Literary theory Books

Book SynopsisExploring the intricacy and complexity of Walter Pater's prose, Transfigured World challenges traditional approaches to Pater and shows precise ways in which the form of his prose expresses its content. Carolyn Williams asserts that Pater's aestheticism and his historicism should be understood as dialectically interrelated critical strategies, inextricable from each other in practice. Williams discusses the explicit and embedded narratives that play a crucial role in Pater's aesthetic criticism and examines the figures that compose these narratives, including rhetorical tropes, structures of argument such as genealogy, and historical or fictional personae.Trade ReviewIn addition to her superb analysis of the style and thought of Pater's individual writing, demonstrates that Pater was far more philosophically coherent and complex, and of far more interest for contemporary critical thought, than has previously been recognized. Her book is the best critical study on Pater yet written. * Victorian Studies *A convincing account of the unity of Pater's thought and probably the most detailed treatment ever attempted of the intricacies of his prose; a book that is likely to be an essential source for future readings of Pater. * Nineteenth-Century Literature *Table of ContentsPart One: Opening Conclusions1. "That Which Is Without"2. "The Inward World of Thought and Feeling"3. Aestheticism4. Answerable Style5. Historicism6. Aesthetic Historicism and "Aesthetic Poverty"7. The Poetics of RevivalPart Two: Figural Strategies in The Renaissance1. Legend and Historicity2. Myths of History: The Last Supper3. The Historicity of Myth4. Myths of History: The Mona Lisa5. Types and Figures6. Low and High Relief: "Luca Della Robbia"7. The Senses of ReliefPart Three: Historical Novelty and Marius the Epicurean1. The Transparent Hero2. Autobiography of the Zeitgeist3. The Transcendental Induction4. Typology as Narrative Form5. Typological Ladders6. Christian Historicism7. Literary History as "Appreciation"Part Four: "Recovery as Reminiscence": The Greek Studies and Plato and Platonism1. Histories of Myth: The Greek Studies2. The House Beautiful and Its Interpreter3. The Philosophy of Mythic Form4. The History of Philosophy5. The Anecdote of the Shell6. Dialogue and Dialectic7. Paterian Recollection: The Anagogic Mind

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Book SynopsisCutting across literature, film, art, and philosophy, Art of the Ordinary is a trailblazing, cross-disciplinary engagement with the ordinary and the everyday. Because, writes Richard Deming, the ordinary is always at hand, it is, in fact, too familiar for us to perceive it and become fully aware of it. The ordinary he argues, is what most needs to be discovered and yet is something that can never be approached, since to do so is to immediately change it.Art of the Ordinary explores how philosophical questions can be revealed in surprising placesas in a stand-up comic's routine, for instance, or a Brillo box, or a Hollywood movie. From negotiations with the primary materials of culture and community, ways of reading self and other are made available, deepening one's ability to respond to ethical, social, and political dilemmas. Deming picks out key figures, such as the philosophers Stanley Cavell, Arthur Danto, and Richard Wollheim; poet John Ashbery; artist AndyTrade ReviewA trailblazing, cross-disciplinary engagement with the ordinary and the everyday. * Critics at Large *Table of ContentsIntroduction: In Respect of the Ordinary 1. Leading an Ordinary Life: Philosophy and the Ordinary 2. Something Completely Different: Steven Wright, Comedy, and the Uncanny Ordinary 3. How to Dwell: John Ashbery and the Poetics of the Ordinary 4. Artful Things: Looking at Warhol, Looking at the Everyday

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Book SynopsisIn The Arts of Cinema, Martin Seel explores film's connections to the other arts and the qualities that distinguish it from them. In nine concise and elegantly written chapters, he explores the cinema's singular aesthetic potential and uses specific examples from a diverse range of filmsfrom Antonioni and Hitchcock to The Searchers and The Bourne Supremacyto demonstrate the many ways this potential can be realized. Seel's analysis provides both a new perspective on film as a comprehensive aesthetic experience and a nuanced understanding of what the medium does to us once we are in the cinema.Trade ReviewIn his tremendously stimulating aesthetics of cinema, Martin Seel writes that films absorb the presence of the spectator more than all other works of art.... One of the merits of his book is that it is informed by a wide spectrum of film history, from the Marx Brothers to Fassbinder. * Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung *In his stimulating volume, the philosopher Seel looks for the essence and especially the particularity of the cinema, tracing the roots of cinema in other arts. According to Seel, film takes up elements from all of these arts and realizes its unique potential. Films like Hitchcock's North by Northwest or Antonioni's Zabriskie Point explode the boundaries of space and draw all of the spectator’s senses into it. * Deutschlandfunk [German Public Radio] *An exciting work of ‘philosophy meets cinema’—intellectually sophisticated but written in a rich, playful style—this book is both impressive and delightful. * academicworld.net *Seel grounds his philosophical work in close textual analysis of a small selection of representative films, including Hollywood classics, such as The Searchers; art films, such as Caché; and more recent action films, such as The Bourne Supremacy. As a work of philosophy and film theory, the book is notable for its lively engagement with complex ideas and for its inviting prose. It will appeal primarily to those with a strong interest in film aesthetics. * Choice *Anyone who studies, watches, or appreciates films for their beauty and artistic value will enjoy Seel's musings in philosophy and art. * Communication Booknotes Quarterly (CBQ) *Table of ContentsOpening Credits: Affairs—The Site of the Cinema—"Film"—The Course of Things—The Film Program 1. Film as Architecture: A Beginning—Division of Space—Ambient Sound—Some Opening Credits—Landscapes—Two Extremes—An Ending—Spatial Imagination—More Opening Credits 2. Film as Music: A Prelude—Time Connections—Action (1)—Double Motion—Action (2)—Spaces of Time—Higher Rhythm—Explosion 3. Film as Image: People Waiting—Pictorial Appearing—Image and Movement—Photography and Film—Another Trip— The Promise of Photography—Image Analysis—The Promise of Film—Another Ending 4. Film as Spectacle: Anarchy—Division of Space, Again—Virtuality—Sculpturality— Actors—Voices—Theatricality—Attractionism—Ecstasy 5. Film as Narrative: Three Films—Abstinence—Narrative Disposition—Telling Stories—Perspectivity—Filmic Storytelling—Cinema's Temporal Form—The Present Past 6. Film as Exploration: In Baghdad—Urban Landscapes—Realities—Processes of Documentation—A Double Promise—Techniques of Fiction— Questions of Style—Loss of Control—References to the World—The End 7. Film as Imagination: At Bakersfield—An Illusionistic Interpretation—The Figure of the Illusionist—Illusion and Immersion—Imagination Not Illusion—Photography and Film, Again—Twofold Attention—Illusion as a Technique—Caché 8. Film as Emotion: The End, Yet Again—The Illusionist's Final Appearance— Motion and Emotion—Corporeality—Sensate Understanding— Expressivity—Engagement—Twofold Attention, Again—Mixed Emotions—Godard 9. Film as Philosophy: Flashbacks—Another Affair—Three Dimensions—Cine- anthropology—Active Passivity—An Encore—Landscapes, Once Again Closing Credits: Notice—Thanks

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Book SynopsisOn the Threshold of Eurasia explores the idea of the Russian and Soviet East as a political, aesthetic, and scientific system of ideas that emerged through a series of intertextual encounters produced by Russians and Turkic Muslims on the imperial periphery amidst the revolutionary transition from 1905 to 1929. Identifying the role of Russian and Soviet Orientalism in shaping the formation of a specifically Eurasian imaginary, Leah Feldman examines connections between avant-garde literary works; Orientalist historical, geographic and linguistic texts; and political essays written by Russian and Azeri Turkic Muslim writers and thinkers.Tracing these engagements and interactions between Russia and the Caucasus, Feldman offers an alternative vision of empire, modernity, and anti-imperialism from the vantage point not of the metropole but from the cosmopolitan centers at the edges of the Russian and later Soviet empires. In this way, On the Threshold of Eurasia illuTrade ReviewFeldman (Chicago) places understudied Turkic archives into dialogue with Russian-language works from the Soviet literary and cultural canon... The author's research is likewise presented in the context of postcolonial studies, which illuminates the role of literary modernity in the Soviet multinational empire and in the context of far-right and neo-Eurasianist geopolitics in Putin's Russia. * Choice *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Note on Transliteration Introduction: Heterodoxy and Heterology on the Threshold of Eurasia Part I.: Heterodoxy and Imperial Returns 1. Parodic and Messianic Genealogies: Reading Gogol in Azeri in the Late Imperial Caucasus 2. Aesthetics of Empathy: The Azeri Subject in Translations of Pushkin Part II.: Heterology and Utopian Futures 3. A Window onto the East: Baku's Avant-garde Poetics and the Translatio Imperii 4. Broken Verse: The Materiality of the Symbol in New Turkic Poetics Postscript: Latinization and Refili's "The Window" onto Soviet Azerbaijan Notes References Index

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Book SynopsisN. Katherine Hayles here investigates parallels between contemporary literature and critical theory and the science of chaos. She finds in both scientific and literary discourse new interpretations of chaos, which is seen no longer as disorder but as a locus of maximum information and complexity. She examines structures and themes of disorder...Trade ReviewHayles’s point is that the almost simultaneous appearance of interest in complex systems across many disciplines—physics, mathematics, biology, information theory, literature, literary theory—signals a profound paradigm and epistemological shift. She calls the new paradigm ‘orderly disorder.’ This is a timely, informative, and enormously thought-provoking book. -- Nancy Craig Simmons * American Literature *

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Book SynopsisTobin Siebers asserts that literary criticism is essentially a form of ethics. The Ethics of Criticism investigates the moral character of contemporary literary theory, assessing a wide range of theoretical approaches in terms of both the ethical presuppositions underlying the critical claims and the attitudes fostered by the approaches. Building on analyses of the moral legacies of Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud, Siebers identifies the various fronts on which the concerns of critical theory impinge on those of ethics.Trade ReviewThe Ethics of Criticism should contribute to the new theoretical conversation through its conclusions about specific thinkers and by moving others to think harder and say more about the relation among ethics, criticism, and literature. -- James Phelan * Modern Philology *

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Book SynopsisIn The One, Other, and Only Dickens, Garrett Stewart casts new light on those delirious wrinkles of wording that are one of the chief pleasures of Dickens's novels but that go regularly unnoticed in Dickensian criticism: the linguistic infrastructure of his textured prose. Stewart, in effect, looks over the reader's shoulder in shared fascination with the local surprises of Dickensian phrasing and the restless undertext of his storytelling. For Stewart, this phrasal undercurrent attests both to Dickens's early immersion in Shakespearean sonority and, at the same time, to the effect of Victorian stenography, with the repressed phonetics of its elided vowels, on the young author's verbal habits long after his stint as a shorthand Parliamentary reporter.To demonstrate the interplay and tension between narrative and literary style, Stewart draws out two personas within Dickens: the Inimitable Boz, master of plot, social panorama, and set-piece rhetorical cadences, and a veTrade ReviewThe One, Other, and Only Dickens is sui generis... Stewart offers an exuberant appreciation of Dickens's language, a celebration of craft.... Stewart points toward a return to the pleasurable, slow reading of both criticism and primary texts, but Stewart champions sustained and passionate attentiveness as integral to that process. Stewart's lovely reading, and writing, will be a pleasure to readers who agree with Thackeray's 1847 appraisal of Dickens that 'There's no writing against such power as this-one has no chance!' * SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 *A series of compelling readings from the inklings of nebulous popular consensus. * Dickens Quarterly *Passage after passage of this kind not only leave you feeling as if you have consistently under-read Dickens, but also, retracing Stewart's granular detail, that Dickens is the unequaled master of English prose, the only peer in prose to Shakespeare in verse. * Victorian Studies *Table of ContentsForeword: Preparing the Way Introduction: Some "Reagions" for Reading 1. Shorthand Speech / Longhand Sound 2. Secret Prose / Sequestered Poetics 3. Phrasing Astraddle 4. Reading Lessens Afterword: "That Very Word, Reading" Endpiece: The One and T'Otherest Notes Index

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Book SynopsisFirst-person poetry is a familiar genre in Latin literature. Propertius, Catullus, and Horace deployed the first-person speaker in a variety of ways that either bolster or undermine the link between this figure and the poet himself. In I, the Poet, Kathleen McCarthy offers a new approach to understanding the ubiquitous use of a first-person voice in Augustan-age poetry, taking on several of the central debates in the field of Latin literary studiesincluding the inheritance of the Greek tradition, the shift from oral performance to written collections, and the status of the poetic I-voice.In light of her own experience as a twenty-first century reader, for whom Latin poetry is meaningful across a great gulf of linguistic, cultural, and historical distances, McCarthy positions these poets as the self-conscious readers of and heirs to a long tradition of Greek poetry, which prompted them to explore radical forms of communication through the poetic form. Informed in part bTrade ReviewI, the Poet is an excellent, thought-provoking, and significant contribution to the study of Latin poetry. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Voices on the Page 1. Poetry as Conversation 2. Poetry as Performance 3. Poetry That Says "Ego" 4. Poetry as Writing Epilogue: Ovid in Exile

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Book SynopsisThis book assess the relationship of literature to various other cultural forms in the Middle Ages. Jesse M. Gellrich uses the insights of such thinkers as Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida to explore the continuity of medieval ideas about speaking, writing, and texts.Trade ReviewOne of the most successful attempts yet to apply contemporary literary theory to medieval poetry. -- A.J. Minnis * Times Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisThis groundbreaking book challenges the disciplinary boundaries that have traditionally separated scientific inquiry from literary inquiry. It explores scientific knowledge in three subject areasthe natural history of aging, literary narrative, and psychoanalysis. In the authors'' view, the different perspectives on cognition afforded by Anglo-American cognitive science, Greimassian semiotics, and Lacanian psychoanalysis help us to redefine our very notion of culture.Part I historically situates the concepts of meaning and truth in twentieth-century semiotic theory and cognitive science. Part II contrasts the modes of Freudian case history to the general instance of Einstein''s relativity theory and then sets forth a rhetoric of narrative based on the discourse of the aged. Part III examines in the context of literary studies an interdisciplinary concept of cultural cognition.Culture and Cognition will be essential reading for literary theorists, historians and

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewOne of the delights of this monograph is its omnivorous intermediality. Those interested in the interweaving of literary, artistic, and cultural disciplines through modernism will find this study interesting not only for its scope, but for the questions it throws up about a future of modernist studies which attends equally to the different strains of criticism that have shaped the field. * The Modernist Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Reformulating Modernism 1. Plastic Form: Henry James's Sculptural Aesthetics and Reading in the Round 2. Mortal Form: Still Life and Virginia Woolf 's Other Elegiac Shapes 3. Protean Form: Erotic Abstraction and Ardent Futurity in the Poetry of Mina Loy 4. Bad Formalism: Evelyn Waugh's Film Fictions and the Work of Art in the Age of Cinemechanics 5. Surface Forms: Photography and Gertrude Stein's Contact History of Modernism Epilogue: The Consolations of Form

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Book SynopsisCan anyone say anything that has not already been said about the most scrutinized text in human history? In one of the most radical rereadings of the opening chapters of Genesis since The Zohar, David Kishik manages to do just that. The Book of Shem, a philosophical meditation on the beginning of the Bible and the end of the world, offers an inspiring interpretation of this navel of world literature. The six parts of the primeval story—God's creation, the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, Noah's Ark, the first covenant, and the Tower of Babel—come together to address a single concern: How does one become the human being that one is? By closely analyzing the founding text of the Abrahamic religions, this short treatise rethinks some of their deepest convictions. With a mixture of reverence and violence, Kishik's creative commentary demonstrates the post-secular implications of a pre-Abrahamic position. A translation of the Hebrew source, included as an appendix, helps to peel away the endless layers of presuppositions about its meaning. Trade Review"With The Book of Shem, we are far from the antiquarianism or spiritual edification one normally expects from a commentary on an ancient text. David Kishik's unconventional reading follows an unconventional method, one that clearly draws on vast erudition and real linguistic expertise."—Adam Kotsko, North Central College"The Book of Shem is a fantastic book that teaches us something new and returns us to something we have abandoned for too long. David Kishik turns his well-honed attention to a truly original question: how to translate 'origin'—how to relate it, relate to it, and let ourselves be interpellated by it."—Gil Anidjar, Columbia University"The Book of Shem is a rare work of scholarship that combines elegance with rigor, economy with originality. This is a book I want to teach, reread, and give as a gift."—Brian Britt, Virginia Tech

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Book SynopsisCan anyone say anything that has not already been said about the most scrutinized text in human history? In one of the most radical rereadings of the opening chapters of Genesis since The Zohar, David Kishik manages to do just that. The Book of Shem, a philosophical meditation on the beginning of the Bible and the end of the world, offers an inspiring interpretation of this navel of world literature. The six parts of the primeval story—God's creation, the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, Noah's Ark, the first covenant, and the Tower of Babel—come together to address a single concern: How does one become the human being that one is? By closely analyzing the founding text of the Abrahamic religions, this short treatise rethinks some of their deepest convictions. With a mixture of reverence and violence, Kishik's creative commentary demonstrates the post-secular implications of a pre-Abrahamic position. A translation of the Hebrew source, included as an appendix, helps to peel away the endless layers of presuppositions about its meaning. Trade Review"With The Book of Shem, we are far from the antiquarianism or spiritual edification one normally expects from a commentary on an ancient text. David Kishik's unconventional reading follows an unconventional method, one that clearly draws on vast erudition and real linguistic expertise."—Adam Kotsko, North Central College"The Book of Shem is a fantastic book that teaches us something new and returns us to something we have abandoned for too long. David Kishik turns his well-honed attention to a truly original question: how to translate 'origin'—how to relate it, relate to it, and let ourselves be interpellated by it."—Gil Anidjar, Columbia University"The Book of Shem is a rare work of scholarship that combines elegance with rigor, economy with originality. This is a book I want to teach, reread, and give as a gift."—Brian Britt, Virginia Tech

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Book SynopsisA case study of one of the most important global institutions of cultural policy formation, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary demonstrates the relationship between such policymaking and transformations in the economy. Focusing on UNESCO's use of books, Sarah Brouillette identifies three phases in the agency's history and explores the literary and cultural programming of each. In the immediate postwar period, healthy economies made possible the funding of an infrastructure in support of a liberal cosmopolitanism and the spread of capitalist democracy. In the decolonizing 1960s and '70s, illiteracy and lack of access to literature were lamented as a "book hunger" in the developing world, and reading was touted as a universal humanizing value to argue for a more balanced communications industry and copyright regime. Most recently, literature has become instrumental in city and nation branding that drive tourism and the heritage industry. Today, the agency largely treats high literature as a commercially self-sustaining product for wealthy aging publics, and fundamental policy reform to address the uneven relations that characterize global intellectual property creation is off the table. UNESCO's literary programming is in this way highly suggestive. A trajectory that might appear to be one of triumphant success—literary tourism and festival programming can be quite lucrative for some people—is also, under a different light, a story of decline.Trade Review"Brouillette brings to our attention a signal institution of postwar global culture, one that has been all but entirely ignored in previous studies of world literature. In her impressive and bracingly severe account, UNESCO becomes an institutional lens through which we can see the much larger and more powerful set of economic realities that have shaped our sense of what role literature should play in the world at large."—Mark McGurl, Stanford University"This book adds another dimension to Brouillette's already impressive scholarship on postcolonial literature and the global economic downturn. With bracingly rigorous yet refreshingly traditional methodology, she provides a bravura demonstration of nuanced, non-reductive Marxist analysis."—Stephen Schryer, University of New Brunswick"In her probe of UNESCO's transformations, Sarah Brouillette skewers the complacency of the reading class. Readers of this book, all of whom will be members of this class, will be enlightened, troubled, and perhaps mortified by their participation in the consolations of the literary world, including its most critical and politically aware corners. Brouillette's analysis is both necessary and devastating."—Wendy Griswold, Northwestern University"Sarah Brouillette's excellent new book, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary, grounds the category of 'world literature' in the only literary institution capable of matching the concept's scale....[Her] book is a powerful argument for the modest power of literature, however long it lasts."—Christopher Findeisen, Los Angeles Review of BooksTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. UNESCO's Collection of Representative Works 2. America's Postwar Hegemony 3. Cultural Policy and the Perils of Development 4. Book Hunger 5. Policy Making for the Creative Industries Today 6. Pirates and Pipe Dreams Conclusion

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Book SynopsisA case study of one of the most important global institutions of cultural policy formation, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary demonstrates the relationship between such policymaking and transformations in the economy. Focusing on UNESCO's use of books, Sarah Brouillette identifies three phases in the agency's history and explores the literary and cultural programming of each. In the immediate postwar period, healthy economies made possible the funding of an infrastructure in support of a liberal cosmopolitanism and the spread of capitalist democracy. In the decolonizing 1960s and '70s, illiteracy and lack of access to literature were lamented as a "book hunger" in the developing world, and reading was touted as a universal humanizing value to argue for a more balanced communications industry and copyright regime. Most recently, literature has become instrumental in city and nation branding that drive tourism and the heritage industry. Today, the agency largely treats high literature as a commercially self-sustaining product for wealthy aging publics, and fundamental policy reform to address the uneven relations that characterize global intellectual property creation is off the table. UNESCO's literary programming is in this way highly suggestive. A trajectory that might appear to be one of triumphant success—literary tourism and festival programming can be quite lucrative for some people—is also, under a different light, a story of decline.Trade Review"Brouillette brings to our attention a signal institution of postwar global culture, one that has been all but entirely ignored in previous studies of world literature. In her impressive and bracingly severe account, UNESCO becomes an institutional lens through which we can see the much larger and more powerful set of economic realities that have shaped our sense of what role literature should play in the world at large."—Mark McGurl, Stanford University"This book adds another dimension to Brouillette's already impressive scholarship on postcolonial literature and the global economic downturn. With bracingly rigorous yet refreshingly traditional methodology, she provides a bravura demonstration of nuanced, non-reductive Marxist analysis."—Stephen Schryer, University of New Brunswick"In her probe of UNESCO's transformations, Sarah Brouillette skewers the complacency of the reading class. Readers of this book, all of whom will be members of this class, will be enlightened, troubled, and perhaps mortified by their participation in the consolations of the literary world, including its most critical and politically aware corners. Brouillette's analysis is both necessary and devastating."—Wendy Griswold, Northwestern University"Sarah Brouillette's excellent new book, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary, grounds the category of 'world literature' in the only literary institution capable of matching the concept's scale....[Her] book is a powerful argument for the modest power of literature, however long it lasts."—Christopher Findeisen, Los Angeles Review of BooksTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. UNESCO's Collection of Representative Works 2. America's Postwar Hegemony 3. Cultural Policy and the Perils of Development 4. Book Hunger 5. Policy Making for the Creative Industries Today 6. Pirates and Pipe Dreams Conclusion

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Book SynopsisNotework begins with a striking insight: the writer's notebook is a genre in itself. Simon Reader pursues this argument in original readings of unpublished writing by prominent Victorians, offering an expansive approach to literary formalism for the twenty-first century. Neither drafts nor diaries, the notes of Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Vernon Lee, and George Gissing record ephemeral and nonlinear experiences, revealing each author's desire to leave their fragments scattered and unused. Presenting notes in terms of genre allows Reader to suggest inventive new accounts of key Victorian texts, including The Picture of Dorian Gray, On the Origin of Species, and Hopkins's devotional lyrics, and to reinterpret these works as meditations on the ethics of compiling and using data. In this way, Notework recasts information collection as a personal and expressive activity that comes into focus against large-scale systems of knowledge organization. Finding resonance between today's digital culture and its nineteenth-century precursors, Reader honors our most disposable, improvised, and fleeting written gestures. Trade Review"Encountering writers' notebooks on their own terms, Simon Reader carves out fresh and rewarding territory in the landscape of Victorian studies. Notework offers brilliant, wide-ranging commentary on little-studied archival materials in dialogue with, but not subordinated to, well-known works of the period."—Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia"Written in an energetic, witty, and clear style, Notework is full of interest and fresh insight—an unexpected and provocative view on material that has wider implications for how we read."—Kathryn Sutherland, University of Oxford"Contrasting with the disjointed fragments he quotes, Reader's own fluent and energetic style guides us through discussions of formalism generally, and Formalism in particular, into the direct engagement that he promises."—Jacqueline Banerjee, Times Literary Supplement"Notework offers a major contribution to the genre theory and the history of reading because it makes valuable, really for the first time, an absolutely ubiquitous practice... Reader's approach can return us to the archive and attune us beyond the canon because it so profoundly values formal multiplicity."—Elisha Cohn, Modern Philology"Critics often view authorial notes as adjunct to the study of major works, and this purpose is still central. However, Reader contends, in addition to providing insight into the creative process, notes serve as a distinct body of literary work... Incidentally, his observations about the disconnected nature of communication in social media (think Twitter) lead one to wonder how these instances of "note work" might figure as a genre to future readers."—L. A. Brewer, CHOICE"As a study in how to interpret those primary sources that make up much of nineteenth-century literary history, Notework is an engaging reimagining of the Victorian information landscape and an important reconsideration of how literary studies treats ephemera in the nineteenth century and beyond.... Notework promises to be a cornerstone in the aesthetics of information and in the ongoing reassessment of the parts of the long nineteenth century that carry into our present."—Sierra Eckert, Modern Language Quarterly"Simon Reader's 'notework,' a new and happily-coined literary term, avoids the book in 'notebook' while evoking the dream in 'dreamwork' and the art in 'artwork.' In other words, the term itself does a lot of work for this excellent study of important noteworks in Victorian literature. By conceptualizing and naming it, Reader's term will generate further work on this novel genre."—Carolyn Williams, Prose Studies

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Book SynopsisIn Of Effacement, David Marriott endeavors to demolish established opinion about what blackness is and reorient our understanding of what it is not in art, philosophy, autobiography, literary theory, political theory, and psychoanalysis. With the critical rigor and polemical bravura which he displayed in Whither Fanon? Marriott here considers the relationships between language, judgement and effacement, and shows how effacement has become the dominant force in anti-blackness. Both skeptically and emphatically, Marriott presents a series of radical philosophical engagements with Fanon's "is not" (n'est pas) and its "black" political truth. How does one speak—let alone represent—that which is without existence? Is blackness n'est pas because it has yet to be thought as blackness? And if so, when Fanon writes of blackness, that it is n'est pas (is not), where should one look to make sense of this n'est pas? Marriott anchors these questions by addressing the most fundamental perennial questions concerning the nature of freedom, resistance, mastery, life, and liberation, via a series of analyses of such key figures as Huey Newton, Nietzsche, Malcolm X, Edward Said, Georges Bataille, Stuart Hall, and Lacan. He thus develops the basis for a reading of blackness by recasting its effacement as an identity, while insisting on it as a fundamental question for philosophy. Trade Review"Dazzlingly original, forcefully subtle in its argumentation, Of Effacement is undeniably path-breaking. Marriott's reading allows us to see Fanon's 'black being' as a 'disquieting in-plenitude' visible only in the way it curves the spaces of the personal, cultural, and political."—Joan Copjec, Brown University"Brilliant, relentless, and unblinking in its acknowledgment that 'there is no ontology of black pain,' David Marriott's Of Effacement is a tour de force of critical analysis. Lingering with Fanon's crystallization of wretchedness into 'a new law of expression' that would precipitate a 'politics beyond that of racial community,' Marriott refuses to avert his gaze from the abyss of Fanon's 'n'est pas.' For in the 'nothing that governs the world gone black,' he locates the possibility of invention without 'arche,telos, or predestined end.' The result is this rigorous, transformative, and supremely necessary book that dares, like Fanon, to 'make the incomprehensible the vocation of [its] politics' and so to open—in ways at once unbearable and exhilarating to contemplate—new pathways for our own."—Lee Edelman, Tufts University"With an unflinching lucidity in reading and critique, Marriott develops a demanding and often startling thinking across the fields of ontology, politics, and aesthetics. Of Effacement deserves the closest attention of all those working in philosophy and theory today."—Geoffrey Bennington, Emory UniversityTable of ContentsPreface PART I ONTOLOGY AND LANGUAGE One N'est Pas Two Nigra Philologica Three Nègre, Figura Four Ontology and Lalangue PART II WRITING AND POLITICS Five Autobiography as Effacement Six Crystallization Seven On Revolutionary Suicide Eight The Real and the Apparent PART III ART AND PHILOSOPHY Nine Corpus Exanime Notes Index

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Book SynopsisAn accessible introduction to cultural theory and an original polemic about the purpose of criticism. What is criticism for? Over the past few decades, impassioned disagreements over that question in the academy have burst into the news media. These conflicts have renewed the culture wars over the legacy of the 1960s, becoming entangled in national politics and leading to a new set of questions about critics and the power they do or don't wield. Re-examining theorists from Matthew Arnold to Walter Benjamin, to Fredric Jameson, Stuart Hall, and Hortense Spillers, Criticism and Politics explores the animating contradictions that have long propelled literary studies: between pronouncing judgment and engaging in philosophical critique, between democracy and expertise, between political commitment and aesthetic autonomy. Both a leftist critic and a critic of the left, Robbins unflinchingly defends criticism from those who might wish to de-politicize it, arguing that working for change is not optional for critics, but rather a core part of their job description. Trade Review"Urgent, bracing, and powerfully argued, Criticism and Politics will be controversial in the best sense—inviting us all to debate the purposes and presumptions of criticism on newly articulated grounds."—Caroline Levine, Cornell University, author of Forms"This is a vivid, engaging, and engaged piece of literary criticism, as well as a vigorous defense of criticism as a method, by one of its foremost practitioners."—Martin Puchner, Harvard University, author of Literature for a Changing Planet"For those who have been looking for a book to address, head on, the complex connections between literary criticism and politics, this is that book."—Mark Greif, Stanford University, author of Against Everything"This challenging, bold book helps answer the question of what critics are for. Highly recommended"—S. J. Shaw, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Criticism in the Wake of the 1960s 2. Criticizing 3. Lost Centrality 4. Aesthetics and the Governing of Others 5. Grievances 6. The Historical and the Transhistorical 7. Cosmopolitical Criticism in Deep Time Conclusion

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Book SynopsisAn accessible introduction to Badiou's key ideas In this short and accessible book, the French philosopher Alain Badiou provides readers with a unique introduction to his system of thought, summed up in the trilogy of Being and Event, Logics of Worlds, and The Immanence of Truths. Taking the form of an interview and two talks and keeping in mind a broad audience without any prior knowledge of his work, the book touches upon the central concepts and major preoccupations of Badiou's philosophy: fundamental ontology, mathematics, politics, poetry, and love. Well-chosen examples illuminate his thinking in regards to being and universality, worlds and singularity, and the infinite and the absolute, among other topics. A veritable tour de force of pedagogical clarity, this new student-friendly work is perhaps the single best general introduction to the work of this prolific and committed thinker. If, for Badiou, the task of philosophy consists in thinking through the truths of our time, the texts collected in this small volume could not be timelier.Trade Review"Badiou by Badiou synthesizes Badiou's key ideas with a personal touch, inviting readers into his presentation of what philosophy is and his highly original way of philosophizing. Badiou is brilliant at making anyone want to engage with philosophical questions."—Emily Apter, author of Unexceptional Politics"This book captures the latest developments in Alain Badiou's thought, while providing an excellent introduction for new readers. Badiou by Badiou, his most legible work, is a riveting tour of the domains of art, love, politics, and science."—Héctor Hoyos, author of Things with a History"Badiou proves himself again to be, like Socrates, a corrupter of the youth. With this clear entry point into his metaphysical project, Badiou demonstrates the dangerously transformative character of philosophy."—Jodi Dean, author of Comrade"As the 21st century shapes up to be all about ends, Badiou challenges us to think ab novo. This latest installment of his firebrand philosophy will ignite youth even among those who think its time has passed."—Joan Copjec, author of Imagine There's No WomanTable of ContentsPart One: Event, Truths, Subject Part Two: Philosophy Between Mathematics and Poetry Part Three: Ontology and Mathematics

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Book SynopsisFrom medieval contemplation to the early modern cosmopoetic imagination, to the invention of aesthetic experience, to nineteenth-century decadent literature, and to early-twentieth century essayistic forms of writing and film, Niklaus Largier shows that mystical practices have been reinvented across the centuries, generating a notion of possibility with unexpected critical potential. Arguing for a new understanding of mystical experience, Largier foregrounds the ways in which devotion builds on experimental practices of figuration in order to shape perception, emotions, and thoughts anew. Largier illuminates how devotional practices are invested in the creation of possibilities, and this investment has been a key element in a wide range of experimental engagements in literature and art from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, and most recently in forms of "new materialism." Read as a history of the senses and emotions, the book argues that mystical and devotional practices have long been invested in the modulating and reconfiguring of sensation, affects, and thoughts. Read as a book about practices of figuration, it questions ordinary protocols of interpretation in the humanities, and the priority given to a hermeneutic understanding of texts and cultural artifacts.Trade Review"This is a truly original work, grounded in wonderfully wide and deep learning. It is also a profound reflection on the ethical life and the role figuration might play within it. There is nothing like it that I know of, nor could anyone without Largier's range of learning and depth of thought have written it."—Amy Hollywood, author of Acute Melancholia and Other Essays"Figures of Possibility is a singular achievement, both as a work of breathtaking scholarship and as a new and exciting theory of aesthetic experience. The writing is exceptionally clear; the prose is passionate, beautiful, and compelling. Largier turns rigorous scholarship on medieval and early modern mysticism into a new approach to reading literature and aesthetic experience."—Eric Santner, author of Untying Things Together"Figures of Possibility is an ambitious, original, and thought-provoking book."—Lieke Smits, Material Religion

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Book SynopsisWhy does it seem like our everyday life is shadowed by something menacing? This book identifies and illuminates paranoia as a significant feature of contemporary American society and culture. Centering on what it identifies as three key dimensions – power, truth, and identity – in three different contexts – society, literature, and critique – the book explores and explains the increasing influence of paranoid thinking in American society during the second half of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first, a period that has seen the rise of control systems and neoliberal ascendency. Inquiring about the predominance of white, male, American subjects in paranoid culture, Frida Beckman recognizes the antagonistic maintenance and fortification of a conception of the autonomous individual that perceives itself to be under threat. Identifying such paranoia as emerging from an increasingly disjunctive relation between this conception of the subject and the changing nature of the public sphere, she develops the concept of the paranoid chronotope as a tool for the theoretical analysis of social, literary, and critical practices today. Investigating twenty-first century paranoid fictions, New Sincerity novels, conspiracist online culture, and postcritique, Beckman shows how the paranoid chronotope constitutes a recurring feature of modern consciousness.Trade Review"An impressively incisive and comprehensive account of the way suspicion continues to haunt modern democratic societies. Beckman ranges over an extraordinary body of material in this consistently illuminating book."—Timothy Melley, Miami University"Beckman does a terrific job of seeing how, as the conspiracy theorist believes, everything is connected. An ambitious and exceptionally wide-ranging discussion of paranoia as a way of making sense of power, truth, and identity in recent decades."—Peter Knight, University of Manchester"Beckman's technique demonstrates the significance the paranoid chronotrope offers to a complete understanding of truth, identity, and power in American society, politics, and culture.... To be sure, this rich and clever framework provides the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the paranoid chronotope—a concept that is destined to become a key one in twenty-first century literary and cultural theory."—Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Modern Fiction StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Paranoid Chronotope 1. The Public Sphere and Paranoia / The Paranoid Public Sphere 2. Power and Paranoia / Paranoid Powers 3. Truth and Paranoia / Paranoid Truths 4. Identity and Paranoia / Paranoid Identities

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Book SynopsisIn this experimental work of ecocriticism, Vincent Bruyere confronts the seeming pointlessness of the humanities amid spectacularly negative future projections of environmental collapse. The vanitas paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries dazzlingly depict heaps of riches alongside skulls, shells, and hourglasses. Sometimes even featuring the illusion that their canvases are peeling away, vanitas images openly declare their own pointlessness in relation to the future. This book takes inspiration from the vanitas tradition to fearlessly contemplate the stakes of the humanities in the Anthropocene present, when the accumulated human record could well outlast the climate conditions for our survival. Staging a series of unsettling encounters with early modern texts and images whose claims of relevance have long since expired, Bruyere experiments with the interpretive affordances of allegory and fairytale, still life and travelogues. Each chapter places a vanitas motif—canvas, debris, toxics, paper, ark, meat, and light—in conversation with stories and images of the Anthropocene, from the Pleistocene Park geoengineering project to toxic legacies to in-vitro meat. Considering questions of quiet erasure and environmental memory, this book argues we ought to keep reading, even by the flickering light of extinction.Trade Review"If all images are vanitas, how should we look, in the Anthropocene present, at works from the past? Bruyere reveals a profound disruption in our ability to represent 'the world without us' with familiar tools of mastery or closure."—Karen Pinkus, Cornell University"Concise in form, its arguments well crafted, this book reads with inspired conviction. By way of reading the future past, Bruyere delivers a saga and a symptom of the state of things in the fragile world in which we live."—Tom Conley, Harvard University"Timely and provocative, this book deftly and courageously broaches the topic of human extinction while developing truly original philosophical arguments. There is no work that is able to approach the end-of-the-world theme with the pitch-perfect tone Bruyere brings to his discussion."—Lynne Huffer, Emory UniversityTable of ContentsPrologue: Of Skulls and Shells 1. Canvas 2. Debris 3. Toxics 4. Paper 5. Ark 6. Meat Epilogue: Light

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Book SynopsisAgainst the backdrop of ever-increasing nationalist violence during the last decade of the twentieth century, this book challenges standard analyses of nation formation by elaborating on the nation's dream-like hold over the modern social imagination. Stathis Gourgouris argues that the national fantasy lies at the core of the Enlightenment imaginary, embodying its central paradox: the intertwining of anthropological universality with the primacy of a cultural ideal. Crucial to the operation of this paradox and fundamental in its ambiguity is the figure of Greece, the universal alibi and cultural predicate behind national-cultural consolidation throughout colonialist Europe. The largely unpredictable institution of a modern Greek nation in 1830 undoes the interweaving of Enlightenment and Philhellenism, whose centrifugal strands continue to unravel the certainty of European history, down to the internal predicaments of the European Union or the tragedy of the Balkan conflicts. This 25th Anniversary edition of the book includes a new preface by the author in which he situates the book's original insights in retrospect against the newer developments in the social and political conditions of a now globalized world: the neocolonial resurgence of nationalism and racism, the failure of social democratic institutions, the crisis of sovereignty and citizenship, and the brutal conditions of stateless peoples.Trade Review"[A] general audience, too, can benefit from Gourgouris's revisions of accepted theory, especially his questioning of the way in which the Greek Enlightenment created the first phase of a new national identity. Despite Gourgouris's claim that he merely raises questions instead of forging conclusions, readers will find that many conclusions are indeed offered, and furthermore that the Enlightenment is employed to reach both backwards and forwards in Greece's imaginative history in a way that might even suggest a postmodern sort of linearity."– Times Literary Supplement"Crafting a story of nationalism that moves further than the linear logic of capital, Gourgouris studies the dream of Greece as part of the productive forces that operated in its making. Dream Nationmakes a powerful contribution to the theory of nationalism: it guides us down a fresh avenue of thinking, beyond the sociology of imagined communities.'"– Radical Philosophy"We dream ourselves a nation. It is aconspiracythat perdures, and which hardens and constricts our global imagination. This halluci-nation is what Stathis Gourgouris dismantles with poeticprecision and unabated urgency, over a prodigious range of fantastic elaborations and retroactive projections, urging us, finally, to develop an ear better attuned to the sounds of history."–Gil Anidjar, author ofSemites: Race, Religion, Literature"This is an original and important study of nation formation as social imaginary signification, raising theoretical and political questions of collective identity, ethnicity, autonomy, culture, and tradition in the modern world. Adopting insights from a variety of disciplines (literary criticism, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy, economics) and drawing on material from different genres, the author approaches his topic in a synthetic way that allows for a multiplicity of perspectives and a wealth of data. A wonderful sense of adventure permeates this book, which offers a model for the study of national identities."–Vassilis Lambropoulos, author of The Rise of Eurocentrism: Anatomy of Interpretation"By meticulously working through the Neohellenic nationalist fantasy as an interminable process of becoming universal in a particular way, bound up with European Philhellenism's 'colonization of the ideal,' Dream Nation brilliantly performs the necessary paradox of theorizing in the crucible of history. A quarter of a century after its initial publication, the demands that Gourgouris's critical mythography makes on the reader at the entangled site of 'Greece,' 'modernity,' and 'nation' are newly urgent."–Brooke Holmes, author of The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient GreeceTable of ContentsContents and Abstracts1The Nation's Dream-Work chapter abstract 2The Formal Imagination, I: The Back Roads of Developmentfrom Enlightenment to Bureaucracy chapter abstract 3The Formal Imagination, II: Natural History and NationalPedagogy—The Case of Korais chapter abstract 4The Punishment of Philhellenism chapter abstract 5The Phantasms of Writing, I: Makriyiannis and the Miraclesof National Memory chapter abstract 6The Phantasms of Writing, II: Nostalgia for Utopia—the Idolatries of Seferis chapter abstract 7Homologia/Apologia: The Writing of National History chapter abstract

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Book SynopsisWhat happens if we read nineteenth-century and Victorian texts not for the autonomous liberal subject, but for singularity—for what is partial, contingent, and in relation, rather than what is merely "alone"? Feminine Singularity offers a powerful feminist theory of the subject—and shows us paths to thinking subjectivity, race, and gender anew in literature and in our wider social world. Through fresh, sophisticated readings of Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, Charles Baudelaire, and Wilkie Collins in conversation with psychoanalysis, Black feminist and queer-of-color theory, and continental philosophy, Ronjaunee Chatterjee uncovers a lexicon of feminine singularity that manifests across poetry and prose through likeness and minimal difference, rather than individuality and identity. Reading for singularity shows us the ways femininity is fundamentally entangled with racial difference in the nineteenth century and well into the contemporary, as well as how rigid categories can be unsettled and upended. Grappling with the ongoing violence embedded in the Western liberal imaginary, Feminine Singularity invites readers to commune with the subversive potentials in nineteenth-century literature for thinking subjectivity today.Trade Review"Ambitious, theoretically sophisticated, and original, Feminine Singularity shows us the importance of literary texts in theorizing alternative political ways of being in the world."—Zarena Aslami, Michigan State University"Chatterjee desegregates Victorian studies and erases the field's boundaries, brilliantly reading 19th-century literature with third-wave feminism, Black radicalism, and continental theory. A compelling and exhilaratingly learned call to think fearlessly, as if our future depended on it."—Elaine Freedgood, New York University"[a] theoretically sophisticated volume which successfully and insightfully charts a vision to help us rethink racial and gendered subjectivity not only in Victorian studies but in current Western culture which despite its historical ideology of individuation, continues to be defined by otherness, violence, and difference."—Jolene Zigarovich, Nineteenth-Century Gender StudiesTable of Contentsn/a: Introduction 1. Lewis Carroll's Alice Books and the Ones and Twos of Femininity 2. Charles Baudelaire and Feminine Singularity 3. Precarious Lives: Christina Rossetti and the Form of Likeness 4. Seriality, Singularity, Sociality: The Case for Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White Epilogue

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Book SynopsisIn this elegant and personal new work, Michael P. Steinberg reflects on the story of Moses and the Exodus as a foundational myth of politics—of the formation not of a nation but of a political community grounded in universal law. Modern renderings of the story of Moses, from Michelangelo to Spinoza to Freud to Schoenberg to Derrida, have seized on the story's ambivalences, its critical and self-critical power. These literal returns form the first level of the afterlife of Moses. They spin a persistent critical and self-critical thread of European and transatlantic art and argument. And they enable the second strand of Steinberg's argument, namely the depersonalization of the Moses and Exodus story, its evolving abstraction and modulation into a varied modern history of political beginnings. Beginnings, as distinct from origins, are human and historical, writes Steinberg. Political constitutions, as a form of beginning, imply the eventuality of their own renewals and their own reconstitutions. Motivated in part by recent reactionary insurgencies in the US, Europe, and Israel, this astute work of intellectual history posits the critique of myths of origin as a key principle of democratic government, affect, and citizenship, of their endurance as well as their fragility. Trade Review"Personal in this book in all the right ways, Michael Steinberg reaches the human and universal by turning over the German-Jewish past and connecting it to contemporary politics."—Samuel Moyn, Yale University"Steinberg's application of Said's distinction between 'origins' and 'beginnings' to the Moses myth of political founding is a tour de force powerful enough to force a rethinking much beyond Freud or Assmann."—Omri Boehm, The New School for Social ResearchTable of ContentsIntroduction: Introduction 1. Moses and Modernism 2. Under Lincoln's Eyes 3. Hannah Arendt Crosses the Atlantic 4. Yaron Ezrahi: Democracy and the Post-Epic Nation

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Book SynopsisWhy does it seem like our everyday life is shadowed by something menacing? This book identifies and illuminates paranoia as a significant feature of contemporary American society and culture. Centering on what it identifies as three key dimensions – power, truth, and identity – in three different contexts – society, literature, and critique – the book explores and explains the increasing influence of paranoid thinking in American society during the second half of the twentieth century and first decades of the twenty-first, a period that has seen the rise of control systems and neoliberal ascendency. Inquiring about the predominance of white, male, American subjects in paranoid culture, Frida Beckman recognizes the antagonistic maintenance and fortification of a conception of the autonomous individual that perceives itself to be under threat. Identifying such paranoia as emerging from an increasingly disjunctive relation between this conception of the subject and the changing nature of the public sphere, she develops the concept of the paranoid chronotope as a tool for the theoretical analysis of social, literary, and critical practices today. Investigating twenty-first century paranoid fictions, New Sincerity novels, conspiracist online culture, and postcritique, Beckman shows how the paranoid chronotope constitutes a recurring feature of modern consciousness.Trade Review"An impressively incisive and comprehensive account of the way suspicion continues to haunt modern democratic societies. Beckman ranges over an extraordinary body of material in this consistently illuminating book."—Timothy Melley, Miami University"Beckman does a terrific job of seeing how, as the conspiracy theorist believes, everything is connected. An ambitious and exceptionally wide-ranging discussion of paranoia as a way of making sense of power, truth, and identity in recent decades."—Peter Knight, University of Manchester"Beckman's technique demonstrates the significance the paranoid chronotrope offers to a complete understanding of truth, identity, and power in American society, politics, and culture.... To be sure, this rich and clever framework provides the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the paranoid chronotope—a concept that is destined to become a key one in twenty-first century literary and cultural theory."—Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Modern Fiction StudiesTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Paranoid Chronotope 1. The Public Sphere and Paranoia / The Paranoid Public Sphere 2. Power and Paranoia / Paranoid Powers 3. Truth and Paranoia / Paranoid Truths 4. Identity and Paranoia / Paranoid Identities

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Book SynopsisWhat is critique? How is it used and abused? At a moment when popular discourse is saturated with voices confronting each other about not being critical enough, while academic discourses proclaim to have moved past critique, this provocative book reawakens the foundational question of what 'critique' is in the first place. Roy Ben-Shai inspects critique as an orientation of critical thinking, probing its structures and assumptions, its limits and its risks, its history and its possibilities. The book is a journey through a landscape of ideas, images, and texts from diverse sources—theological, psychological, etymological, and artistic, but mainly across the history of philosophy, from Plato and Saint Augustine, through Kant and Hegel, Marx and Heidegger, up to contemporary critical theory. Along the way, Ben-Shai invites the reader to examine their own orientation of thought, even at the moment of reading the book; to question popular discourse; and to revisit the philosophical canon, revealing affinities among often antagonistic traditions, such as Catholicism and Marxism. Most importantly, Critique of Critique sets the ground for an examination of alternative orientations of critical thinking, other ways of inhabiting and grasping the world.Trade Review"Ben-Shai exposes the rhizomatic orientations of critique, its multiple topologies, chronologies, positionalities, perversions and betrayals. A masterful analysis of where we are and what we are doing when we engage in critique."—Peg Birmingham, DePaul University"This is one hell of a book—a decisive intervention in the inheritance of the critical theory tradition. Political philosophers and political theorists will want to read this, as will everyone concerned with criticism in film and the arts today."—Anne O'Byrne, Stony Brook University"What does it mean to orient ourselves critically rather than in some other way? In answering this question Ben-Shai brilliantly shows how to critically circumscribe the limits of critique."—Andrew Cutrofello, Loyola University Chicago"Ben-Shai orients, in a remarkable way, the critical theory that emerged in particular from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno'sDialectic of Enlightenment(1944).... Valuable for those interested in social philosophy and critical theory. Highly recommended."—J. C. Swindal, CHOICE"If critique is the act of pointing, Ben-Shai points both at the hand of the finger that is pointing and its environment. The book aims to bring the structural premises and essential features of critique into view to limit its scope, which Ben-Shai fears has become relentlessly repetitious and blind to its own repetitions."—O. L. Silverman, Theory & EventTable of ContentsIntroduction: Critique as Orientation Overture 1. Chapter 1: Critique of the Spectacle or the Spectacle of Critique 2. Chapter 2: Critique of Power or the Power of Critique 3. Chapter 3: Critique of Injustice or the Injustice of Critique 4. Chapter 4: Critique of External Authority or the External Authority of Critique 5. Chapter 5: Moral Ontologies of Critique 6. Chapter 6: Political Ontologies of Critique 7. Chapter 7: Topologies of Critique 8. Chapter 8: Chronologies of Critique Conclusion: Critique and Its Betrayals.

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Book SynopsisRecent thinking has resuscitated civility as an important paradigm for engaging with a violence that must be deemed endemic to our lives. But, while it is widely acknowledged that civility works against violence, and that literature generates or accompanies civility and engenders tolerance, civility has also been understood as violence in disguise, and literature, which has only rarely sought to claim the power of violence, has often been accused of inciting it. This book sets out to describe the ways in which these words—violence, literature and civility—and the concepts they evoke are mutually entangled, and the uses to which these entanglements have been put. Simpson's argument follows a broadly historical trajectory through the long modern period from the Renaissance to the present, drawing on the work of historians, political scientists, literary scholars and philosophers. The result is a distinctly new argument about the complex and often mystified entanglements between literature, civility and violence in the anglophone Atlantic sphere. What now are our expectations of civility and literature, separately and together? How do these long-familiar but residually imprecise concepts stand up to the demands of the modern world? Simpson's argument is that, despite and perhaps because of their imperfect conceptualization, both persist as important protocols for the critique of violence.Trade Review"Among the most important literary historical considerations of violence and civility to emerge in recent decades, this remarkable, challenging book sustains the question of how—and at what cost—civility has been opposed to violence, and literature allied with civility."—Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley"This timely, erudite work is not polemical, not a defense, but reflective—essayistic rather than thesis-driven. In these ways and more, the book enacts a form of civility that it characterizes and appreciates without idealizing."—Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh"Engaging Violence is dialectical criticism at its best. It follows the overlapping histories of civility and literary pedagogy over time as both engage with different forms of violence, and it renders the complex historical process by which each term shifts as it moves between contexts but never admits of monolithic conclusions."—Kevis Goodman, Critical InquiryTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Civility and Literature and Their Discontents 2. Civil Beginnings 3. Philosophy Polite and Politic 4. The Displacement of Civility: Violence in a Widening World 5. Civility after 1989: Romancing Small Groups 6. The Reach of Literature

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Book SynopsisIn this revisionist account of romantic-era poetry and language philosophy, Tristram Wolff recovers vibrant ways of thinking language and nature together. Wolff argues that well-known writers including Phillis Wheatley Peters, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Henry David Thoreau offer a radical chronopolitics in reaction to the "uprooted word," or the formal analytic used to classify languages in progressive time according to a primitivist timeline of history and a hierarchy of civilization. Before the bad naturalisms of nineteenth-century race science could harden language into place as a metric of social difference, poets and thinkers try to soften, thicken, deepen, and dissolve it. This naturalizing tendency makes language more difficult to uproot from its active formation in the lives of its speakers. And its "gray romanticism" simultaneously gives language different kinds of time—most strikingly, the deep time of geologic form—to forestall the hardening of time into progress. Reorienting romantic studies to consider colonialism's pervasive effects on theories of language origin, Wolff shows us the ambivalent position of romantics in this history. His reparative reading makes visible language's ability to reimagine social forms. Trade Review"Against the Uprooted Word is a splendid piece of scholarship. It will be a welcome arrival to students across disciplines (including language studies and anthropology) in addition to charting the future of the literary field—romanticism—in which it is most immediately grounded."—William Galperin, author of The History of Missed Opportunities"Wolff reclaims the literary imaginary as a rich archive for rethinking linguistics and philology. This erudite, ranging, and provocative book has helped me to learn—and unlearn—a lot."—Maureen McLane, author of My Poets"The compelling conjunctions of imaginative literature and linguistic, philological, and proto-anthropological theories that [Against the Uprooted Word] presents make the most convincing case for the discrepant force of Romantic-era writing, and Wolff is an impressively erudite guide to this richly comparative, interdisciplinary, and trans-Atlantic Romanticism."—Nancy Yousef, European Romantic Review"The book's arguments are extraordinarily complex and nuanced. Wolff marshals an impressive erudition, an original theoretical synthesis (drawing on thinkers from Denise Ferreira da Silva to Valentin Voloshinov), and a fine sensitivity to minute inflections and reverberations of linguistic and poetic form."—Joseph Albernaz, Nineteenth-Century Contexts"Against the Uprooted Word is an original, incisive study, a perceptive weaving together of various threads in recent Romanticist scholarship that revisits the familiar terrain of Romantic language theory in a consequential, disorienting, and ultimately hopeful way."—Jacob Risinger, Modern PhilologyTable of ContentsIntroduction: Pulling Roots 1. Giving Language Time 2. The Transported Word: Wheatley's Part 3. Voices of the Ground: Blake's Language in Deep Time 4. Radical Diversions: Wordsworth's Overgrowth 5. The Primitive Today: Thoreau in the Wild Conclusion: Deracination

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Book SynopsisAcross the humanities and social sciences, scholars increasingly use quantitative methods to study textual data. Considered together, this research represents an extraordinary event in the long history of textuality. More or less all at once, the corpus has emerged as a major genre of cultural and scientific knowledge. In Literary Mathematics, Michael Gavin grapples with this development, describing how quantitative methods for the study of textual data offer powerful tools for historical inquiry and sometimes unexpected perspectives on theoretical issues of concern to literary studies. Student-friendly and accessible, the book advances this argument through case studies drawn from the Early English Books Online corpus. Gavin shows how a copublication network of printers and authors reveals an uncannily accurate picture of historical periodization; that a vector-space semantic model parses historical concepts in incredibly fine detail; and that a geospatial analysis of early modern discourse offers a surprising panoramic glimpse into the period's notion of world geography. Across these case studies, Gavin challenges readers to consider why corpus-based methods work so effectively and asks whether the successes of formal modeling ought to inspire humanists to reconsider fundamental theoretical assumptions about textuality and meaning. As Gavin reveals, by embracing the expressive power of mathematics, scholars can add new dimensions to digital humanities research and find new connections with the social sciences.Trade Review"Literary Mathematics is a new kind of book. A project of this scope is guaranteed to be controversial, but everyone interested in literary history will find it worth their time."—Ted Underwood, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign"This book is a timely, well-reasoned, and readable contribution to digital humanities and literary studies. Literary Mathematics will help guide the next generation of researchers in quantitative approaches to historical and literary texts."—Mel Evans, University of Leeds"Theoretically, historically, and critically informed, this is the most ambitious, and practical, book I know on the computational revolution in literary studies."—Jonathan Hope, Arizona State University"WithLiterary Mathematics, Gavin achieves what he sets forth to do: demonstrate quantitative models that can be used to describe the relationships between a corpus and its source texts, facilitating insights into the culture from which these historical documents emerged. Gavin's call for 'a curious spirit' that brings 'creative, rather than merely critical, thinking' is a welcome approach. Gavin takes risks in his corpus-level analyses and asks scholars to join him by looking at thousands of texts with an openness to the possibilities of what they may find."—Mary Learner, H-Sci-Med-TechTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Corpus as an Object of Study 1. Networks and the Study of Bibliographical Metadata 2. The Computation of Meaning 3. Conceptual Topography 4. Principles of Literary Mathematics Conclusion: Similar Words Tend to Appear in Documents with Similar Metadata

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Book SynopsisMid-twentieth-century developments in science and technology produced new understandings and images of the planet that circulated the globe, giving rise to a modern ecological consciousness; but they also contributed to accelerating crises in the global environment, including climate change, pollution, and waste. In this new work, Patrick Whitmarsh analyzes postwar narrative fictions that describe, depict, or express the earth from above (the aerial) and below (the subterranean), revealing the ways that literature has engaged this history of vertical science and linked it to increasing environmental precarity, up to and including the extinction of humankind. Whitmarsh examines works by writers such as Don DeLillo, Karen Tei Yamashita, Reza Negarestani, and Colson Whitehead alongside postwar scientific programs including the Space Race, atmospheric and underground nuclear testing, and geological expeditions such as Project Mohole (which attempted to drill to the earth's mantle). As Whitmarsh argues, by focusing readers' attention on the fragility of postwar life through a vertical lens, Anthropocene fiction highlights the interconnections between human behavior and planetary change. These fictions situate industrial history within the much longer narrative of geological time and reframe scientific progress as a story through which humankind writes itself out of existence.Trade Review"This brilliant book tackles a vital topic with creativity, grace, and depth. Chock full of ideas, Writing Our Extinction opens up fascinating questions about what Whitmarsh calls 'vertical science.' A crucial touchstone for current debates in ecocriticism."—Caren Irr, Brandeis University"What happens when we look up? Or look down? Writing Our Extinction insists these are vital questions to ask, as it carefully shows how vertical perspectives illuminate a present ripe with the anticipation of our species' demise."—Min Hyoung Song, Boston College"[For] an ecological humanism characteristically prone to deep despair (on the one hand) and deluded self-aggrandizement (on the other), Writing Our Extinction is an exemplary model for how to do this hard work right."—Gerry Canavan, H-EnvironmentTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Vertical Anthropocene 1. Earthly Language: Don DeLillo and the Novel of the Anthropocene 2. Plot Holes: Anthropocene Fiction After Project Mohole 3. Overview Effects: Anthropocene Fiction in the Orbital Field 4. Fossil Labor: Anthropocene Fiction and the Racial Politics of Extinction Underview: Writing Our Resilience

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Book SynopsisConcentrating on W. H. Auden's work from the late 1930s, when he seeks to understand the poet's responsibility in the face of a triumphant fascism, to the late 1950s, when he discerns an irreconcilable "divorce" between poetry and history in light of industrialized murder, this startling new study reveals the intensity of the poet's struggles with the meanings of history. Through meticulous readings, significant archival findings, and critical reflection, Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb presents a new image and understanding of Auden's achievement and reveals how his version of modernism illuminates urgent contemporary issues and theoretical paradigms: from the meaning of marriage equality to the persistence of fascism; from critical theory to psychoanalysis; from precarity to postcolonial studies. "The muse does not like being forced to choose between Agit-prop and Mallarmé," Auden writes with characteristic lucidity, and this study elucidates the probity, humor, and technical skill with which his responses to historical reality in the mid-twentieth century illuminate our world today. Trade Review"The beauty of Gottlieb's copiously productive engagement with Auden's 'marriage of inconvenience' between the poetic and the historic lies in her refusal to offer us any consolation in the turbulence of meanings or morals. In staying with Auden's anxiety of tone and temper, Gottlieb reveals her own integrity as an impeccable scholarly reader with a fine understanding of the give and take, the ebb and flow, of the performance of poetic justice."—Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University"Auden and the Muse of History brings new depths to Auden studies, while bringing Auden's work into sharp and revelatory focus. Gottlieb shows how the poems speak forcefully to today's world, while also showing how deeply rooted they were in the world where they were written."—Edward Mendelson, Columbia UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction: Introduction 1. States of Marriage 2. Poetry, Prose, and a Forgotten Practice 3. "Civilization Must Be Saved" Interlude: Interlude: The Falling Empire 4. Isotopes of Love 5. From Poem to Volume 6. Anthropology, Hell, "Goodbye" Coda: Closing and Opening Thoughts

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Book SynopsisThe Sociology of Literature is a pithy primer on the history, affordances, and potential futures of this growing field of study, which finds its origins in the French Enlightenment, and its most salient expression as a sociological pursuit in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Addressing the epistemological premises of the field at present, the book also refutes the common criticism that the sociology of literature does not take the text to be the central object of study. From this rebuttal, Gisèle Sapiro, the field's leading theorist, is able to demonstrate convincingly one of the greatest affordances of the discipline: its in-built methods for accounting for the roles and behaviors of agents and institutions (publishing houses, prize committees, etc.) in the circulation and reception of texts. While Sapiro emphasizes the rich interdisciplinary nature of the approach on display, articulating the way in which it draws on literary history, sociology, postcolonial studies, book history, gender studies, and media studies, among others, the book also stands as a defense of the sociology of literature as a discipline in its own right.Trade Review"This erudite, yet accessible book has no equal. The quality and breadth of Sapiro's scholarship is excellent. We would have to go back to a thinker like Adorno for a scholar as proficient in both literary research and sociological theory."—Bridget Fowler, University of Glasgow"Sapiro's clear survey of the sociology of literature synthesizes Bourdieu's field theory with other approaches, adding subtle, provocative twists of her own. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of literary theory and the sociology of culture."—Andrew Goldstone, Rutgers University"The Sociology of Literature is distinguished by unusual breadth of scope, both international and interdisciplinary. This book will be of great interest not only to sociologists but to literary scholars, historians, and anyone else interested in the systematic study of written culture."—Ted Underwood, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign"a concise but comprehensive handbook... which showcases a wide range of approaches and research problems in literary sociology."—Lee Konstantinou, Chronicle of Higher EducationTable of ContentsIntroduction I: Sociological Theories and Approaches to Literature II: The Social Conditions for the Production of Literary Works III: The Sociology of Literary Works IV: Sociology of Reception Conclusion

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Book SynopsisAn accessible introduction to cultural theory and an original polemic about the purpose of criticism. What is criticism for? Over the past few decades, impassioned disagreements over that question in the academy have burst into the news media. These conflicts have renewed the culture wars over the legacy of the 1960s, becoming entangled in national politics and leading to a new set of questions about critics and the power they do or don't wield. Re-examining theorists from Matthew Arnold to Walter Benjamin, to Fredric Jameson, Stuart Hall, and Hortense Spillers, Criticism and Politics explores the animating contradictions that have long propelled literary studies: between pronouncing judgment and engaging in philosophical critique, between democracy and expertise, between political commitment and aesthetic autonomy. Both a leftist critic and a critic of the left, Robbins unflinchingly defends criticism from those who might wish to de-politicize it, arguing that working for change is not optional for critics, but rather a core part of their job description. Trade Review"Urgent, bracing, and powerfully argued, Criticism and Politics will be controversial in the best sense—inviting us all to debate the purposes and presumptions of criticism on newly articulated grounds."—Caroline Levine, Cornell University, author of Forms"This is a vivid, engaging, and engaged piece of literary criticism, as well as a vigorous defense of criticism as a method, by one of its foremost practitioners."—Martin Puchner, Harvard University, author of Literature for a Changing Planet"For those who have been looking for a book to address, head on, the complex connections between literary criticism and politics, this is that book."—Mark Greif, Stanford University, author of Against Everything"This challenging, bold book helps answer the question of what critics are for. Highly recommended"—S. J. Shaw, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Criticism in the Wake of the 1960s 2. Criticizing 3. Lost Centrality 4. Aesthetics and the Governing of Others 5. Grievances 6. The Historical and the Transhistorical 7. Cosmopolitical Criticism in Deep Time Conclusion

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Book SynopsisFor Herman Melville, the instability of democracy held tremendous creative potential. Examining the centrality of political thought to Melville's oeuvre, Jennifer Greiman argues that Melville's densely figurative aesthetics give form to a radical reimagining of democratic foundations, relations, and ways of being—modeling how we can think democracy in political theory today. Across Melville's five decades of writing, from his early Pacific novels to his late poetry, Greiman identifies a literary formalism that is radically political and carries the project of democratic theory in new directions. Recovering Melville's readings in political philosophy and aesthetics, Greiman shows how he engaged with key problems in political theory—the paradox of foundations, the vicious circles of sovereign power, the fragility of the people—to produce a body of radical democratic art and thought. Scenes of green and growing life, circular structures, and images of a groundless world emerge as forms for understanding democracy as a collective project in flux. In Melville's experimental aesthetics, Greiman finds a significant precursor to the tradition of radical democratic theory in the US and France that emphasizes transience and creativity over the foundations and forms prized by liberalism. Such politics, she argues, are necessarily aesthetic: attuned to material and sensible distinctions, open to new forces of creativity.Trade Review"Greiman succeeds at the difficult task of saying something new about democracy in her original reading of Melville as a systematic thinker of it. This is an excellent book, wonderfully written and researched."—Branka Arsić, author of Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau"Enthralling and fearless, Greiman's sensuous dive into Melville's poetics and political thinking excites and holds us tight in a world like no other. A brilliant breakthrough in close reading and political thinking. Democracy will never be the same."—Colin Dayan, author of With Dogs at the Edge of Life"In Greiman's dazzling analysis, Melville emerges as a political theorist in his own right whose 'figurative imagination' gives us new forms, new language, new narratives to explore what democracy is and what it should be."—Nathan Wolff, author of Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age"Greiman's Emersonian demonstration shows that however incomplete its figures, Melville's democracy is not formless. Both a regime and a process, Melville's democracy is held fluid by, and as, a practice of form that may be called aesthetics. Greiman needs to be thanked for making these complex geometrical entanglements beautifully clear."—Cécile Roudeau, Leviathan"Including a cogent, wide-ranging introduction and a useful overview of other approaches to Melville and democracy, this is a fascinating, valuable contribution to Melville studies. Essential."—J. W. Miller, CHOICETable of Contents1. Green Things and Verdant Recesses: Imperial History, State-of-Nature Theory, and the Color of Democracy (Typee) 2. Verdigris: Color, Tone, and Radical Democracy (Pierre) 3. Round Robins and Insphered Spheres: Revolution, Representation, and the Shape of Founding (Omoo and Mardi) 4. "Circles upon circles": Sovereignty, Equality, and the Shape of Democracy (Moby-Dick) 5. "And apoplexy has its fall": Slavery, Prophecy, and the Gravity of Democracy ("The Bell Tower" and Battle-Pieces) 6. Unplanted to the Last: Democratic Grass and Groundless Aesthetics (Israel Potter, Clarel and Billy Budd)

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Book SynopsisAssessing the dawn of the Anthropocene era, a poet and philosopher asks: How do we live at the end of the world? The end of the Holocene era is marked not just by melting glaciers or epic droughts, but by the near universal disappearance of shared social enterprise: the ruling class builds walls and lunar shuttles, while the rest of us contend with the atrophy of institutional integrity and the utter abdication of providing even minimal shelter from looming disaster. The irony of the Anthropocene era is that, in a neoliberal culture of the self, it is forcing us to consider ourselves as a collective again. For those of us who are not wealthy enough to start a colony on Mars or isolate ourselves from the world, the Anthropocene ends the fantasy of sheer individualism and worldlessness once and for all. It introduces a profound sense of time and events after the so-called "end of history" and an entirely new approach to solidarity. How to Live at the End of the World is a hopeful exploration of how we might inherit the name "Anthropocene," renarrate it, and revise our way of life or thought in view of it. In his book on time, art, and politics in an era of escalating climate change, Holloway takes up difficult, unanswered questions in recent work by Donna Haraway, Kathryn Yusoff, Bruno Latour, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Isabelle Stengers, sketching a path toward a radical form of democracy—a zoocracy, or, a rule of all of the living.Trade Review"We may talk casually about the end of the world, but Travis Holloway convincingly argues that the Anthropocene has emerged as a new epic for our time, offering us a narrative of human history, art, and politics capable of shaping the beginning of a new and more collective world."—Anthony Morgan, editor of The Philosopher"A magnificent achievement. Beautifully written and of our time. Going far beyond Arendt's project of thinking a politics of the human condition, Travis Holloway offers a radical concept of the political as a 'democracy of all of the living.'"—Peg Birmingham, DePaul University, editor of Philosophy Today"A powerful and generative text that will help the reader negotiate these disorienting times. Holloway carefully engages with decolonial thought and with the contested category of the Anthropocene to produce a richer sense of the present."—Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago, author of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age"It requires great concern and care for all forms of life, a poetic imagination, critical thinking and a wide range of interests, from art, politics to geology, to write a book like Travis Holloway's How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art and Politics for the Anthropocene."—Sanjeeb Mukherjee, Socialist Perspective"Poet and philosopher Travis Holloway will have none of the current shilly-shallying in his compact book How to Live at the End of the World. The jig is up, and various establishments (including the arts) will have no choice but to confront the inevitably unifying conditions dictated by the Anthropocene. Like it or not, we are on the brink of catastrophe, faced with the collective loss of a reliable and habitable future. Short and provocative, this is my kind of 'how to' book."—Bill Marx, Arts FuseTable of ContentsIntroduction: A Philosophy for the End of the World 1. Time: A Counterhistory for Human Beings 2. Art: The Transition from Postmodern Art to the Anthropocene 3. Politics: Democracy at the End of the World

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Book SynopsisAcross the humanities and social sciences, scholars increasingly use quantitative methods to study textual data. Considered together, this research represents an extraordinary event in the long history of textuality. More or less all at once, the corpus has emerged as a major genre of cultural and scientific knowledge. In Literary Mathematics, Michael Gavin grapples with this development, describing how quantitative methods for the study of textual data offer powerful tools for historical inquiry and sometimes unexpected perspectives on theoretical issues of concern to literary studies. Student-friendly and accessible, the book advances this argument through case studies drawn from the Early English Books Online corpus. Gavin shows how a copublication network of printers and authors reveals an uncannily accurate picture of historical periodization; that a vector-space semantic model parses historical concepts in incredibly fine detail; and that a geospatial analysis of early modern discourse offers a surprising panoramic glimpse into the period's notion of world geography. Across these case studies, Gavin challenges readers to consider why corpus-based methods work so effectively and asks whether the successes of formal modeling ought to inspire humanists to reconsider fundamental theoretical assumptions about textuality and meaning. As Gavin reveals, by embracing the expressive power of mathematics, scholars can add new dimensions to digital humanities research and find new connections with the social sciences.Trade Review"Literary Mathematics is a new kind of book. A project of this scope is guaranteed to be controversial, but everyone interested in literary history will find it worth their time."—Ted Underwood, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign"This book is a timely, well-reasoned, and readable contribution to digital humanities and literary studies. Literary Mathematics will help guide the next generation of researchers in quantitative approaches to historical and literary texts."—Mel Evans, University of Leeds"Theoretically, historically, and critically informed, this is the most ambitious, and practical, book I know on the computational revolution in literary studies."—Jonathan Hope, Arizona State University"WithLiterary Mathematics, Gavin achieves what he sets forth to do: demonstrate quantitative models that can be used to describe the relationships between a corpus and its source texts, facilitating insights into the culture from which these historical documents emerged. Gavin's call for 'a curious spirit' that brings 'creative, rather than merely critical, thinking' is a welcome approach. Gavin takes risks in his corpus-level analyses and asks scholars to join him by looking at thousands of texts with an openness to the possibilities of what they may find."—Mary Learner, H-Sci-Med-TechTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Corpus as an Object of Study 1. Networks and the Study of Bibliographical Metadata 2. The Computation of Meaning 3. Conceptual Topography 4. Principles of Literary Mathematics Conclusion: Similar Words Tend to Appear in Documents with Similar Metadata

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Book SynopsisToday, churches, political parties, trade unions, and even national sports teams are no guarantee of social solidarity. At a time when these traditional institutions of social cohesion seem increasingly ill-equipped to defend against the disintegration of sociability, K. Ludwig Pfeiffer encourages us to reflect on the cultural and literary history of social gatherings—from the ancient Athenian symposium to its successor forms throughout Western history. From medieval troubadours to Parisian salons and beyond, Pfeiffer conceptualizes the symposium as an institution of sociability with a central societal function. As such he reinforces a programmatic theoretical move in the sociology of Georg Simmel and builds on theories of social interaction and communication characterized by Max Weber, George Herbert Mead, Jürgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, and others. To make his argument, Pfeiffer draws on the work of a range of writers, including Dr. Samuel Johnson and Diderot, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, Dorothy Sayers, Joseph Conrad, and Stieg Larsson. Ultimately, Pfeiffer concludes that if modern societies do not find ways of reinstating elements of the Athenian symposium, especially those relating to its ritualized ease, decency and style of interaction, they will have to cope with increasing violence and decreasing social cohesion.Trade Review"Sociability and Society switches with ease and elegance between theoretical argumentation, historical narrative, and literary criticism. An intensive, interesting, and inviting book for students of European cultural history, qualitative social theory, and literature."—Rüdiger Campe, Yale University"In this important and thought-provoking book, Pfeiffer tracks the history of the social form of the symposium and its multifarious successors. His open, essayistic style perfectly suits his protean subject matter."—Peter Gilgen, Cornell UniversityTable of Contents0. Introduction 1. Conceptualizing the Symposium 2. Power and Signs of Power in the Middle Ages 3. Sociability and the Humanities 4. The Splintering of Culture: Reading versus Salon 5. Proust and Nineteenth-Century Salons 6. The Silence of Power: English Clubs or Oligarchy versus Democracy 7. A Symptomatology of Critical Shifts 8. Securing Power and Auxiliary Evidence 9. The Paradigm of Isolation and Its Consequences: Joseph Conrad 10. Beyond the Sympotic: Aesthetic Productivity and Sociable Bonding in the Detective Novel 11. Consequences and Conclusion(s): The Anthropological-Institutional Trap and the Resurrection of Literature

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Book SynopsisIn this book, Amy R. Wong unravels the colonial and racial logic behind seemingly innocuous assumptions about "speech": that our words belong to us, and that self-possession is a virtue. Through readings of late-Victorian fictions of empire, Wong revisits the scene of speech's ideological foreclosures as articulated in postcolonial theory. Engaging Afro-Caribbean thinkers like Édouard Glissant and Sylvia Wynter, Refiguring Speech reroutes attention away from speech and toward an anticolonial poetics of talk, which emphasizes communal ownership and embeddedness within the social world and material environment. Analyzing novels by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, George Meredith, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, Wong refashions the aesthetics of disordered speech—such as parroting, eavesdropping, profuse inarticulacy, and dysfluency—into alternate forms of communication that stand on their own as talk. Wong demonstrates how late nineteenth-century Britain's twin crises of territorialization—of empire and of new media—spurred narrative interests in capturing the sense that speech's tethering to particular persons was no longer tenable. In doing so, Wong connects this period to US empire by constructing a genealogy of Anglo-American speech's colonialist and racialized terms of proprietorship. Refiguring Speech offers students and scholars of Victorian literature and postcolonial studies a powerful conceptualization of talk as an insurgent form of communication. Trade Review"Refiguring Speech is a daring and deft new work within Victorian studies as well as colonial and postcolonial theory. Its brilliant, timely argument for retheorizing 'talk' as racially embodied linguistic production represents the next generation of research."—Susan Zieger, University of California, Riverside"This book makes a sophisticated argument about the distinction between speech and talk in the late Victorian novel and how, when the propriety of speech gives way to talk, glimpses of an anticolonial aesthetic come into view. Illuminating and eloquent."—Tanya Agathocleous, Hunter College"InRefiguring Speech, Wong analyzes four Victorian novels that illustrate a breakdown in the notion of speech as an indication of cultural self-possession and the erosion of the assumption of Ango-European civilization as universal.... Recommended."—L. A. Brewer, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Parroting With and Eavesdropping On Robert Louis Stevenson 2. Multilingual Talk and Bram Stoker's White Cosmopolitics 3. George Meredith's Profuse Inarticulacy 4. Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford's Dysfluent End of the World Conclusion

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Book SynopsisMid-twentieth-century developments in science and technology produced new understandings and images of the planet that circulated the globe, giving rise to a modern ecological consciousness; but they also contributed to accelerating crises in the global environment, including climate change, pollution, and waste. In this new work, Patrick Whitmarsh analyzes postwar narrative fictions that describe, depict, or express the earth from above (the aerial) and below (the subterranean), revealing the ways that literature has engaged this history of vertical science and linked it to increasing environmental precarity, up to and including the extinction of humankind. Whitmarsh examines works by writers such as Don DeLillo, Karen Tei Yamashita, Reza Negarestani, and Colson Whitehead alongside postwar scientific programs including the Space Race, atmospheric and underground nuclear testing, and geological expeditions such as Project Mohole (which attempted to drill to the earth's mantle). As Whitmarsh argues, by focusing readers' attention on the fragility of postwar life through a vertical lens, Anthropocene fiction highlights the interconnections between human behavior and planetary change. These fictions situate industrial history within the much longer narrative of geological time and reframe scientific progress as a story through which humankind writes itself out of existence.Trade Review"This brilliant book tackles a vital topic with creativity, grace, and depth. Chock full of ideas, Writing Our Extinction opens up fascinating questions about what Whitmarsh calls 'vertical science.' A crucial touchstone for current debates in ecocriticism."—Caren Irr, Brandeis University"What happens when we look up? Or look down? Writing Our Extinction insists these are vital questions to ask, as it carefully shows how vertical perspectives illuminate a present ripe with the anticipation of our species' demise."—Min Hyoung Song, Boston College"[For] an ecological humanism characteristically prone to deep despair (on the one hand) and deluded self-aggrandizement (on the other), Writing Our Extinction is an exemplary model for how to do this hard work right."—Gerry Canavan, H-EnvironmentTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Vertical Anthropocene 1. Earthly Language: Don DeLillo and the Novel of the Anthropocene 2. Plot Holes: Anthropocene Fiction After Project Mohole 3. Overview Effects: Anthropocene Fiction in the Orbital Field 4. Fossil Labor: Anthropocene Fiction and the Racial Politics of Extinction Underview: Writing Our Resilience

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Book SynopsisWhat grounds the fictional world of a novel? Or is such a world peculiarly groundless? In a powerful engagement with the latest debates in novel theory, Daniel Wright investigates how novelists reckon with the ontological status of their works. Philosophers who debate whether fictional worlds exist take the novel as an ontological problem to be solved; instead, Wright reveals the novel as a genre of immanent ontological critique. Wright argues that the novel imagines its own metaphysical "grounds" through figuration, understanding fictional being as self-sufficient, cohesive, and alive, rather than as beholden to the actual world as an existential anchor. Through philosophically attuned close readings of novels and reflections on writerly craft by Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, Colson Whitehead, Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, Henry James, and Akwaeke Emezi, Wright shares an impassioned vision of reading as stepping into ontologically terraformed worlds, and of literary criticism as treading and re-treading the novel's grounds. Trade Review"The Grounds of the Novel is an exceptionally bold and brave work that pushes our understanding of the essence of fiction in new directions. This utterly original book will interest all scholars of the novel, particularly students of radical ontology."—Adela Pinch, University of Michigan"In this lyrical and intimate book, Wright invites us to look again at what metaphors of fictional being might do. Reconfiguring the metaphysics of the novel across time, he lays new groundwork for the intersection of personal and philosophical criticism."—David James, University of BirminghamTable of ContentsPreface: The Truth of Earth Introduction:On What There Is in the Novel 1. Groundwork 2. Underground 3. The Ground Gained 4. Meeting Grounds Afterword: Basement Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisWhat grounds the fictional world of a novel? Or is such a world peculiarly groundless? In a powerful engagement with the latest debates in novel theory, Daniel Wright investigates how novelists reckon with the ontological status of their works. Philosophers who debate whether fictional worlds exist take the novel as an ontological problem to be solved; instead, Wright reveals the novel as a genre of immanent ontological critique. Wright argues that the novel imagines its own metaphysical "grounds" through figuration, understanding fictional being as self-sufficient, cohesive, and alive, rather than as beholden to the actual world as an existential anchor. Through philosophically attuned close readings of novels and reflections on writerly craft by Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, Colson Whitehead, Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, Henry James, and Akwaeke Emezi, Wright shares an impassioned vision of reading as stepping into ontologically terraformed worlds, and of literary criticism as treading and re-treading the novel's grounds. Trade Review"The Grounds of the Novel is an exceptionally bold and brave work that pushes our understanding of the essence of fiction in new directions. This utterly original book will interest all scholars of the novel, particularly students of radical ontology."—Adela Pinch, University of Michigan"In this lyrical and intimate book, Wright invites us to look again at what metaphors of fictional being might do. Reconfiguring the metaphysics of the novel across time, he lays new groundwork for the intersection of personal and philosophical criticism."—David James, University of BirminghamTable of ContentsPreface: The Truth of Earth Introduction:On What There Is in the Novel 1. Groundwork 2. Underground 3. The Ground Gained 4. Meeting Grounds Afterword: Basement Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisHélène Cixous has dreamed for years of "The Book-I-Don't-Write," but each time she approaches it, it withdraws. The-Book-I-Don't-Write is always just out of reach. When Jacques Derrida told her the Book would get written one day, but differently, Cixous tells us she would see it "shining behind a veil, its indecipherable back, upright on heaven's bookshelf, its elegant silhouette, utterly foreign, utterly familiar, of future revenant. I've always thought it would come, naturally. When? After all my deaths? Just before, or just after, the last of my deaths."One day, when she is no longer expecting it, the Book turns up: "Quickly, without taking my eyes off it, I copied it down, staying scrupulously close to its notations, its rhythms, its moments of silence. I found it. Just as you see it." She calls it Los, meaning "loose, detached" in German, her mother's tongue. Or Los like Carlos, the Latin American friend whose unexpected death in May 2014 takes her back to a life they shared and a time the Book will reconstitute in the present, abolishing time: "Suddenly, that morning, I saw the universe of The-Book-I-Don't-Write: it is an infinity of presents."Los, A Chapter is a marvelous exploration of time and relationships. It reimagines scenes from Paris in the late sixties: its cafés, its debates, its political turmoil. Both playful and serious, it is a book in a long line of novels – from Balzac to Proust – that create worlds both philosophical and concrete. In Los a lost time is regained.Trade Review"Los, A Chapter is a lyrical meditation on the fragility of the human as well as on the palimpsestic way that our loves and lovers overlay each other in our psyche and repeatedly reappear without clear distinctions. Cixous leads the reader on by her literary – indeed semi-Joycean – verbal dexterity, while at the same time conveying a strong sense of the personal and emotional side of her experience of love and mourning."Christina Howells, University of Oxford

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Book SynopsisHélène Cixous has dreamed for years of "The Book-I-Don't-Write," but each time she approaches it, it withdraws. The-Book-I-Don't-Write is always just out of reach. When Jacques Derrida told her the Book would get written one day, but differently, Cixous tells us she would see it "shining behind a veil, its indecipherable back, upright on heaven's bookshelf, its elegant silhouette, utterly foreign, utterly familiar, of future revenant. I've always thought it would come, naturally. When? After all my deaths? Just before, or just after, the last of my deaths."One day, when she is no longer expecting it, the Book turns up: "Quickly, without taking my eyes off it, I copied it down, staying scrupulously close to its notations, its rhythms, its moments of silence. I found it. Just as you see it." She calls it Los, meaning "loose, detached" in German, her mother's tongue. Or Los like Carlos, the Latin American friend whose unexpected death in May 2014 takes her back to a life they shared and a time the Book will reconstitute in the present, abolishing time: "Suddenly, that morning, I saw the universe of The-Book-I-Don't-Write: it is an infinity of presents."Los, A Chapter is a marvelous exploration of time and relationships. It reimagines scenes from Paris in the late sixties: its cafés, its debates, its political turmoil. Both playful and serious, it is a book in a long line of novels – from Balzac to Proust – that create worlds both philosophical and concrete. In Los a lost time is regained.Trade Review"Los, A Chapter is a lyrical meditation on the fragility of the human as well as on the palimpsestic way that our loves and lovers overlay each other in our psyche and repeatedly reappear without clear distinctions. Cixous leads the reader on by her literary – indeed semi-Joycean – verbal dexterity, while at the same time conveying a strong sense of the personal and emotional side of her experience of love and mourning."Christina Howells, University of Oxford

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Book SynopsisDeath Shall Be Dethroned is the “shadow book” of Los, a Chapter, Hélène Cixous tells us. It came along after Los, but it was always there "hidden" in her notebooks, in the Beethoven notebook, say, the one Jacques Derrida gave her. But when it tapped at the window, she ignored it until the day she had to let it in. This is just of one the enigmas Death explores as it probes an old relationship between the narrator and “Carlos.” Another is her discovery on the Internet that Carlos’s archives were at Princeton, and that the archive containing their correspondence was closed to the public: “Bluebeard’s closet. The fruit on the tree of Good and Evil. You shall not open.” Death Shall Be Dethroned is the logbook of Los, a Chapter. It owes its life to the death of a lover.Trade Review“Death Shall Be Dethroned sees the welcome translation into English of another instalment of Cixous's ongoing reflection on the profound connection between writing and loss. Part meditation, part diary, part literary comment, this book is wholly Cixous: bittersweet, yet sounding a note of gold. ”Mairéad Hanrahan, University College London“This book is for everyone who can’t forget or always understand the phrase: ‘Love is stronger than death.’ Cixous remembers passion, laughter and shared company, discloses the untimely glories of love, but still gives death its due. This beautiful fear-defying writing stands witness that death in its own way gives life.” Sarah Wood, University of KentTable of Contents Contents Death Shall Be Dethroned Translator’s Notes

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