Philosophy: aesthetics Books

Book SynopsisA collection of eleven essays on the moral philosophy of the American Polymath Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914). The essays cover the three normative sciences that Peirce distinguishes (esthetics, ethics, and logic), and their relation to metaphysics.Trade Review"The volume makes a timely contribution to current Peirce scholarship." -- -Shannon Dea University of Waterloo "This is an outstanding work of scholarship, an important contribution to the now significant body of secondary literature devoted to the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce. The intellectual range of the book is truly impressive, and yet the attention to Peirce's realism throughout supplies an important thread of continuity." -- -Michael L. Raposa Lehigh University "These are all sophisticated philosophical essays devoted, some primarily to the interpretation and others to the extension of, the ideas of one of America's most difficult thinkers." -- -Michael L. Raposa Lehigh University

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Book SynopsisIn this unique philosophical anthology 16 authors- including both established feminists and some of today’s most innovative new scholars- engage in sustained reflection on the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and mothering, and on the beliefs, customs, and political institutions by which those experiences are informed.Trade Review"This book produces what is for the most part little-known material, the result of recent research, and also contributes a new understanding of some familiar phenomenological material." -- -Amy Mullin University of Toronto Mississauga "The volume contributors, all female philosophy scholars, remedy [a] gap in the literature by approaching questions about reproductive rights, the status of the fetus, and the medicalization of childbirth." -Choice "Very little philosophical attention-and certainly little positive attention-has been paid to women's experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and mothering. Critically focusing on those experiences, this groundbreaking collection explores how pregnancy and childbirth have been portrayed in the philosophical canon; the variety of forms that mothering and motherhood can take; how feminist phenomenology can illuminate the experiences of pregnancy, birth, and miscarriage; ethical and political questions surrounding pregnancy and childbirth; and how pregnancy and mothering are viewed by mainstream media and popular culture. This book is a must-read for feminists and philosophers of all stripes." -- -Shannon Sullivan Pennsylvania State University "Recent years have shown a renewed scholarly interest in motherhood and pregnancy, and Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood is an important addition to the literature. Sarah LaChance Adams and Caroline R. Lundquist's anthology is both firmly rooted in philosophical theory and accessible to the non-specialist, a rare combination. In bringing their own experiences as mothers to bear on canonical accounts of personhood and moral theory, contributors to the volume extend the second-wave project of identifying gendered and sexist frameworks underlying seemingly gender-neutral philosophies. New to the literature is Coming to Life's extensive, critical attention to phenomenology, an area of philosophy often seen, incorrectly, as motherhood and pregnancy-friendly. In addition, Dorothy Roger's essay on women who experience pregnancy and/or childbirth, but not motherhood, brings attention to an all too often unrecognized, and certainly under-theorized, phenomenon of women's experience-miscarriage and the giving up of a child for adoption." -- -Maeve O'Donovan Notre Dame of Maryland University "This consistently rigorous and original collection is a joy to read. From the most metaphorical and metaphysical claims about the pregnant subject to the most practical political arguments about the day-to-day of mothering, these essays draw us in with their careful and passionate scholarship. LaChance Adams and Lundquist have provided not only a primer for those trying to understand what is philosophical in pregnancy, birth, and mothering, but show that thinking about these topics should change the way everyone philosophizes. The discipline--and the canon--look different after Coming To Life." -- -Cressida Heyes University of Alberta, EdmontonTable of ContentsContributors: Sarah LaChance Adams, Melissa Burchard, Sonya Charles, Cynthia Coe, Frances Gray, Lisa Guenther, Eva Kittay, Candace Johnson, Caroline R. Lundquist, Bertha Alvarez Manninen, Kelly Oliver, Dorothy Rogers, Rebecca Tuvel, Kayley Varnallis, Florentien Verhage, Gail Weiss, Talia Welsh

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Book SynopsisMarginal Modernity traces the emergence and dissemination of a new aesthetic paradigm from the periphery to the core of European culture. This “aesthetics of dependency” is distinct from the aesthetics of autonomy and fragmentation usually relied on and provides a different structure, philosophical foundation and historical condition for modernist works.Trade Review"Leonardo Lisi's study is exemplary in that it demonstrates a rare mastery of the diverse areas of research his study intervenes in. He situates his readings in relation to what he sketches as major tendencies of recent scholarship and all of his individual readings are innovative, stringent and of exceptionally high quality." -- -Johnannes Turk Indiana University, Bloomington "...a superb work, extraordinarily learned, original, well-written, and of great importance." -- -J. Hillis Miller University of California, Irvine

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Book SynopsisThis book reconceives modern aesthetics by reconstructing its genesis in the eighteenth century, between Baumgarten's Aesthetics and Kant's Critique of Judgment.Trade Review"Continental philosophers working in the area of aesthetics will find this book to be of great interest. Menke's study is brief, but compelling and highly learned-- a welcome addition to the scholarship. . Recommended." -Choice "Force is an outstanding study of the philosophical, ethical and political underpinnings of modern aesthetics and an important and original contribution to contemporary debates about the fate of modernity, philosophy, and the arts." -- -Paola Marrati The Johns Hopkins University "Menke forcefully makes the point that with the emergence of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, philosophy, and its understanding of itself, underwent a radical change." -- -Rodolphe Gasche University of Buffalo, SUNY

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Book SynopsisOriginally written for an exhibition Nancy curated at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon in 2007, the text addresses the medium of drawing in light of form in its formation, of form as a formative force, opening drawing to questions of pleasure and desire.Trade Review"What is it about drawing that might attract a philosopher's eye? Many things no doubt but not least, there is the (literally) unthinkable movement by which something begins to take shape. Jean-Luc Nancy's approach in The Pleasure in Drawing moves beyond art-historical categories and conceptual schemas to touch on precisely that: he considers the 'formative force' of drawing, not in terms of its formal achievement but in terms of the pleasures afforded by its constant beginning-pleasures of attraction, sense, permanent interruption, tension and intensity. A book full of dazzling insights, imaginative curves and provocative renewals." -- -Sarah Clift University of King's CollegeTable of ContentsTranslator's Note Preface to the English-Language Edition Form Sketchbook 1 Idea Sketchbook 2 Formative Force Sketchbook 3 The Pleasure of Drawing Sketchbook 4 Forma Formans Sketchbook 5 From Self Toward Self Sketchbook 6 Consenting to Self Sketchbook 7 Gestural Pleasure Sketchbook 8 The Form-Pleasure Sketchbook 9 The Designing/Drawing of the Arts Sketchbook 10 Mimesis Sketchbook 11 Pleasure of Relation Sketchbook 12 Death, Sex, Love of the Invisible Sketchbook 13 Ambiguous Pleasure Sketchbook 14 Purposiveness Without Purpose Sketchbook 15 Desire of the Line Sketchbook 16 Notes

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Book SynopsisOriginally written for an exhibition Nancy curated at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon in 2007, the text addresses the medium of drawing in light of form in its formation, of form as a formative force, opening drawing to questions of pleasure and desire.Trade Review"What is it about drawing that might attract a philosopher's eye? Many things no doubt but not least, there is the (literally) unthinkable movement by which something begins to take shape. Jean-Luc Nancy's approach in The Pleasure in Drawing moves beyond art-historical categories and conceptual schemas to touch on precisely that: he considers the 'formative force' of drawing, not in terms of its formal achievement but in terms of the pleasures afforded by its constant beginning-pleasures of attraction, sense, permanent interruption, tension and intensity. A book full of dazzling insights, imaginative curves and provocative renewals." -- -Sarah Clift University of King's CollegeTable of ContentsTranslator's Note Preface to the English-Language Edition Form Sketchbook 1 Idea Sketchbook 2 Formative Force Sketchbook 3 The Pleasure of Drawing Sketchbook 4 Forma Formans Sketchbook 5 From Self Toward Self Sketchbook 6 Consenting to Self Sketchbook 7 Gestural Pleasure Sketchbook 8 The Form-Pleasure Sketchbook 9 The Designing/Drawing of the Arts Sketchbook 10 Mimesis Sketchbook 11 Pleasure of Relation Sketchbook 12 Death, Sex, Love of the Invisible Sketchbook 13 Ambiguous Pleasure Sketchbook 14 Purposiveness Without Purpose Sketchbook 15 Desire of the Line Sketchbook 16 Notes

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Book SynopsisArt’s Undoing is about radical aestheticism, the term that best describes a recurring event in some of the most powerful and resonating texts of nineteenth-century British literature.Trade Review“Art’s Undoing: In the Wake of a Radical Aestheticism proposes a stunning alternative to our habit of thinking of the work of art as an occasion for heightened vision or temporary respite. Like the mind-blowing opening lines of many of Dickinson’s poems, Pyle’s radical aestheticism undoes the apotropaic function usually assigned to art and understands poetry not as a domain offering and requiring protection from encroaching forces but as a darkness making event and as the ‘unwilled’ imposition of a sensuous apprehension. In this brilliant, beautifully written work of literary criticism that promises to leave its own readers exquisitely undone, Forest Pyle unthreads Shelley, Keats, Dickinson, Hopkins, Rossetti, and Wilde into figures, reflections, traces, and lines that, unlike the Medusa’s face, will never resolve themselves into a single, readable, and hence pierce-able image.” ---—Anne-Lise Francois, University of California, BerkeleyA range of theoretical projects are considered in a survey recommended for any advanced literary analysis and philosophy holding. * —California Bookwatch *“This is one of the most powerful and subtle books I’ve read on nineteenth-century literature in decades. It’s searching, meticulous, and wide-ranging as it pursues its novel, overarching thesis. Pyle brings into striking relief what is powerful and problematic in an important strain of nineteenth-century literature, setting its poetry in motion all over again.”---—Ian Balfour, York UniversityTable of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Introduction: "From Which One Turns Away Aestheticism and Its Radicality, The Insistence of the Aesthetic, "Our Romantic Movement," Scene of Shipwreck 1. "A Light More Dread Than Obscurity": Spelling and Kindling in Percy Bysshe Shelley "Frail Spells," "Wholly Political," Kindling and Ash, "A Shape All Light" 2. "I Hold It Towards You": Keats's Weakness "Consumed in the Fire," Weakness, Threats, "On He Flared" 3. What the Zeros Taught: Emily Dickinson, Event-Machine "The Plunge from the Front," "A Word Dropped": The Dickinsonian Event-Machine, "A System of Aesthetics," "Bright Impossibility" 4. Hopkins's Sighs "Let Him Oh! With His Air of Angels Then Lift Me, Lay Me!" Hopkins's Breathturns, "The Fire of Stress," "The Fire That Breaks," 5. Superficiality: What Is Loving and What Is Dead in Dante Gabriel Rossetti On the Surface... , "One Face Looks Out," "A Blunder of Taste"; or, What Would Clement Greenberg Say? "Love Is Addressed to the Semblance"; or, What Would Jacques Lacan Say? The Promises of Glass, 6. "Rings, Pearls, and All": Wilde's Extravagance The Soul of Man Under Aestheticism, Christ the Romantic, Christ the Dandy, The Cost of a Kiss, Covered with Jewels Notes Index

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Book SynopsisArt’s Undoing is about radical aestheticism, the term that best describes a recurring event in some of the most powerful and resonating texts of nineteenth-century British literature.Trade Review“Art’s Undoing: In the Wake of a Radical Aestheticism proposes a stunning alternative to our habit of thinking of the work of art as an occasion for heightened vision or temporary respite. Like the mind-blowing opening lines of many of Dickinson’s poems, Pyle’s radical aestheticism undoes the apotropaic function usually assigned to art and understands poetry not as a domain offering and requiring protection from encroaching forces but as a darkness making event and as the ‘unwilled’ imposition of a sensuous apprehension. In this brilliant, beautifully written work of literary criticism that promises to leave its own readers exquisitely undone, Forest Pyle unthreads Shelley, Keats, Dickinson, Hopkins, Rossetti, and Wilde into figures, reflections, traces, and lines that, unlike the Medusa’s face, will never resolve themselves into a single, readable, and hence pierce-able image.” ---—Anne-Lise Francois, University of California, BerkeleyA range of theoretical projects are considered in a survey recommended for any advanced literary analysis and philosophy holding. * —California Bookwatch *“This is one of the most powerful and subtle books I’ve read on nineteenth-century literature in decades. It’s searching, meticulous, and wide-ranging as it pursues its novel, overarching thesis. Pyle brings into striking relief what is powerful and problematic in an important strain of nineteenth-century literature, setting its poetry in motion all over again.”---—Ian Balfour, York UniversityTable of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Introduction: "From Which One Turns Away Aestheticism and Its Radicality, The Insistence of the Aesthetic, "Our Romantic Movement," Scene of Shipwreck 1. "A Light More Dread Than Obscurity": Spelling and Kindling in Percy Bysshe Shelley "Frail Spells," "Wholly Political," Kindling and Ash, "A Shape All Light" 2. "I Hold It Towards You": Keats's Weakness "Consumed in the Fire," Weakness, Threats, "On He Flared" 3. What the Zeros Taught: Emily Dickinson, Event-Machine "The Plunge from the Front," "A Word Dropped": The Dickinsonian Event-Machine, "A System of Aesthetics," "Bright Impossibility" 4. Hopkins's Sighs "Let Him Oh! With His Air of Angels Then Lift Me, Lay Me!" Hopkins's Breathturns, "The Fire of Stress," "The Fire That Breaks," 5. Superficiality: What Is Loving and What Is Dead in Dante Gabriel Rossetti On the Surface... , "One Face Looks Out," "A Blunder of Taste"; or, What Would Clement Greenberg Say? "Love Is Addressed to the Semblance"; or, What Would Jacques Lacan Say? The Promises of Glass, 6. "Rings, Pearls, and All": Wilde's Extravagance The Soul of Man Under Aestheticism, Christ the Romantic, Christ the Dandy, The Cost of a Kiss, Covered with Jewels Notes Index

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Book SynopsisStudies in the philosophy of John Dewey, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Santayana and Native American philosophy that argue for an ecological, aesthetic form of philosophy.Trade Review"This book represents a significant contribution to knowledge in its treatment of familiar figures and in its own tapestry-type approach. It is wide both in scope and in scholarship and will be a welcome addition to any philosopher, especially in the American tradition." -- -William T. Myers Birmingham-Southern College "This is a masterful piece of writing. The author's wide range of knowledge is matched by a dexterity in writing-both of which are enviable." -- -John Kaag University of Massachusetts-Lowell

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Book SynopsisTheodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1970) offers one of the most powerful and comprehensive critiques of art and of the discipline of aesthetics ever written. The work offers a deeply critical engagement with the history and philosophy of aesthetics and with the traditions of European art through the middle of the 20th century.

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Book SynopsisLooks at gender and queer theories through lenses that are simultaneously retrospective and anticipatory, "American" and "French".Trade Review"Berger's work spans two academic idioms and cultures-that of the United States on the one hand, and of France on the other-to examine the conceptual, performative, indeed theatrical work produced by the examination of gender. From a consideration of how gender produces all sorts of translational conundra, to how the theoretical apparatus for gender analysis is borrowed from one continent, developed in another, and then shuttles back and forth, she discusses how the forms of resignification that take place constitute the ground of queer critique and its relation to gender, identity, and non-binary, and non-identitarian thinking. Thinking through "gender" and "sexual difference" and understanding the possibilities ascribed to these traveling terms allows Berger also to consider the production and reproduction of difference in relation to the history of feminist and queer link to the advance of capital. Through a brilliant final chapter on prostitution or sex work, she questions the manner in which feminist and queer critiques embody a contradictory relationship to capitalist development even as they espouse a Marxist critique. She does not dwell on contradiction for the sake of it, but rather considers it as a lesson about the frames that break apart potentially under the pressure of current thinking around gender, sexual difference, and queer theory. The book is both intellectually stimulating and thoroughly teachable." -- -Ranjana Khanna Duke University "Even the most practiced readers of queer theory and feminist theory-perhaps especially those readers-will find that The Queer Turn in Feminism takes them into unexpected and exhilarating critical terrain. By staging the numerous critical encounters between "French theory" and "American theory" that continue into the present, by offering readings that are as theoretically nuanced as they are rhetorically engaging, Anne Berger reinvigorates old debates in order to open up crucial questions still to be addressed." -- -Elizabeth Weed Brown University "The scholarship of the book is a treat, as is the care with which Berger attends to distinctions or crafts a sentence." -- -E.S. Burt University of California, Irvine "Brilliantly exploring the paradoxes of an American feminism inspired and invigorated by French theory and a French etudes du genre stimulated by American queer theory, Anne Berger offers a fascinating romp through the vicissitudes of feminist and post-feminist ideas, performance studies, and identity politics on both sides of the Atlantic, shrewdly articulating the differences as she explores the translatability of progressive ideas." -- -Jonathan Culler Cornell UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments 1. Parabasis (Before the Act) 2. Queens and Queers: The Theater of Gender in "America" 3. Paradoxes of Visibility in / and Contemporary Identity Politics 4. The Ends of an Idiom, or Sexual Difference in Translation 5. Roxana's Legacy: Feminism and Capitalism in the West Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisThis book describes the centrality of trauma to Freud’s thought, the moments of its apparent abandonment and later recurrences, from the seduction theory to the Death Drive. At these turning points Freud engages with the works of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Hoffmann and da Vinci as thought experiments in the imaginary space of literature and painting.Trade Review"Fletcher offers a distinctly original reformulation of a psychoanalytic account of fantasy and memory, focusing on its belated and non-mimetic dimensions. This account has far-reaching consequences for the status and ethical value of psychoanalysis within contemporary intellectual life... The chapters of this book are distinguished not only by their enormous theoretical power and precision, but by Fletcher's nearly uncanny ability to read both literary and theoretical texts with great powers of illumination and nuance. It is rare to find someone who combines his capacity for sustained and lucid abstract discussion with such a fine capacity for close textual reading." -- -Judith Butler University of California, Berkeley "There can be no doubt that this book will reward scholars across a number of disciplines: literary studies, trauma studies, psychoanalysis and psychology, and philosophy" -Choice Magazine "This book is a gem. It is written on a number of levels: Freud's scholarship, literary scholarship, psychoanalytic scholarship, and psychology. It has depth and subtlety at the same time as providing a good read for a wide range of audiences. I recommend it wholeheartedly to students at all levels of seniority, including the most serious of scholars." -- -Peter Fonagy University College LondonTable of ContentsForeword Section I The Power of Scenes Prologue Freud's Scenographies Chapter 1 Charcot's Hysteria: Trauma and the Hysterical Attack Chapter 2 Freud's Hysteria: " Scenes of Passionate Movement" Section II Memorial Fantasies, Fantasmatic Memories Chapter 3 The Afterwardsness of Trauma and the Theory of Seduction Chapter 4 Memory and the Key of Fantasy Chapter 5 The Scenography of Trauma: Oedipus as Tragedy and Complex Section III Screen Memories and the Return of Seduction Chapter 6 Leonardo's Screen Memory Chapter 7 Flying and Painting: Leonardo's rival sublimations Section IV Protoypes and the Primal Chapter 8 The Transference and its Prototypes Chapter 9 The Wolf Man I: Constructing the Primal Scene Chapter 10 The Wolf Man II: Interpreting the Primal Scene Section V Trauma and the Compulsion to Repeat Chapter 11 Trauma and the Genealogy of the Death Drive Chapter 12 Uncanny Repetitions Freud, Hoffmann and the Death-Work Epilogue

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Book SynopsisTraces the concept of the imagination through German idealism of the 18th century, the American philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, and the findings of contemporary cognitive neuroscience in order to argue for the centrality of aesthetics in human cognition.Trade Review"Most impressive is the author's detailed and insightful presentation of Peirce's thoughts on the nature of imagination and the connection between imagination and inquiry. This alone is worth the price of admission." -- -F.A. Grabowski, Roger State University Choice "This important book deserves a wide audience, and should be of interest to scholars working on a variety of topics. Kaag effectively exposes the Kantian roots of pragmatism, especially the link between Kant and Peirce. Against that background he articulates a pragmatic theory of the imagination that underscores its character both as fully embodied and as vitally central to human cognition and inquiry. Kaag's own insightful account plays out in a conceptual space far removed from the dangerous extremes of either biological reductionism or what he himself labels a 'naive panpsychism.' The result is really quite impressive, a virtuoso philosophical performance." -- -Michael L. Raposa Lehigh University "This book is a giant step forward in understanding the interplay between imagination and inquiry in Peirce. Kaag brilliantly illuminates the influence of Kant's aesthetics and imagination for Peirce through Schiller with a discussion that ranges over literary analysis and cognitive and neural science as ways of explicating Peirce's logic and existential graphing. This is one of the best examples I know of handling Peirce's texts with both historical perspicuity and speculative insight." -- -Roger A. Ward Georgetown College "John Kaag's Thinking through the Imagination is a uniquely important contribution to the philosophy of imagination in at least six ways. First, it is the most comprehensive and detailed study ever of Charles S. Peirce's theory of imagination, although scholars have long recognized the importance of Peirce on this topic; this book is state of the art in Peirce scholarship. Second, it resets the philosophic discussion of imagination to a new default position, that of the American pragmatic tradition rather than the Kantian tradition, both of which Kaag discusses in detail. Third, although Kaag is primarily a philosopher setting forth his own position on imagination, he is also a careful historian of philosophy, working with letters and unpublished material as well as standard texts, and therefore speaks with full authority on the historical material of pragmatism and its relation to European philosophy. Fourth, he shows why Peirce is the pragmatist to watch on the subject of imagination, despite the greater fame of William James and John Dewey on the subject. Sixth, he is exactly right to place all this discussion in close connection with the studies of imagination in contemporary cognitive science, showing on the one hand that philosophers should have been following this science as Peirce would have done all along and on the other that cognitive scientists should have been learning from Peirce and the other pragmatists. This is a splendid contribution, not to be ignored by cognitive scientists, scholars of American philosophy, and philosophers and critics interested in imagination." -- Robert Neville Boston UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments | ix 1 The Cultivation of the Imagination | 1 2 Enlightening Thought: Kant and the Imagination | 25 3 C. S. Peirce and the Growth of the Imagination | 57 4 Abduction: Inference and Instinct | 75 5 Imagining Nature | 93 6 Ontology and Imagination: Peirce on Necessity and Agency | 120 7 The Evolution of the Imagination | 139 8 Emergence, Complexity, and Creativity | 165 9 Be Imaginative! Suggestion and Imperative | 192 Notes | 211 Bibliography | 235 Index | 249

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Book SynopsisThis book argues that the antisemitic interpretation of modernist form as a symptom of a mobile, contagious Jewish spirit needs to be treated as integral to the history of European modernism. The notion of modernist form as Jewified lies at the heart of both a certain modernism’s hostile reception, and its self-conception.Trade Review"Until I saw the cover of Neil Levi's book, I had no idea that 'Jewification' was a real world. It certainly got picked up in spellcheck. But after I read just a few pages of Levi's book, I knew exactly what he meant. The word, strange and twisted as it seems, is an apt way to describe a modern phenomenon that seems to defy description. Levi argues that 'both aesthetic modernism and modern anti-Semitism seek formal solutions to the problem of how to render intelligible the experience of modernity, and that the figure of the Jew is made to personify otherwise unrepresentable, disorienting experiences that enter a condition of chronic crisis in modernity'. Levi contents that many modern and avant-garde works of art neither by Jews nor about Jews can still be interpreted as Jewish, given the way they were conceived and the projections put upon them by those who conceive them and those who 'appreciate' them. Thus, we arrive at the Judaization of art or its Jewification." -Erica Brown, Jewish Quarterly "In this bold and original study, Neil Levi offers a radical unsettling of the relations between aesthetic modernism and the anti-Semitic imagination. Exploring the multiple fantasies and projections woven around notions of Judaism, Levi provides a deeply penetrating insight into modern literature's complex negotiations with the antisemitic imaginary. This is a book no student of modernism should ignore." -- -Peter Nicholls New York University "Modernist Form and the Myth of Jewification is an essential contribution to the recent attempt to analyze the phantasms and ideological formations that configured the Jew as a dirty or polluting influence that supposedly permeated modern culture and played a distinctive role in its aesthetic productions. Levi is addressing issues that go beyond the aesthetic while nonetheless playing an important role in it. His analysis is fine-tuned and convincing both as literary criticism and as ideology critique." -- -Dominick LaCapra Cornell University "Neil Levi's brilliant reading of the relationship between Jewishness and modernism recodes the politics of modernism in a highly original and revealing way in a transnational field. From Wagner and Nordau via Wyndham Lewis and Joyce to Beckett and Adorno we are offered theoretically informed readings that cut through many misunderstandings of this riven field of fascism, modernism, and violence. It turns out that European literary modernism is deeply embedded in issues of Jewishness and anti-semitism. A must read for any scholar of modernism!" -- -Andreas Huyssen Columbia UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Phobic Reading, Modernist Form, and the Figure of the Antisemite Part I: Modernist Form as Judaization 1. Genealogies: Judaization, Wagner, Nordau 2. Jews, Art, and History: The Nazi Exhibition of "Degenerate Art" as Historicopolitical Spectacle 3. Fanatical Abstraction: Wyndham Lewis's Critique of Modernist Form as Judaization in Time and Western Man Part II: Modernist Form and the Antisemitic Imagination 4. Straw Men: Projection, Personification, and Narrative Form in Ulysses 5. Images of the Bilderverbot: Adorno, Antisemitism, and the Enemies of Modernism 6. The Labor of Late Modernist Poetics: Beckett after Celine Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe essays of this volume explore the conceptual relationships among intentionality, cognition and mental representation as conceived by some of the greatest medieval philosophers, including Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham and Buridan, and some of their lesser known, but in their own time equally influential contemporaries.Trade Review"While the volume is undoubtedly directed primarily to medieval specialists familiar with the figures under study, the essays are written with an eye to accessibility...the contents are of a very high caliber and constitute a major contribution to a vibrant field." -- -Carl N. Still Journal of the History of Philosophy, 54.2 "...this rich and stimulating collection will shape future research on medieval theories of intentionality." -Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews "This constitutes a very significant collection of essays on medieval theories of cognition and philosophical psychology." -- -Richard Cross University of Notre DameTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Intentionality, Cognition and Mental Representation in Medieval Philosophy Gyula Klima Concepts and Meaning in Medieval Philosophy Stephen Read Mental Language in Aquinas? Joshua P. Hochschild Causality and Cognition: An Interpretation of Henry of Ghent's Quodlibet V, q. 14 Martin Pickave Two Models of Thinking: Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus on Occurrent Thoughts Giorgio Pini Thinking About Things: Singular Thought in the Middle Ages Peter King Singular Terms and Vague Concepts in Late Medieval Mental Language Theory or the Decline and Fall of Mental Language Henrik Lagerlund Act, Species, and Appearance: Peter Auriol on Intellectual Cognition and Consciousness Russell L. Friedman Ockham's Externalism Claude Panaccio Was Adam Wodeham an internalist or an externalist? Elizabeth Karger The Nature of Intentional Objects in Nicholas of Autrecourt's Theory of Knowledge Christophe Grellard William Ockham and Walter Chatton on Objects and Acts of Judgment: or, How Chatton Changed Ockham's Mind Susan Brower-Toland 'Intentio' in Buridan John Zupko Mental Representation in Animals and Humans: Some Late-Medieval Discussions Olaf Pluta The Intersubjective Sameness of Mental Concepts in Late Scholastic Thought (and some Aspects of Its Historical Aftermath) Stephan Meier-Oeser Mental Representations and Concepts in Medieval Philosophy Gyula Klima Cumulative Bibliography List of Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisThis collection of essays addresses recent and historical changes in the ways in which listening has been conceived as a cultural agency and act. It argues that listening, by emancipating from an essentially implied, passive-receiving, and subjected position, has become an explicit factor in culture and the object of proactive collective and individual politics.Trade Review"Thresholds of Listening intervenes into an extraordinarily wide range of subjects, ranging from masochism and torture at one extreme to Cage and Kafka at the other. Chapters zoom by at high speed, covering enormous ground and wrestling on all fronts with music's potential value as a transformative biopolitical praxis. The level of scholarship is excellent, and van Maas's cast of contributors includes stellar names alongside emerging scholars. This is less a book about listening to music than a virtuosic inquiry into the relationships between listening, hearing, sound, and space and an investigation of the limits of the human body." -- -Anthony Gritten Royal Academy of Music "Clearly the scholarship that underpins Thresholds of Listening is generally very thorough and 'experimental,' which tests conventional understandings of scholarship. Given its unique qualities, I would rate this book as an important contribution that will be useful across a number of disciplines, from musicology and music theory to philosophy and literary theory, but also touching upon certain strands of science." -- -Kenneth Gloag Cardiff UniversityTable of ContentsContents Introduction Sander van Maas 1. The Auditory Re-turn (The Point of Listening) Peter Szendy 2. Dear Listener ...: Music and the Invention of Subjectivity Lawrence Kramer 3. Scenes of Devastation: Interpellation, Finite and Infinite Sander van Maas 4. Positive Feedback: Listening Behind Hearing David Wills 5. Antennas Have Long Since Invaded Our Brains: Listening to 'the Other Music' in Friedrich Kittler Melle Kromhout 6. Movement at the Boundaries of Listening, Composition, and Performance Jason Freeman 7. The Biopolitics of Noise: Kafka's 'Der Bau' Anthony Adler 8. Torture as an Instrument of Music John Hamilton 9. Stop it, I Like it! Embodiment, Masochism and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure Robert Sholl 10. Sounds of Belonging: Accented Writing in Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight Liedeke Plate 11. Back to the Beat: Silent Orality in Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries Kiene Brillenburg Wurth 12. The Discovery of Slowness in Music Alexander Rehding 13. Negotiating Ecstasy: Electronic Dance Music and the Temporary Autonomous Zone Andrew Shenton Notes List of Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisThis collection of essays addresses recent and historical changes in the ways in which listening has been conceived as a cultural agency and act. It argues that listening, by emancipating from an essentially implied, passive-receiving, and subjected position, has become an explicit factor in culture and the object of proactive collective and individual politics.Trade Review"Thresholds of Listening intervenes into an extraordinarily wide range of subjects, ranging from masochism and torture at one extreme to Cage and Kafka at the other. Chapters zoom by at high speed, covering enormous ground and wrestling on all fronts with music's potential value as a transformative biopolitical praxis. The level of scholarship is excellent, and van Maas's cast of contributors includes stellar names alongside emerging scholars. This is less a book about listening to music than a virtuosic inquiry into the relationships between listening, hearing, sound, and space and an investigation of the limits of the human body." -- -Anthony Gritten Royal Academy of Music "Clearly the scholarship that underpins Thresholds of Listening is generally very thorough and 'experimental,' which tests conventional understandings of scholarship. Given its unique qualities, I would rate this book as an important contribution that will be useful across a number of disciplines, from musicology and music theory to philosophy and literary theory, but also touching upon certain strands of science." -- -Kenneth Gloag Cardiff UniversityTable of ContentsContents Introduction Sander van Maas 1. The Auditory Re-turn (The Point of Listening) Peter Szendy 2. Dear Listener ...: Music and the Invention of Subjectivity Lawrence Kramer 3. Scenes of Devastation: Interpellation, Finite and Infinite Sander van Maas 4. Positive Feedback: Listening Behind Hearing David Wills 5. Antennas Have Long Since Invaded Our Brains: Listening to 'the Other Music' in Friedrich Kittler Melle Kromhout 6. Movement at the Boundaries of Listening, Composition, and Performance Jason Freeman 7. The Biopolitics of Noise: Kafka's 'Der Bau' Anthony Adler 8. Torture as an Instrument of Music John Hamilton 9. Stop it, I Like it! Embodiment, Masochism and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure Robert Sholl 10. Sounds of Belonging: Accented Writing in Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight Liedeke Plate 11. Back to the Beat: Silent Orality in Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries Kiene Brillenburg Wurth 12. The Discovery of Slowness in Music Alexander Rehding 13. Negotiating Ecstasy: Electronic Dance Music and the Temporary Autonomous Zone Andrew Shenton Notes List of Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisBy analyzing many films, by drawing on the philosophy of Lyotard, Nancy, and Derrida, this book suggest that in the apocalyptic genre, cinema is at work on its limit. Apocalypse-cinema is both the end of the world and the end of the film, the consummation and the (self)consumption of cinema.Trade ReviewArmed with an arsenal of audacious concepts, Peter Szendy confronts the torment of blockbusters with style. Before venturing to spend your next night out at the silver screen, be sure to take this thrilling film survival manual with you." -Philosophie Magazine "In this prodigiously intelligent book, Peter Szendy reflects on the specific nature of apocalyptic cinema. Organized as a series of brief essays on individual films and recurrent cinematic strategies, Apocalypse-Cinema offers brilliant insights on a genre that has yet to receive all the critical attention it deserves." -- -Marie Helene Huet Princeton University "Apocalypse-Cinema is a brilliantly-executed, timely book, a tour-de-force encounter with a major film genre that has been too much neglected by 'serious' film scholars. Szendy's survey of the highs and lows of the 'apo' canon is nuanced and impeccably grounded in contemporary philosophy and film theory." -- -Terry Harpold University of FloridaTable of ContentsTable of Contents 1. Melancholia, or the After-All 2. The Last Man on Earth, or Film as Countdown 3. Cloverfield, or the Holocaust of the Date 4. Terminator, or the Arche-Travelling Shot 5. 2012, or Pyrotechnics 6. A.I., or the Freeze 7. Pause, For Inventory (The "Apo") 8. Watchmen, or the layering of the cineworld 9. Sunshine, or The Black-and-White Radiography 10. Blade Runner, or the Interworlds 11. Twelve Monkeys, or the Pipes of the Apocalypse 12. The Road, or the Language of a Drowned Era 13. The Blob, or the Bubble 14. Postface: Il n'y a pas de hors-film, or cinema and its cinders

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Book SynopsisBy analyzing many films, by drawing on the philosophy of Lyotard, Nancy, and Derrida, this book suggest that in the apocalyptic genre, cinema is at work on its limit. Apocalypse-cinema is both the end of the world and the end of the film, the consummation and the (self)consumption of cinema.Trade ReviewArmed with an arsenal of audacious concepts, Peter Szendy confronts the torment of blockbusters with style. Before venturing to spend your next night out at the silver screen, be sure to take this thrilling film survival manual with you." -Philosophie Magazine "In this prodigiously intelligent book, Peter Szendy reflects on the specific nature of apocalyptic cinema. Organized as a series of brief essays on individual films and recurrent cinematic strategies, Apocalypse-Cinema offers brilliant insights on a genre that has yet to receive all the critical attention it deserves." -- -Marie Helene Huet Princeton University "Apocalypse-Cinema is a brilliantly-executed, timely book, a tour-de-force encounter with a major film genre that has been too much neglected by 'serious' film scholars. Szendy's survey of the highs and lows of the 'apo' canon is nuanced and impeccably grounded in contemporary philosophy and film theory." -- -Terry Harpold University of FloridaTable of ContentsTable of Contents 1. Melancholia, or the After-All 2. The Last Man on Earth, or Film as Countdown 3. Cloverfield, or the Holocaust of the Date 4. Terminator, or the Arche-Travelling Shot 5. 2012, or Pyrotechnics 6. A.I., or the Freeze 7. Pause, For Inventory (The "Apo") 8. Watchmen, or the layering of the cineworld 9. Sunshine, or The Black-and-White Radiography 10. Blade Runner, or the Interworlds 11. Twelve Monkeys, or the Pipes of the Apocalypse 12. The Road, or the Language of a Drowned Era 13. The Blob, or the Bubble 14. Postface: Il n'y a pas de hors-film, or cinema and its cinders

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Book SynopsisThis is the third volume of Maurice Blanchot’s war-time Literary Chronicles. Written in 1943, they appeared during the darkest days of the war yet also at a time when real hope for victory was becoming possible. Against the grain of any simple optimism, Blanchot identifies in ruin and disaster a sign and a chance for a mode of human relation that will truly guarantee the future.Trade Review"Maurice Blanchot's writings during the Vichy years (1941-44) may be the most crucial of his long career, particularly when read against his controversial political writings of the 1930s. Although to all appearances occasional pieces, these literary essays and reviews are also projects of self-transformation in which Blanchot becomes an increasingly distanced and even invisible observer of the disaster of Occupied France, as well as a writer whose critiques of the conventions of the novel look forward to his later experiments in fragmentary writing and the materializations of language." -- -Gerald L. Bruns University of Notre Dame "Writing from one world in ruins to another, Blanchot comes to us today to pose the question of what, if anything, deserves to survive the collapse of an established order of meaning. Through the richness and precision of Michael Holland's presentation of these texts, and the elegance and rigour of his translations, we meet with new understanding one of recent history's most stringent explorations of the possibilities and limitations of thought in the face of disaster. If the now-forgotten subjects of many of these essays might suggest that they have little to say to our present day, Holland helps us to see that nothing could be further from the truth. Blanchot is not writing to us, no doubt. But he is most certainly writing for us." -- -Martin Crowley Queens' College "...what makes Blanchot's critical essays so important is the depth of his engagement with writing as a concept and the experience of writing fiction that he brings to the task. An essential Blanchotian theme treated in this volume, as throughout his work, is the ambiguity of literary language. Blanchot conceives of literature as having a unique power to put language itself in question, exposing the reader or writer to what lies beyond meaning, knowledge, and all familiar relations... Holland has rendered readers a service by stressing the importance of historical context in interpreting Blanchot's writings, and by extension 20th-century French thought, more generally." -- -Calum Watt Review 31 / Kings College "How did Maurice Blanchot transform himself from journeyman reviewer to the theorist of narrative whose work transformed the intellectual landscape of the postwar era? This collection of reviews from a single, harrowing year, 1943, provides answers. Expertly introduced, annotated, and translated by leading Blanchot scholar Michael Holland, A World in Ruins provides a unique entry into making of literature under Nazi occupation." -- -Alice Kaplan Yale UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction by Michael Holland Nicholas of Cusa The Correspondence of Madame de Lafayette The Book Novels of the Land Tocqueville's Recollections Symbolism and the Poets of Today On Montherlant's Play The Romance of Marie Dorval and Vigny Novels Machiavelli Eloquence and Literature On Jouhandeau's Work The Thirteen Forms of a Novel From Praise to Sovereignty Religious Poetry Novels French Suite Hoffman's Fantastic On the Song of Roland Kierkegaard and AEsthetics The Art of the Short Story Women Novelists of Today A History of French Literature The Influence of the American Novel The Mysticism of Angelus Silesius Autobiographical Narratives History and the Masterpiece A Study of the Apocalypse La Fontaine Without the Fables The Pure Novel The Novel of the Gaze Tradition and Surrealism A World in Ruins Index

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Book SynopsisPhilosophy holds an ambivalent relation to the pleasures of intoxication, this excess that both fascinates and questions philosophy’s sober ambitions for conceptual clarity and appropriate behavior. Displacing established dualities—mind and body, reason and desire, logic and eros—Nancy’s subject becomes intoxicated: Ego sum, ego existo ebrius—I am, I exist—drunk.Trade Review"Intoxication, a short reflection from Jean-Luc Nancy, explores the ambivalent pleasures of intoxication as it has been configured within histories of philosophical and poetic thought. This abundant meander through the work of Plato, Hegel and Baudelaire among others offers readers a rewarding, even intoxicating, experience." -Bjarke Morkore Stigel Hansen, LSE Review of Books "Read Nancy's wonderfully exhilarating Intoxication and you'll understand why it is urgent to be, like Rimbaud's boat, ivre. Make no mistake: French ivresse has little to do with intoxication's dull thud of medical measure. Leave intoxication for breathalyzers; ivresse is pure elation, sublimated elevation, an ecstatic Bacchic frenzy soaring to poetic rapture, a rapture that, as Hegel stated, achieves the dizzy dissolution of all absolutes." -- -Jean-Michel Rabate University of Pennsylvania "The originality of Intoxication lies in the acuity and patience (and indeed the touch of humor) with which it teases out the surprising concurrence, or interaction, of two apparently unrelated terms-that of the "Absolute" on the one hand, and that of "ivresse" or "drunkenness" on the other." -- -Richard A. Rand University of Alabama

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Book SynopsisPremised on the assumption that the mind is fundamentally active and self-determining, the German Idealist project gave rise to new ways of thinking about our dependence upon culturally transmitted models of thought, feeling, and creativity. Receptive Spirit elucidates the ways in which Kant, Fichte, Schlegel, and Hegel envisioned and enacted the conjunction of receptivity and spontaneous activity in the transmission of human-made models of mindedness. Their innovations have defined the very terms in which we think about the historical character of aesthetic experience, the development of philosophical thinking, the dynamics of textual communication, and the task of literary criticism.Combining a reconstructive approach to this key juncture of modern thought with close attention paid to subsequent developments, Marton Dornbach argues that we must continue to think within the framework established by the Idealists if we are to keep our bearings in the contemporary intellectual Trade Review"Receptive Spirit is a finely argued and erudite rereading of what is arguably the most important period in modern philosophy, the early reception of Kant's critical philosophy, when the timeless now of Kantian cognition met a great challenge in the historical mind that came onto the scene." -- -Paul North Yale UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction: Idealism and Finitude 1. Kant on the Formation of Taste 2. Kantian Revisionism and Revisionist Kantianism 3. Esoteric Enlightenment in Fichte 4. Friedrich Schlegel on Textual Communication 5. Exoteric Enlightenment in Hegel Conclusion: The Afterlife of a Distinction Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThis book examines the affinity between the notions of “theory” and “deconstruction” that developed in the American academy in the 1970s by way of a semi-fictional collective, the “Yale Critics”: Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, in association with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.Trade Review"This is the most informative and accurate book I have read, or ever expect to read, on the 'Yale Critics' phenomenon. It's completely free of both the bad faith and the idolatry that plague any and all other accounts." -- -Paul Fry Yale University "Marc Redfield's Theory at Yale provides an absorbing account of the so-called Yale school of deconstruction, whose chief luminaries were Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller...it is rich in insight and information" -- Terry Eagleton -Times Literary Supplement "Lucid, erudite, and theoretically sophisticated... The virtue of Theory at Yale lies not only in its expert handling of its archives, but in its understanding that the explanatory dimensions of such treatment constitute a theoretical wager." -Romantic Circles "Also author of The Rhetoric of Terror: Reflections on 9/11 and the War on Terror (2009) and editor of Legacies of Paul de Man (2007), Redfield has produced an important and ambitious book..." -Choice Magazine "Was the Yale School a media creation? Marc Redfield here offers us both a shrewd account of the quite different contributions of Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, and Paul de Man to literary studies, and a smart, subtle, analysis of the myth of the 'Yale School' and its fortunes in the culture wars. An invigorating retrospective on an important chapter in American intellectual history which is not yet over." -- -Jonathan Culler Cornell University "The first book-length history of the Yale school of literary criticism, which included figures like Harold Bloom and Paul de Man, examines the process through which European theory entered the United States in the 1970s and 1980s." -Publishers WeeklyTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: The Strange Case of "Theory" 1. Theory, Deconstruction, and the Yale Critics 2. Theory and Romantic Lyric: The Case of "A slumber did my spirit seal" 3. What Remains: Geoffrey Hartman and the Shock of Imagination 4. Literature, Incorporated: Harold Bloom, Theory, and the Canon 5. Professing Theory: Paul de Man and the Institution of Reading 6. Querying, Quarrying: Mark Tansey's Paintings of Theory's Grand Canyon

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Book SynopsisThis book mounts a critique of persistently romantic assumptions in contemporary literary criticism and advances an original theory of literary production. Along the way, it offers new readings of major modernist novels of Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, and Gertrude Stein.Trade Review"Lucid and beautifully written, The Work of Difference gives us an ontology of literature that is at once theoretical and practical. Audrey Wasser not only teaches us what literature can be but also what it can do and how it works in its most groundbreaking operations. Combining profound new readings of major modernist writers (Proust, Beckett, Stein) with a sophisticated philosophical understanding of Deleuze, The Work of Difference develops an innovative theory of literary production. Equally at home in conceptual thinking and rhetorical close reading, Wasser is an important new critic to reckon with." -- -Martin Hagglund Yale UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction 1 1. Form and Fragmentation: Romantic Legacies 2. The Book of the World: Form and Intent in New Criticism, Revisited 3. Tyranny of the Possible: Blanchot 4. A Genesis of the New: Deleuze 5. From Figure to Fissure: Self-Correction in Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable 6. Hyperbole In Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu 7. "How Anything Can Be Different from What It Is": Tautology in Stein's The Making of Americans Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisThis book mounts a critique of persistently romantic assumptions in contemporary literary criticism and advances an original theory of literary production. Along the way, it offers new readings of major modernist novels of Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, and Gertrude Stein.Trade Review"Lucid and beautifully written, The Work of Difference gives us an ontology of literature that is at once theoretical and practical. Audrey Wasser not only teaches us what literature can be but also what it can do and how it works in its most groundbreaking operations. Combining profound new readings of major modernist writers (Proust, Beckett, Stein) with a sophisticated philosophical understanding of Deleuze, The Work of Difference develops an innovative theory of literary production. Equally at home in conceptual thinking and rhetorical close reading, Wasser is an important new critic to reckon with." -- -Martin Hagglund Yale UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction 1 1. Form and Fragmentation: Romantic Legacies 2. The Book of the World: Form and Intent in New Criticism, Revisited 3. Tyranny of the Possible: Blanchot 4. A Genesis of the New: Deleuze 5. From Figure to Fissure: Self-Correction in Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable 6. Hyperbole In Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu 7. "How Anything Can Be Different from What It Is": Tautology in Stein's The Making of Americans Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Very few critics have all the qualities and competencies required to engage fully with the entirety Beckett's work in all genres: a detailed familiarity with Beckett's texts in both English and French; a sensitivity to his linguistic, stylistic and thematic manoeuvres; an encyclopaedic knowledge of his intellectual context; an awareness of the range and detail of Beckett studies; and an ability to write with refinement and wit. It is clear from this remarkable book that Jean-Michel Rabate is one of those few."--Derek Attridge, University of YorkTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. How to Think Like a Pig 2. The Worth and Girth of an Italian Hoagie 3. The Posthuman, or the Humility of the Earth 4. Burned Toasts and Boiled Lobsters 5. "Porca Madonna!": Moving Descartes toward Geulincx and Proust 6. From an Aesthetics of Nonrelation to an Ethics of Negation 7. Beckett's Kantian Critiques 8. Dialectics of Enlittlement 9. Bathetic Jokes, Animal Slapstick, and Ethical Laughter 10. Strength to Deny: Beckett between Adorno and Badiou 11. Lessons in Pigsty Latin: The Duty to Speak 12. An Irish Paris Peasant 13. The Morality of Form-A French Story Coda: Minima Beckettiana Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisThis collection takes its point of departure from Walter Benjamin’s concept of the historical constellation, a concept which puts “contemporary” as well as “Romanticism” in play as period designations and critical paradigms. The book regards Romanticism as a thought experiment that poses questions for our own “now” time.Trade Review"What might be Romanticism now? In tackling the implications of this question, which entails thinking Romanticism less as a period designation and more as a constellation of critical paradigms, Khalip and Pyle release us from the historical time (and, just as importantly, historicization) of Romanticism to think it forward as 'something evermore about to be.' If, as Paul de Man suggested nearly fifty years ago, we have experienced Romanticism 'in its passing away,' the essays collected here reveal to us the contemporariness of that 'passing away,' inflecting it as an interpretive act in which we have not only participated but to which we continue to contribute. Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism will be essential reading for anyone interested in what Romanticism was, is, and will become. It fundamentally reconfigures Romanticism as 'our contemporary'-as the critical alliance of the past with the present, and the present with the future-and challenges us to imagine the future inscribed in our own now." -- -Charles Mahoney University of Connecticut-Storrs "This volume invokes Walter Benjamin's notion of a constellation, in which past and present meet or pass along a two-way street, to describe the different articulated conjunctions or passing through between contemporary cultural media (art, literature, film) and romanticism that occur in these fifteen essays. The constellation that editors Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle identify is propelled by a Benjaminian understanding of what the editors here call "strange adjacencies" rather than alignments of cause with effect, between romanticism and now, adjacencies that recall those that Benjamin identified in the way an image (or a constellation) might pulse with an arresting temporality. The essays themselves offer a superlative, often commanding account of how we might read romanticism now, and further, how we might recast the then and now axis that we use to do so, in our own time. The array of scholarly voices and arguments in this collection is arresting. The critical differences that emerge across the volume as each scholar takes up the invitation to write about a contemporary romanticism make clear how many constellations this volume creates for thinking about where romanticism and the contemporary might be said to occupy a shared space of writing." -- -Theresa Kelley University of Wisconsin-MadisonTable of Contents1. Introduction: The Present Darkness of Romanticism Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle 2. The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday William Galperin 3. The Pathology of the Future, or the Endless Triumphs of Life Lee Edelman 4. Painting Theory: Mark Tansey's "Derrida Queries de Man" Marc Redfield 5. Here There Is No After (Richter's History) Sara Guyer 6. Goya's Scarcity David L. Clark 7. The Tone of Praise Peter de Bolla 8. Endymion; The Text of Undersong Simon Jarvis 9. Dancing in the Dark With Shelley Joel Faflak 10. The Pastoral Stain: Twombly Under the Trees Mary Jacobus 11. The Walter Scott Experience: Living American History after Waverley Mike Goode 12. Free Indirect Filmmaking: Jane Austen and the Renditions (On Emma Among Its Others) Ian Balfour 13. Population Aesthetics in Romantic and Post-Romantic Literature Robert Mitchell 14. Techno-magism, Coleridge's Mariner, and the Sentence Image Orrin Wang 15. Willing Suspension of Disbelief, Here, Now Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak List of Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisThis collection takes its point of departure from Walter Benjamin’s concept of the historical constellation, a concept which puts “contemporary” as well as “Romanticism” in play as period designations and critical paradigms. The book regards Romanticism as a thought experiment that poses questions for our own “now” time.Trade Review"What might be Romanticism now? In tackling the implications of this question, which entails thinking Romanticism less as a period designation and more as a constellation of critical paradigms, Khalip and Pyle release us from the historical time (and, just as importantly, historicization) of Romanticism to think it forward as 'something evermore about to be.' If, as Paul de Man suggested nearly fifty years ago, we have experienced Romanticism 'in its passing away,' the essays collected here reveal to us the contemporariness of that 'passing away,' inflecting it as an interpretive act in which we have not only participated but to which we continue to contribute. Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism will be essential reading for anyone interested in what Romanticism was, is, and will become. It fundamentally reconfigures Romanticism as 'our contemporary'-as the critical alliance of the past with the present, and the present with the future-and challenges us to imagine the future inscribed in our own now." -- -Charles Mahoney University of Connecticut-Storrs "This volume invokes Walter Benjamin's notion of a constellation, in which past and present meet or pass along a two-way street, to describe the different articulated conjunctions or passing through between contemporary cultural media (art, literature, film) and romanticism that occur in these fifteen essays. The constellation that editors Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle identify is propelled by a Benjaminian understanding of what the editors here call "strange adjacencies" rather than alignments of cause with effect, between romanticism and now, adjacencies that recall those that Benjamin identified in the way an image (or a constellation) might pulse with an arresting temporality. The essays themselves offer a superlative, often commanding account of how we might read romanticism now, and further, how we might recast the then and now axis that we use to do so, in our own time. The array of scholarly voices and arguments in this collection is arresting. The critical differences that emerge across the volume as each scholar takes up the invitation to write about a contemporary romanticism make clear how many constellations this volume creates for thinking about where romanticism and the contemporary might be said to occupy a shared space of writing." -- -Theresa Kelley University of Wisconsin-MadisonTable of Contents1. Introduction: The Present Darkness of Romanticism Jacques Khalip and Forest Pyle 2. The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday William Galperin 3. The Pathology of the Future, or the Endless Triumphs of Life Lee Edelman 4. Painting Theory: Mark Tansey's "Derrida Queries de Man" Marc Redfield 5. Here There Is No After (Richter's History) Sara Guyer 6. Goya's Scarcity David L. Clark 7. The Tone of Praise Peter de Bolla 8. Endymion; The Text of Undersong Simon Jarvis 9. Dancing in the Dark With Shelley Joel Faflak 10. The Pastoral Stain: Twombly Under the Trees Mary Jacobus 11. The Walter Scott Experience: Living American History after Waverley Mike Goode 12. Free Indirect Filmmaking: Jane Austen and the Renditions (On Emma Among Its Others) Ian Balfour 13. Population Aesthetics in Romantic and Post-Romantic Literature Robert Mitchell 14. Techno-magism, Coleridge's Mariner, and the Sentence Image Orrin Wang 15. Willing Suspension of Disbelief, Here, Now Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak List of Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisMendicino retraces the ways in which the task of translation is tied in Romantic writing to prophecy, not in the sense of telling future events, but in the sense of speaking in the place of another, such that language takes place in more than one voice—and tongue—at once, unpredictably.Trade Review"Prophecies of Language offers strikingly original insights into some of the most complex dimensions of Idealist and Romantic thought. Mendicino's ingenious analyses help us rethink the singular challenges of these canonical texts in innovative ways." -- -Jan Mieszkowski Reed CollegeTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction The Pitfalls of Translating Philosophy: Or, the Languages of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit Language at an Impasse, in Passing: Wilhelm von Humboldt's Agamemnon- Translation Prophecy, Spoken Otherwise: In the Language of Aeschylus' Cassandra Prophetic Poetry, Ad Infinitum: Friedrich Schlegel's Daybreak Empedocles, Empyrically Speaking-: Friedrich Holderlin's Tragic Ode Disclosure Bibliography

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Blackpentecostal Breath is a work of utter originality anchored by daring synthesis, acrobatic leaps of imagination, and laced throughout with passages of jolting beauty." -- -Ann Pellegrini coauthor of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance "A one-of-a-kind intervention into performance, religious, black and cultural studies." -- -Roderick A. Ferguson Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique "Crawley's prose is attentive, loving. It's round and sweet. It's generous in associations. Anecdotes and personal emails populate the book...In Blackpentecostal Breath, tales and anecdotes equip us with tools to decode the book;s argument while also allowing us to pause and breathe...Blackpentecostal Breath is a book of its time, but it's decidedly future-oriented. Breathing, after all, is sequential: each breath, however strained, carries the hope of another one, and another one." -- Jean-Thomas Tremblay -Los Angeles Review of Books

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Book SynopsisWINNER OF THE JUDY TSOU CRITICAL RACE STUDIES AWARD!In this profoundly innovative book, Ashon T. Crawley engages a wide range of critical paradigms from black studies, queer theory, and sound studies to theology, continental philosophy, and performance studies to theorize the ways in which alternative or otherwise modes of existence can serve as disruptions against the marginalization of and violence against minoritarian lifeworlds and possibilities for flourishing.Examining the whooping, shouting, noise-making, and speaking in tongues of Black Pentecostalisma multi-racial, multi-class, multi-national Christian sect with one strand of its modern genesis in 1906 Los AngelesBlackpentecostal Breath reveals how these aesthetic practices allow for the emergence of alternative modes of social organization. As Crawley deftly reveals, these choreographic, sonic, and visual practices and the sensual experiences they create are not only important for imagining what CTrade Review"Blackpentecostal Breath is a work of utter originality anchored by daring synthesis, acrobatic leaps of imagination, and laced throughout with passages of jolting beauty." -- -Ann Pellegrini coauthor of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance "A one-of-a-kind intervention into performance, religious, black and cultural studies." -- -Roderick A. Ferguson Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique "Crawley's prose is attentive, loving. It's round and sweet. It's generous in associations. Anecdotes and personal emails populate the book...In Blackpentecostal Breath, tales and anecdotes equip us with tools to decode the book;s argument while also allowing us to pause and breathe...Blackpentecostal Breath is a book of its time, but it's decidedly future-oriented. Breathing, after all, is sequential: each breath, however strained, carries the hope of another one, and another one." -- Jean-Thomas Tremblay -Los Angeles Review of Books

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Book SynopsisThe essays in The Insistence of Art suggest ways in which the artworks and practices of the early modern period show the essentiality of aesthetic experience for philosophical reflection, and in particular for the rise of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline, while also showing art’s need for philosophy.Trade Review"This collection on early modern aesthetics of doesn't just fill a gap: In its emphatic refusal to cordon off the Renaissance, and in its conviction that art is no passive mirror but a 'matrix through which social reality is established,' it is a welcome corrective. Dante and Ficino, Donne and Shakespeare, Bellori and Caravaggio, Goya and Pater-with Herder, Hegel, Paul de Man and Kierkeegard making memorable cameos-populate an early modernity that looks ahead to modernism." -- -Andrei Pop University of Chicago "A superb and timely collection-rigorous wide-ranging essays demonstrating some of the most compelling trends in their respective fields. It's the sort of collection that gives substance and urgency to interdisciplinary thinking." -- -Christopher Pye Williams College

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Book SynopsisThe essays in The Insistence of Art suggest ways in which the artworks and practices of the early modern period show the essentiality of aesthetic experience for philosophical reflection, and in particular for the rise of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline, while also showing art’s need for philosophy.Trade Review"This collection on early modern aesthetics of doesn't just fill a gap: In its emphatic refusal to cordon off the Renaissance, and in its conviction that art is no passive mirror but a 'matrix through which social reality is established,' it is a welcome corrective. Dante and Ficino, Donne and Shakespeare, Bellori and Caravaggio, Goya and Pater-with Herder, Hegel, Paul de Man and Kierkeegard making memorable cameos-populate an early modernity that looks ahead to modernism." -- -Andrei Pop University of Chicago "A superb and timely collection-rigorous wide-ranging essays demonstrating some of the most compelling trends in their respective fields. It's the sort of collection that gives substance and urgency to interdisciplinary thinking." -- -Christopher Pye Williams College

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Book SynopsisExpectation is a major volume of Jean-Luc Nancy's writings on literature, written across three decades but, for the most part, previously unavailable in English.More substantial than literary criticism, these essays collectively negotiate literature's relation to philosophy. Nancy pursues such questions as literature's claims to truth, the status of narrative, the relation of poetry and prose, and the unity of a book or of a text, and he addresses a number of major European writers, including Dante, Sterne, Rousseau, Hölderlin, Proust, Joyce, and Blanchot.The final section offers a number of impressive pieces by Nancy that completely merge his concerns for philosophy and literature and philosophy-as-literature. These include a lengthy parody of Valéry's La Jeune Parque, several original poems by Nancy, and a beautiful prose-poetic discourse on an installation by Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani that incorporates the Faust theme. Opening with a substantial IntroduTrade Review"Expectation stages a courtship between philosophy and literature that has never been presented with such wit, grace, and finesse. What's more, this intense courtship leads to a marriage blessed with specific offspring: Nancy's book offers both an epithalamium and a pregnant poetics, a poetics of awakening and emergence-poetics as obstetrics ushering in new 'senses' in and of the world, plus strong and luminescent poems never seen in English before." -- from Jean-Michel Rabate's IntroductionTable of ContentsIntroduction Cornerstones 1: Cone 2: Baldwin 3: Mbembe 4: Derrida, Agamben, Wynter Questions 5: What is Black Tradition? 6: What is Black Organizing? 7: For What Are Blacks to Hope? 8: For What Are Whites to Hope? Exempla 9: The Revelation of Race: On Steve Biko 10: The Racial Messiah: On Huey P. Newton 11: The Post-Racial Saint: On Barack Obama 12: The Race of the Soul: On Gillian Rose Afterword: The Birth of the Black Church Bibliography

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Book SynopsisThis volume examines the poetics of bird mimicry: the way birds mimic humans, and the way humans mimic birds. Drawing from 18th-century studies, romantic studies, American studies, 20th-century studies, and postcolonial studies, the collection offers new models for combining comparative and global studies of literature and culture.Table of ContentsIntro Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Afterword Chapter 13 Coda

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Book SynopsisThis volume examines the poetics of bird mimicry: the way birds mimic humans, and the way humans mimic birds. Drawing from 18th-century studies, romantic studies, American studies, 20th-century studies, and postcolonial studies, the collection offers new models for combining comparative and global studies of literature and culture.Table of ContentsIntro Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Afterword Chapter 13 Coda

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Book SynopsisExplores both the theory and practice of rhythm in literature with a focus on nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry. Emphasis on rhythm’s role in contemporary literary criticism, including debates about poetic form and genre.Table of ContentsIntroduction Ben Glaser, 1 Rhythm’s Critiques Why Rhythm? Jonathan Culler, 21 What Is Called Rhythm? David Nowell Smith, 40 Sordello’s Pristine Pulpiness Simon Jarvis, 60 Body, Throng, Race The Cadence of Consent: Francis Barton Gummere, Lyric Rhythm, and White Poetics Virginia Jackson, 87 Contagious Rhythm: Verse as a Technique of the Body Haun Saussy, 106 Constructing Walt Whitman: Literary History and Histories of Rhythm Erin Kappeler, 128 Beat and Count The Rhythms of the English Dolnik Derek Attridge, 153 How to Find Rhythm on a Piece of Paper Thomas Cable, 174 Picturing Rhythm Meredith Martin, 197 Fictions of Rhythm Beyond Meaning: Differing Fates of Some Modernist Poets’ Investments of Belief in Sounds Natalie Gerber, 223 Sapphic Stanzas: How Can We Read the Rhythm? Yopie Prins 247 Rhythm and Affect in “Christabel” Ewan Jones, 274 Acknowledgments 297 List of Contributors 299 Index 303

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Book SynopsisExplores both the theory and practice of rhythm in literature with a focus on nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry. Emphasis on rhythm’s role in contemporary literary criticism, including debates about poetic form and genre.Table of ContentsIntroduction Ben Glaser, 1 Rhythm’s Critiques Why Rhythm? Jonathan Culler, 21 What Is Called Rhythm? David Nowell Smith, 40 Sordello’s Pristine Pulpiness Simon Jarvis, 60 Body, Throng, Race The Cadence of Consent: Francis Barton Gummere, Lyric Rhythm, and White Poetics Virginia Jackson, 87 Contagious Rhythm: Verse as a Technique of the Body Haun Saussy, 106 Constructing Walt Whitman: Literary History and Histories of Rhythm Erin Kappeler, 128 Beat and Count The Rhythms of the English Dolnik Derek Attridge, 153 How to Find Rhythm on a Piece of Paper Thomas Cable, 174 Picturing Rhythm Meredith Martin, 197 Fictions of Rhythm Beyond Meaning: Differing Fates of Some Modernist Poets’ Investments of Belief in Sounds Natalie Gerber, 223 Sapphic Stanzas: How Can We Read the Rhythm? Yopie Prins 247 Rhythm and Affect in “Christabel” Ewan Jones, 274 Acknowledgments 297 List of Contributors 299 Index 303

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsSydney Lectures 1. Money, or The Other Side of Images 3 2. The Point of (No) Exchange, or The Debt- Image 27 3. Innervation, or The Gaze of Capital 43 Additional Features Merchandise: Godzilla’s Eye 79 Deleted Scenes: Doors and Slide Changers in Pickpocket and Obsession 84 Deleted Scenes: Three Variations on Time and Money (Antonioni, De Palma, Bresson) 88 Photo Gallery: Blow- Up, or Why There Are No Images 92 Locations: 23, rue Bénard, Paris, 75014 99 Deleted Scene: The Fluctuations of the Unchained Camera (L’Herbier) 101 Deleted Scenes: The General Fetishism of the Marxes 103 Deleted Scenes: The Amortization of the Gaze (King Kong) 106 Formats: Surplus Definition (Redacted) 112 Credits 121 Notes 123 Index 155

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Book SynopsisTable of ContentsSydney Lectures 1. Money, or The Other Side of Images 3 2. The Point of (No) Exchange, or The Debt- Image 27 3. Innervation, or The Gaze of Capital 43 Additional Features Merchandise: Godzilla’s Eye 79 Deleted Scenes: Doors and Slide Changers in Pickpocket and Obsession 84 Deleted Scenes: Three Variations on Time and Money (Antonioni, De Palma, Bresson) 88 Photo Gallery: Blow- Up, or Why There Are No Images 92 Locations: 23, rue Bénard, Paris, 75014 99 Deleted Scene: The Fluctuations of the Unchained Camera (L’Herbier) 101 Deleted Scenes: The General Fetishism of the Marxes 103 Deleted Scenes: The Amortization of the Gaze (King Kong) 106 Formats: Surplus Definition (Redacted) 112 Credits 121 Notes 123 Index 155

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Book SynopsisThe Fact of Resonance returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which theories of the novel developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. The book shows how the experience of reading is undergirded by the sonic.Table of ContentsNote on Abbreviations | ix Overture: The Sound of a Novel | 1 1 Voice at the Threshold of the Audible: Free Indirect Discourse and the Colonial Space of Reading | 13 Coda: Chantal Akerman and Lip Sync as Postcolonial Strategy | 59 2 The Echo of the Object: On the Pain of Self-Hearing in The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and “The Fact of Blackness” | 67 Coda: Literary History as Miscegenating Sound: The Sound and the Fury | 103 Intersonority: Unclaimed Voices Circum-1900, or Sound and Sourcelessness in The Souls of Black Folk | 115 3 A Sinister Resonance: On the Extraction of Sound and Language in Heart of Darkness | 149 Reprise: Reverberation, Circumambience, and Form-Seeking Sound (Absalom, Absalom!) | 211 Acknowledgments | 231 Notes | 235 Bibliography | 309 Index | 331

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