications to have emerged out of cultural studies in Germany during the past thirty years."—David E. Wellbery University of Chicago
£31.50
Stanford University Press Walter Benjamin
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Weigel (director, Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin) offers a meticulous exploration of the German writer Walter Benjamin's take on creaturely existence, law, sovereignty, secularization and holiness, language, and art."—M. V. Marder, CHOICE"Weigel's readings, which are steeped in philological detail and hermeneutic insight, brilliantly exhibit the stakes involved in approaching Benjamin's work anew. Her impeccable sense for intertextual trajectories coupled with broad erudition not only results in sophisticated exegeses, but also amply demonstrate the continued if not urgent relevance of Benjamin's interventions for our current intellectual and cultural concerns."—John T. Hamilton, Harvard University
£22.49
Stanford University Press Atmosphere Mood Stimmung
Book SynopsisThis book explores the act of reading as the experiencing of specific moods and atmospheres.Trade Review"In the first part of the book, entitled 'Moments', in a truly comparative tour de force, Gumbrecht moves insightfully and suggestively from Lazarillo de Tormes to Shakespeare's sonnets, from Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau to Caspar David Friedrich's paintings, from Thomas Mann's Venice to Machado de Assis's Memorial de Aries, making these works apt condensations of particular 'forms of "life"' in different historical periods."—Pierpaolo Antonello, Modern Language Review"Writing in prose that is remarkably lucid for a philosophical text, the author illustrates his point with examples that range widely, from medieval verse to the picaresque narrative; from the art of Caspar David Friedrich to the music of Janis Joplin. Although the book will be most useful for specialists, less experienced readers would also benefit from engagement with Gumbrecht's heuristic for reading literature. Highly recommended."—J. F. Moffett, CHOICE"Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is one of the 'Meisterdenker' (Master Thinkers) of our time and a teacher in the best sense of the word. The perspective on literature that he presents here—the study of the emotional reactions, moods, and atmospheres that reading can trigger—entails a serious methodological challenge. How can one avoid delivering subjective impressions without any objective relevance? His answer is as simple as it is bold, thought-provoking, and charming: You can't."—Eckart Goebel, New York University"This book, like most of Gumbrecht's previous work, will be a trendsetting example of literary criticism. It opens the way to a re-evaluation of what has been but a faint 'longing.' Monumental endeavors such as this keep alive the hard questions of which our profession has mostly lost track."—Barbara Vinken, University of Munich"A delightful read. There is a fine and subtle affinity between the form of the chapters, which might almost be called 'mood pieces,' and their delicate and somewhat elusive subject. Experts and general readers alike will derive both pleasure and profit from this book."—Eric Downing, University of North Carolina
£18.04
Stanford University Press Between Philosophy and Literature
Book SynopsisThis book examines Bakhtin as a Modernist, "exilic" thinker, engaged with the question of ethical subjectivity, aligned with contemporary Continental philosophers such as Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, and positioned at a crossroads of the human sciences.Trade Review"A recurrent motif of the book, reflecting both Bakhtin's work and human experience in general, is the subject's need for a framing structure alongside the need to transcend those frames. The ethical subject pushes through the frame while understanding its deep dependence on that very frame - the individual acting at the limits of being even if those limits are impossible to fully cross. In her study, Erdinast-Vulcan has distilled the complexity of Bakhtin's thought while preserving its core of humanity - achieving that rare feat of a scholarly work that deals with questions that are pressing in human life." -- David Stromberg * Partial Answers: Journal of LIterature and the History of Ideas *"Erdinast-Vulcan provides an interpretation of Bakhtin's neglected early writings that effectively makes them available for the first time to a general audience. Her readings are critical, but they insightfully convey the essence of what Bakhtin was trying to do in his earliest phase. Her lucid exposition will result in a discovery of those writings as the important documents they are in the formation of new paths in linguistics, ethics, aesthetics—and even theology." —Michael Holquist, Yale University"By uncovering the layers of Bakhtin's understanding of the subject, Erdinast-Vulcan's offers an in-depth interpretation of his 'philosophizing under the mask' at a time when literary theory came under the threat of totalitarianism. She portrays his vision of the subject in the process of its formation, and by placing it in a broad historical context she discloses the range of his influence on modern philosophy and the humanities." -- Boris Gubman * European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms *"Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan's study avoids the standard lines of inquiry into the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. It aspires neither to provide a full exposition of his thought, nor to situate it in its cultural context or trace its intellectual genealogies. Drawing largely on sources that are less widely known—the early philosophical manuscripts and the suggestive notebooks—she provides instead a compelling account of Bakhtin's idiosyncratic place within the Western philosophical tradition, and in particular within the tradition of thinking about subjectivity and ethics....Bakhtin's work emerges as neither a curiosity from the past, fit for little more than intellectual-historical unpacking, nor a repository of helpful terms to be applied to our respective domains of study, but rather as our untimely contemporary, still grappling with the deadlock between a discredited foundationalism and an unsatisfying relativism....Lucid and beautifully written." -- Ilya Kliger * Comparative Literature *"Between Philosophy and Literature is profoundly interesting . . . [I]ts vision of a better way to live is genuinely persuasive . . . The chapters in which Bakhtin is compared to Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Lévinas are particularly well-achieved and show how the examination of a concrete, historically situated, and creative self became a sustained philosophical concern in the 20th century." -- Andre van Loon * Review 31 *
£89.10
Stanford University Press Between Philosophy and Literature
Book SynopsisThis book examines Bakhtin as a Modernist, "exilic" thinker, engaged with the question of ethical subjectivity, aligned with contemporary Continental philosophers such as Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, and positioned at a crossroads of the human sciences.Trade Review"A recurrent motif of the book, reflecting both Bakhtin's work and human experience in general, is the subject's need for a framing structure alongside the need to transcend those frames. The ethical subject pushes through the frame while understanding its deep dependence on that very frame - the individual acting at the limits of being even if those limits are impossible to fully cross. In her study, Erdinast-Vulcan has distilled the complexity of Bakhtin's thought while preserving its core of humanity - achieving that rare feat of a scholarly work that deals with questions that are pressing in human life." -- David Stromberg * Partial Answers: Journal of LIterature and the History of Ideas *"Erdinast-Vulcan provides an interpretation of Bakhtin's neglected early writings that effectively makes them available for the first time to a general audience. Her readings are critical, but they insightfully convey the essence of what Bakhtin was trying to do in his earliest phase. Her lucid exposition will result in a discovery of those writings as the important documents they are in the formation of new paths in linguistics, ethics, aesthetics—and even theology." —Michael Holquist, Yale University"By uncovering the layers of Bakhtin's understanding of the subject, Erdinast-Vulcan's offers an in-depth interpretation of his 'philosophizing under the mask' at a time when literary theory came under the threat of totalitarianism. She portrays his vision of the subject in the process of its formation, and by placing it in a broad historical context she discloses the range of his influence on modern philosophy and the humanities." -- Boris Gubman * European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms *"Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan's study avoids the standard lines of inquiry into the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. It aspires neither to provide a full exposition of his thought, nor to situate it in its cultural context or trace its intellectual genealogies. Drawing largely on sources that are less widely known—the early philosophical manuscripts and the suggestive notebooks—she provides instead a compelling account of Bakhtin's idiosyncratic place within the Western philosophical tradition, and in particular within the tradition of thinking about subjectivity and ethics....Bakhtin's work emerges as neither a curiosity from the past, fit for little more than intellectual-historical unpacking, nor a repository of helpful terms to be applied to our respective domains of study, but rather as our untimely contemporary, still grappling with the deadlock between a discredited foundationalism and an unsatisfying relativism....Lucid and beautifully written." -- Ilya Kliger * Comparative Literature *"Between Philosophy and Literature is profoundly interesting . . . [I]ts vision of a better way to live is genuinely persuasive . . . The chapters in which Bakhtin is compared to Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Lévinas are particularly well-achieved and show how the examination of a concrete, historically situated, and creative self became a sustained philosophical concern in the 20th century." -- Andre van Loon * Review 31 *
£22.79
Stanford University Press Dead Pledges
Book SynopsisDead Pledges is the first book to explore the ways that U.S. culturefrom novels and poems to photojournalism and horror movieshas responded to the collapse of the financialized consumer credit economy in 2008. Connecting debt theory to questions of cultural form, this book argues that artists, filmmakers, and writers have re-imagined what it means to owe and to own in a period when debt is what makes our economic lives possible. Encompassing both popular entertainment and avant-garde art, the post-crisis productions examined here help to map the landscape of contemporary debt: from foreclosure to credit scoring, student debt to securitized risk, microeconomic theory to anti-eviction activism. A searing critique of the ideology of debt, Dead Pledges dismantles the discourse of moral obligation so often invoked to make us repay. Debt is no longer a source of economic credibility, it contends, but a system of dispossession that threatens the basic fabric of social life.Trade Review"In a series of nuanced yet militant readings, McClanahan makes an incisive case for the centrality of the political economy of debt to contemporary art, culture, and politics. Dead Pledges is a powerful contribution to cultural and social theory that advances the debate over capital and its representations, a debate of vital importance to economic thought, artistic practice, and political action." -- Alberto Toscano, Goldsmiths * University of London *"Dead Pledges offers an exemplary demonstration of how literary and cultural analysis can address urgent social and political problems. A timely work of critical debt theory, it is poised to reshape the transdisciplinary debates around debt and contemporary capitalism." -- Richard Dienst * Rutgers University *"McClanahan's argument is developed in part through readings of photographs of foreclosed homes and their landscapes, where in the moment of debt crisis the antisociality of (or our alienation from) property as a commodity comes to the fore. Dead Pledges brilliantly brings this antisociality home in its final chapter, which examines how housing and foreclosure have become a site of terror in contemporary horror films...McClanahan's most important contribution is how she brings out the dark side of the debt economy and crisis; that is, her attention to the hollow subjects and hostile objects that now populate our worlds. Dead Pledges illuminates the forms of structural coercion and social violence that accumulate around us, like wreckage no longer blown forward by any wind of progress." -- Brian Whitener * The New Inquiry *"McClanahan opens up the personal onto the macro of the social and the collective. In Dead Pledges, the novel and especially the realist novel turn out to be productive sites to pursue such a project due to the scalar negotiation and rich characterization that are typical of the genre—and in the credit-crisis novel both of those are under pressure" -- Arne De Boever * Boundary 2 *"McClanahan calls her cultural texts her "literary laboratories," wherein she distills and deconstructs these competing narratives about capitalism, crisis, and debt. As a work of cultural critique, Dead Pledges is uniquely capable of deconstructing the literary and aesthetic devices that structure these competing narratives in a way that political economy cannot." -- Sofia Cutler * Los Angeles Review of Books *"Dead Pledges stands out among recent criticism for its cogent description of the culture produced by our deregulated, financialized economy, which has spawned various species of hyper-usury whereby consumer credit risk and national credit ratings have themselves become tradeable objects...We need more books like this one." -- David Hawkes * Times Literary Supplement *"Dead Pledges is remarkable for its economic history, drawing on thinkers from Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche, and bringing this history of economic thought to bear on the policies and arguments of Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and Robert Shiller, among others. For its historical framing of the contemporary economic crisis alone, Dead Pledges marks an important intervention into contemporary debates about cultural forms and the economy. For those working at the intersection of contemporary literature and economics it is a must-read." -- Davis Smith-Brecheisen * Mediations *"McClanahan's great strength is the wealth of detail she brings to her portrait of the period itself, with excellent distillations of existing literature on the concept of debt, its financialization prior to 2008, and the crisis itself. Her grasp of economics, in the radical as well as the more official senses, is truly masterful and she does an outstanding job of clarifying its stakes for cultural analysis." -- Julian Murphet * Affirmations: Of the Modern *"Dead Pledges is a welcome addition to an area of growing importance, the 'economic humanities.' Its author commands a disparate and complex body of economic thought and economic history." -- Jerry A. Varsava * American Studies *"The book is a masterful exploration of the cultural politics of the financial crisis and a powerful mediation on how to make sense of an era of unrepayable debts...Dead Pledgesis a must read. For whom? Well, anyone living in the 21st century, concerned about insurmountable debts, thinking of how culture and the economy transect each other, and striving for a radical politics fit for the mortgaged times in which we live."––Aparna Gopalan, New Books NetworkTable of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Behavioral Economics and the Credit-Crisis Novel chapter abstractChapter 1 analyzes novelistic representations of the 2008 credit crisis. Focusing on Jonathan Dee's The Privileges, Adam Haslett's Union Atlantic, and Martha McPhee's Dear Money, it reads the post-crisis novel's interest in individual psychology alongside and against the rise of behavioral economics. Behavioral economists understand the financial crisis as a consequence of individual choices and cultural climates: from excessive optimism and irrational exuberance to greed and overweening self-interest. At once mirroring and refuting these explanations, the post-credit-crisis novel reveals a deep ambivalence about the model of psychological complexity that undergirds both novelistic character and behavioralist economics. Exploring these problems through experiments with narrative perspective, these post-crisis novels suggest that the rich, full, autonomous homines economici of both the realist novel and microeconomic theory are bankrupt. 2Credit, Characterization, Personification chapter abstractChapter 2 addresses the relationship between debt and personhood. Practices for evaluating economic credibility in the late eighteenth century relied on subjective, qualitative, narrative forms of evaluation and thus depended on a realist model of literary character. By the early twenty-first century, however, credit scoring had become objective, quantitative, and data driven. Yet contemporary creditors still import the fictions of personhood stripped from human subjects into the scores themselves. To understand the perduring presence of the person, this chapter considers both characterization and personification. Gary Shytengart's 2010 novel Super Sad True Love Story attests to the persistence of racial discrimination in "objective" credit scoring, while conceptual art by Cassie Thornton, Occupy Wall Street debtor-portraits, and poetry by Mathew Timmons and Timothy Donnelley register debt as a material and historical force. 3Photography and Foreclosure chapter abstractChapter 3 brings together a wide range of photographs—photojournalism, art photography, and satellite images—that document the economic crisis with images of abandoned homes. These photographs reveal the effects of the boom and bust of the mortgage market on our view of the home. They also raise questions about the politics of representation, especially when the photographer's ability to enter the home depends on the power of the police to process an eviction. Photographs of empty houses, it suggests, draw on the aesthetics of what Freud termed the Unheimlich—unhomely, uncanny—to register the uncanny power of property. Turning from photographs of single houses to images of abandoned industrial landscapes and empty housing developments, this chapter argues that such images foreshadow a financial crisis to come. 4Houses of Horror chapter abstractChapter 4 begins by noting that contemporary discourse on the economic crisis is profoundly shaped by the language of horror and fear. To understand why, this chapter turns to four post-crisis horror films that explicitly link fear, foreclosure, and financialized credit: Drag Me to Hell (dir. Sam Raimi), Dream Home (dir. Pang Ho-cheung), Mother's Day (dir. Darren Lynn Bousman), and Crawlspace (dir. Josh Stolberg). All four films take up real estate lending, mortgage speculation, and foreclosure risk and locate horror in the "dead pledge" of the mortgage. Using horror and the home-invasion genre to explore the shifting understandings of ownership consequent to the housing crisis, these films frighteningly literalize the doctrine of caveat emptor. Exploring the relationship between "paying back" and "payback," they suggest that introduction of speculative risk has shifted the social force of credit contracts from the promise of trust to the threat of revenge. Coda: The Living Indebted (on Students and Sabotage) chapter abstractThe Coda to Dead Pledges explores an emerging anti-debt politics, arguing that "debt strikes" and the occupation or sabotage of domestic space are forms of protest that attempt to block capital at the point of circulation. Exploring the economics of student debt and taking up the treatment of education debt as an "investment in the future," this chapter suggests that the politics of student debt illuminate the relationship between workers and students and between the university and capitalism. It concludes by exploring the emergence of what it terms "crisis subjectivity": a demystified condition of radical percipience and canny knowing.
£77.35
LSU Press Postregional Fictions Barry Hannah and the
Book SynopsisDrawing from recent debates about the validity of regional studies and scepticism surrounding the efficacy of the concept of authenticity, Clare Chadd's Postregional Fictions focuses on questions of southern regional authenticity in fiction published by Barry Hannah from 1972 to 2001.
£36.51
LSU Press Desire and Infinity in W. S. Merwins Poetry
Book SynopsisIn the first monograph on W.S. Merwin to appear since his death in 2019, Feng Dong focuses on the dialectical movement of desire and infinity that ensouls the poet's entire oeuvre. His analysis foregrounds what Merwin calls ""the other side of despair"", the opposite of humans' articulated personal and social agonies.
£35.06
Louisiana State University Press Faulkner and the Politics of Reading
Book SynopsisWith this study Karl F. Zender offers fresh readings of individual novels, themes, and motifs while also assessing the impact of recent politicized interpretations on our understanding of William Faulkner’s achievement.
£20.85
Northwestern University Press Future Crossings Literature Between Philosophy
Book SynopsisA collection of essays exploring the future of literary studies by focusing on the relationship between literary theory, philosophy, and cultural studies. The essays aim to break the boundaries separating philosophy and literature.
£27.96
Northwestern University Press Bakhtin and the Classics Rethinking Theory
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£23.96
Northwestern University Press Nabokovs Canon From Onegin to Ada Studies in
Book SynopsisNabokov's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1964) and its accompanying Commentary, along with Ada, or Ardor (1969), his densely allusive late Englishlanguage novel, have appeared nearly inscrutable to many interpreters of his work. If not outright failures, they are often considered relatively unsuccessful curiosities. In Bozovic's insightful study, these key texts reveal Nabokov's ambitions to reimagine a canon of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western masterpieces with Russian literature as a central, rather than marginal, strain. Nabokov's scholarly work, translations, and lectures on literature bear resemblance to New Critical canon reformations; however, Nabokov's canon is pointedly translingual and transnational and serves to legitimize his own literary practice. The new angles and theoretical framework offered by Nabokov's Canon help us to understand why Nabokov's provocative monuments remain powerful source texts for several generations of diverse international writers
£29.96
Northwestern University Press Space as Storyteller Spatial Jumps in
Book SynopsisExplores stories across a wide range of time that narrate spatial jumps, from Walter Benjamin's tangential take on the cityscape, the experimentalism of Futurist theatricality, the multiple and potential atlases narrated by Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, and the posturban thought and practice of Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas/OMA.
£27.96
Northwestern University Press Speculative Formalism Literature Theory and the Critical Present Diaeresis
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£27.96
Northwestern University Press New Digital Worlds
Book SynopsisTraces the formation of postcolonial studies and digital humanities as fields, identifying how they can intervene in knowledge production in the digital age. Roopika Risam examines the role of colonial violence in the development of digital archives and the possibilities of postcolonial digital archives for resisting this violence.
£27.96
Northwestern University Press The Origins of Russian Literary Theory
Book SynopsisReconstructs lost Formalist theories of authorship, of the psychology of narrative structure, and of the social spread of poetic innovations. By recontextualising Russian Formalism within this philological paradigm, the book highlights the aspects of Formalism's legacy that speak to the priorities of twenty-first-century literary studies.Trade Review“Merrill's book is a major reinterpretation of the early stages of literary theory in Russia and their wider impact. Her narrative is attentive to detail, while remaining sure-footed when capturing the bigger picture. A rewarding piece of research that makes a strong contribution to the field.” —Galin Tihanov, author of The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond“With impressive erudition and admirable lucidity, Jessica Merrill offers a strikingly novel reconstruction of Russian Formalism, placing it in a rich and largely neglected historical context. Her extended discussions of folklore and folkloristics, of the emphasis on the spoken as well as the written word, of the relevance of psychological theories and of contemporary politics, force us to reconsider the movement, its achievements, and its legacy. The book is a major contribution to the study of Western literary theory, and more generally, to twentieth-century intellectual history.” —Michael Wachtel, author of The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry“The Origins of Russian Literary Theory is remarkable for the lucidity of its composition. This clear and wide-ranging book makes an original and significant contribution to the study of Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism, and thereby also to our understanding of the history of literary theory in the twentieth century—and perhaps its future in the twenty-first.” —Ilya Kliger, author of The Narrative Shape of Truth: Veridiction in Modern European Literature“Merrill’s book attests to the inspiring vitality of Russian Formalism for contemporary literary studies. It approaches this subject from a new and insightful perspective and provides provocative vistas on this seminal school of criticism.” —Peter Steiner, author of Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics“The Origins of Russian Literary Theory focuses on the role of comparative philology in the formation of Formalist concepts. The author efficiently considers both branches of the Formalist School—OPOIAZ and the Moscow Linguistic Circle—and explores why they favored folklore studies and sociolinguistic disciplines, such as dialectology (a fact largely disregarded in previous scholarship). As it is quite a departure from the traditional narrow view of Russian Formalism, Merrill’s book is a fascinating read for both literary theorists and intellectual historians.” —Igor Pilshchikov, coeditor of Epokha “ostraneniia” (The Age of “Estrangement”: Russian Formalism and Contemporary Humanities)Table of Contents Acknowledgements Note on the Text Introduction: The Philological Paradigm 1.Comparative Philology 2.The Author as Performer 3.The Psychology of Poetic Form 4.Inside the Moscow Linguistic Circle: Poetic Dialectology 5.Structuralisms Conclusion: Formalism and Philology in the Twenty-First Century Appendix Notes Bibliography Index
£29.96
Northwestern University Press Reading at the Limits of Poetic Form
Book SynopsisHow does literary objecthood contend with the challenge of writing objects that emerge at an extreme limit of material presence? Jacob McGuinn delves into the ways literature writes this indeterminate presence in the context of pre- and post-'68 Paris, a vital moment in the history of criticism.
£28.76
