Philosophy: aesthetics Books

Book SynopsisTrade Review"Todd Cronan’s juggernaut is several books in one. In the first place, it historicizes a crucial question in contemporary esthetics, whether or not a beholder’s experience of a work of art can properly be understood as affective rather than as cognitive. Second, it offers a strong rereading of various writings by Henri Bergson—whose philosophy has often been associated with the art of Matisse—with respect to that and related issues, showing in the end that although Bergson was continually tempted by the affective position, he never quite definitely succumbed to it. Third and most important, Cronan tracks the interplay between the affective and cognitivist viewpoints in the theory and practice of one of the great painters of the twentieth century, Henri Matisse; this sets Cronan on a collision course—from which he does not flinch —with the almost uniformly affective bias of recent Matisse criticism. Against Affective Formalism is a major achievement, and I look forward with fascination to its reception by a field that is likely to be transformed by it." —Michael Fried, Johns Hopkins University "Matisse knows that sensations belong to - or alas have been detached from - particular human occasions, ways of being, forms of life. But the exacerbation of colour in Matisse speaks, dialectically, to the lack of particularity that makes us 'modern'. This to and fro of contraries is dealt with powerfully in a new book by Todd Cronan, Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism. Colour, for Matisse - pure sensation, the stuff of the senses - will make, will be, a form of life. And at the same time it will enact the extremity - the uncanniness - of the wish."- T. J. Clark, "The Urge to Strangle," The London Review of Books Table of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsList of IllustrationsIntroduction: Modernism against Representation1. Painting as Affect Machine2. Freedom and Memory: Bergson’s Theory of Hypnotic Agency3. The Influence of Others: Matisse and Personnalité4. Matisse and MimesisConclusion. From Art to Object: The Case of Paul ValéryNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisToward a theory of the city at the crossroads of aesthetics and politics

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Book SynopsisOver 25 centuries ago, the Greek philosopher Protagoras declared: on every question there are two opposing answers, including this one. This work sets out to demonstrate that Protagoras' statement constitutes one of the fundamental principles of aesthetic and rhetorical theory.

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Book SynopsisExamining select high points in the speculative tradition from Plato and Aristotle through the Middle Ages and German tradition to Dewey and Heidegger, Placing Aesthetics seeks to locate the aesthetic concern within the larger framework of each thinkerâs philosophy.In

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Book SynopsisIn The Madness of Vision, Buci-Glucksmann asserts the important of embodied vision in nine studies of paintings, sculptures, and images. She integrates the work of Merleau-Ponty with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Renaissance studies in optics, and twentieth-century mathematics to make the case for the pervasive influence of the baroque.

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Book SynopsisPhenomenology has played a decisive role in the emergence of the discourse of place, and the contribution of Merleau-Ponty to architectural theory and practice is well established. This collection of essays by 12 eminent scholars is the first devoted specifically to developing his contribution to our understanding of place and architecture.Trade Review“An exceptionally impressive collection of provocative essays, all of which apply Merleau-Ponty’s ideas to new fields and frontiers. This book will probably be of most use and interest to those who are already familiar with Merleau-Ponty’s work, as well as those who are interested in the political implications which are expressed in or entailed by phenomenological concepts and techniques.” * Phenomenological Reviews *Merleau-Ponty: Space, Place, Architecture is a vanguard compilation of strong contributions by eminently capable scholars. It synthesizes the Merleau-Pontyian themes of dehiscence, chiasm, flesh, and space in a thoughtful, surprising, and fruitful manner…It opens new pathways for exciting and rewarding investigation, and the editors and contributors are to be commended. * Human Studies *Table of Contents* Introduction Patricia M. Locke*Part 1: Liminal Space*1. Hearkening to the Night for the Heart of Depth, Space and Dwelling Glen Mazis*2. Depth of Space and Depth of World: Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Rembrandt's Nightwatch on a Modern Baroque Galen A. Johnson*3. Finding Architectural Edge in the Wake of Merleau-Ponty Edward S. Casey*4. Liquid Space of Matrixial Flesh: Reading Merleau-Ponty and Bracha L. Ettinger Poolside Randall Johnson*Part 2: Temporal Space*5: Spatiality, Temporality, and Architecture as a Place of Memory David Morris*6: In Search of Lost Time: Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and the Time of Objects Dorothea Olkowski*7: Inhabiting the House that Herman Built: Merleau-Ponty and the Pathological Space of Solitary Confinement Lisa Guenther*8: Stolen Space: The Perverse Architecture of Torture D. R. Koukal*Part 3: Shared Space*9: Through the Looking Glass: The Spatial Experience of Merleau-Ponty's Metaphors Rachel McCann*10: Sheltering Spaces, Dynamics of Retreat, and Other Hiding Places in Merleau-Ponty's Thought Suzanne Cataldi Laba*11: Dimensions of the Flesh in a Case of Twins with Which I Am Familiar: Actualizing the Potential for Shared Intentional Space Nancy Barta-Smith*12: Dwelling and Public Art: Serra and Bourgeois Helen Fielding* Contributors* Index

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Book SynopsisLaura E. Pérez analyzes Latina art to explore a new notion of decolonial thought and love based on the integration of body, mind, and spirit that offers a means to creating a more democratic and just present and future.Trade Review“Laura E. Pérez renews the precepts of 1950s Third World liberation and extends the contemporary politics of women-of-color freedom fighters into the future. She speaks with many voices—the learned scholar, the analyst, the teacher, the maker of new aesthetics, the poet, the dreamer, and the guide—and offers her readers a multitude of routes for crossing academic and subjective terrains to find new possibilities for thinking, doing, and being. An outstanding work of decolonial writing by one of the great Chicana feminist philosophers of our time, Eros Ideologies is exactly the book I have needed to best teach my undergraduate and graduate students.” -- Chela Sandoval, author of * Methodology of the Oppressed *“Laura E. Pérez’s newest book is a tour de force that integrates the mind-body-spirit through a series of writings that weave together the theoretical and poetical within the context of decolonization. She explores the works of artists like Gloria Anzaldúa, Ester Hernández, and Consuelo Jiménez Underwood as she crosses disciplines to bring the embodied psyche to bear on questions of the erotic and the spiritual.” -- Amalia Mesa-Bains, Professor Emerita, California State University, Monterey Bay"Pérez eloquently reflects on activism, art, philosophy, poetry, politics, and selfhood. She offers radical reappraisals of the art of Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, Esther Hernández, and Liliana Wilson, among many artists whose histories have been obfuscated by Eurocentric ideas and whose praxes she creatively reexamines. This cross-disciplinary study powerfully recombines theoretical and literary sources that speak to academic practice, lived experience, and poetic meditation. Writing in multiple authorial voices, Pérez shatters the high/low art dichotomy that has often segregated Latinx art history from mainstream US culture. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty." -- L. Estevez * Choice *"Readers unfamiliar with Latina, especially Chicana, art and politics are treated to eye-opening beauty mixed with expressions of suffering and resistance. Readers already immersed in the culturally rich world of protest art foregrounding gender and eroticisim will find new ways into the multilayered visionaries featured here." -- Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer * Religion *"Eros Ideologies is a teacherly text: Pérez shows us not only how to look at, but also how to be with, art of the Americas.… Certainly, the use of personal prose in scholarly publications is not unprecedented in the discourses of ethnic studies, anthropology, history, literature, art, and cultural studies; but Pérez's approach is tactical as readers enter her classroom—a space of 'heart and hearth'—where she interweaves decades of close study of theoretical and spiritual texts, lifelong contemplations of artwork, and the conversations she has maintained with the many artists who made them." -- Ella Maria Diaz * Latino Studies *"Eros Ideologies can serve as an approachable and valuable introduction to very urgent concerns." -- Andrew William Lee * Religion and the Arts *"It is Pérez’s mindful contributions of eros, agape, philia, In lak’ech, love, and respect for art that mark this book as a starting point in discussion of works by people of color, mostly Latinx and women artists. . . . As beautiful as Pérez’s writings on the subjects can be, as rich with historical connections calling upon syncretism and community care, these analyses are primers for further work to be done." -- Helman Alejandro Sosa * Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations xi Preface xv Acknowledgments xxi 1. The Social Body of Love: Crafting Decolonial Methodologies 1 2. Eros Ideologies and Methodology of the Oppressed 17 3. Long Nguyen: Flesh of the Inscrutable 24 4. Hidden Avant-Gardes: Contemporary U.S. Latina/o Art 27 5. Freedom and Gender in Ester Hernández's Libertad 34 6. 'Ginas in the Atelier 40 7. The Poetry of Embodiment: Series and Variation in Linda Arreola's Vaguely Chicana 52 8. Art and Museums 56 9. The@-Erotics in Alex Donis's My Cathedral 70 10. Con o sin permiso (With or without Permission): Chicana Badgirls: Las hociconas 77 11. Maestrapeace: Picturing the Power of Women's Histories of Creativity 82 12. Decolonizing Self-Portraits of Frida Kahlo, Ana Mendieta, and Yreina D. Cervántez 91 13. Undead Darwinism and the Fault Lines of Neocolonialism in Latina/o Art Worlds 112 14. The Inviolate Erotic in the Paintings of Liliana Wilson 126 15. The Performance of Spirituality and Visionary Politics in the Work of Gloria Anzaldúa 133 16. Daughters Shaking Earth 147 17 Fashioning Decolonial Optics: Days of the Dead Walking Altars and Calavera Fashion Shows in Latina/o Los Angeles 155 18. On Jean Pierre Larochette and Yael Lurie's Water Songs 174 19. Prayers for the Planet: Reweaving the Natural and the Social: Consuelo Jimenez Underwood's Welcome to Flower-Landai 179 20. "Undocu Nation," Creativity, Integrity 192 21. Writing with Crooked Lines 201 Notes 211 References 245 Index 263

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Book SynopsisAttending to diverse practices of everyday living and doing—of form, style, and scenography—in Jacques Rancière’s writings, Davide Panagia explores Rancière’s aesthetics of politics as it informs his radical democratic theory of participation.Trade Review“To understand Rancière, Panagia argues, is to set aside the search for prescriptive constructs and instead embrace the aesthetic sensibilities that create the world. Recommended.” -- L. A. Wilkinson * Choice *"Davide Panagia has written a complex and pathbreaking book that engages the work of democratic theorist Jacques Rancière in order to redefine what it means to practice democracy. Rancière’s Sentiments is not an introduction to Rancière’s oeuvre, but rather a book that grapples with his most difficult ideas in order to challenge established assumptions about how politics comes to be known, felt, and practiced." -- Elisabeth Anker * Perspectives on Politics *"Rancière’s Sentiments is a whistle-stop tour of aesthetics in the work of Jacques Rancière. . . . Davide Panagia skillfully meshes a scenic narrative, wending his way through four chapters, each exploring a different line of division that Rancière’s writing puts into question." -- Clare Woodford * Review of Politics *"I would recommend Davide Panagia's Rancière's Sentiments without hesitation to any researcher in literature, political science, or philosophy who seeks an articulate presentation of Rancière's very particular manner of thinking and arguing. Panagia has done a superb job of navigating through and illuminating the various constellations that characterize Rancière's thought, while maintaining the sense and the feel of a manner of thinking that elide closure." -- David F. Bell * H-France, H-Net Reviews *Table of ContentsPreface vii Acknowledgments xiii Introduction. The Manner of Impropriety 1 1. Rancière's Partager 19 2. Rancière's Police Poetics 40 3. Rancière's Style 63 4. Rancière's Democratic Realism 85 Conclusion. Demotic Modernisms, Popular Occupations 99 Notes 105 Bibliography 129 Index 137

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Book SynopsisAttending to diverse practices of everyday living and doingof form, style, and scenographyin Jacques Rancière's writings, Davide Panagia explores Rancière's aesthetics of politics as it informs his radical democratic theory of participation.Trade Review“To understand Rancière, Panagia argues, is to set aside the search for prescriptive constructs and instead embrace the aesthetic sensibilities that create the world. Recommended.” -- L. A. Wilkinson * Choice *"Davide Panagia has written a complex and pathbreaking book that engages the work of democratic theorist Jacques Rancière in order to redefine what it means to practice democracy. Rancière’s Sentiments is not an introduction to Rancière’s oeuvre, but rather a book that grapples with his most difficult ideas in order to challenge established assumptions about how politics comes to be known, felt, and practiced." -- Elisabeth Anker * Perspectives on Politics *"Rancière’s Sentiments is a whistle-stop tour of aesthetics in the work of Jacques Rancière. . . . Davide Panagia skillfully meshes a scenic narrative, wending his way through four chapters, each exploring a different line of division that Rancière’s writing puts into question." -- Clare Woodford * Review of Politics *"I would recommend Davide Panagia's Rancière's Sentiments without hesitation to any researcher in literature, political science, or philosophy who seeks an articulate presentation of Rancière's very particular manner of thinking and arguing. Panagia has done a superb job of navigating through and illuminating the various constellations that characterize Rancière's thought, while maintaining the sense and the feel of a manner of thinking that elide closure." -- David F. Bell * H-France, H-Net Reviews *Table of ContentsPreface vii Acknowledgments xiii Introduction. The Manner of Impropriety 1 1. Rancière's Partager 19 2. Rancière's Police Poetics 40 3. Rancière's Style 63 4. Rancière's Democratic Realism 85 Conclusion. Demotic Modernisms, Popular Occupations 99 Notes 105 Bibliography 129 Index 137

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Book SynopsisIn the context of Holderlin's poetics of alienation, exile, and wandering, Gosetti-Ferencei poses a phenomenologically sensitive theory of poetic language and a "new poetics of Dasein," or being there.Trade Review"The book is a state-of-the-art discussion of Heidegger ... The reader emerges from this book with a tremendous sense of possibility-of new avenues opened up, and of old debates unclogged." -- -Nicholas Birns New School University "The perennially interesting complex of topics--Heidegger's thought, Holderlin's thought and poetry, Heidegger's reading of Holderlin's poetry--is here enriched by a fourth meditation, written against the grain: Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei reads Heidegger's thought in the light of Holderlin's poetry and theoretical writings. The outcome is a defense and justification of poetic subjectivity at once subtle and exhilarating. Heidegger, Holderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language is composed with admirable passion, erudition, and conceptual flair. It will be indispensable for students of continental philosophy, literature, and literary theory." -- -Stanley Corngold Princeton University

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Book SynopsisWhat powers lie hidden in images? Nancy explores the complicated effects of the visual on culture, truth, and meaning. Writings on the power hidden in the depth of an image.Trade Review"Offers more recent and more focused reflections on the nature of representation and art, especially painting." -Book Forum "...A series of discrete analyses and reflections ...the best pieces make noteworthy contributions to themes connected with images, imagination, representation, aesthetics, and with direct and indirect relevance to thinking about religion." -Journal of American Academy of Religion "This collection of nine chapter-essays, translated from those published in French in 2003-4 describes Nancy's recent work on images and visual art." -Art Book News Annual

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Book SynopsisIn the 1930s, Georges Bataille proclaimed a ferociously religious sensibility characterized by simultaneous ecstasy and horror. This book investigates the content and implications of this religious sensibility by examining Bataille's insistent linking of monstrosity and the sacred.Trade Review"In this superb study of Bataille, Jeremy Biles navigates between Bataille's fascination with the horrible and the monstrous on the one hand, and his insistence on the possibility of the sacred in the modern world on the other. With erudition and level-headed admiration, Biles shows how Bataille's work is a meditation, willfully combining horror and ecstasy, joy in the face of death, and sacrifice as a necessary antidote to form. Biles reads Bataille on four principle thinkers: Hegel, Nietzsche, Simone Weil, and Andre Breton.The reader emerges from this study understanding, not only the importance to modernity of Bataille himself, but also the extent to which Bataille's project provides a certain modernist trajectory the ramifications of which are increasingly clear today." -- -Francoise Meltzer University of Chicago "All in all, among recent studies on Bataille, Biles's book is the one that perhaps approaches best Bataille's thought while proposing new interpretations of his work." -H-Net Reviews "Biles demonstrates an excellent grasp of the critical commentary on, and the cultural context of Georges Bataille. The stakes of Bataille's work in the areas of intellectual history, literary history, and modern, and postmodern, art are clearly explored. Wonderfully informative and stimulating." -- -Allan Stoekl Pennsylvania State University "One is struck by Biles's erudition: not only has he read, with patience and great sensitivity, the entirety of Bataille's writings along with his principal commentators, but he writes insightfully also about the works of the many figures (Hegel, Nietzsche, Simone Weil, Andre Breton) in relation to whom he situates Bataille." -- -Peter Tracey Connor Barnard College

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Book SynopsisExamines what the role of the listener is, and has been, through the centuries. The author explains his love of musical arrangement (since arrangements allow him to listen to someone listening to music), and wonders whether it is possible in other ways to convey to others how we ourselves listen to music.Trade Review"Swerving away from the grand abstractions of late-deconstructive theory, the book has no labyrinthine close-readings, no world-historical announcements, and ties itself in no tortured linguistic knots." -Current Musicology "Szendy's meditation on listening and on music is a dreamlike mixture of philosophy, personal memoir, and intellectual history. Listening is not hearing (perception or sensation), but neither is it understanding ("entendre"), as opera especially makes clear, in those ecstatic moments when the libretto is least important, and the human voice suspends all sense, but holds the listener most. What subject is brought into being in such moments, beyond the interiority of the person, as a relation to the world and to others with whom one shares (or disputes about) this experience? And how has the history and transmission of such listening, especially in music, been caught in the great questions of law and copyright, citation, quotation, reproduction and sampling, original text and its "translation" in performance (a secondary repetition without which music cannot exist)? How are the questions of instrumentation and mechanical reproduction, so dear to Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno and other theorists of modernity, played out in the economy of the listening ear? And how are these issues aggravated today by advertizing and media that sample and distribute, but also copyright and turn into property even those random noises -- the sound of a car engine or the tone of a cell phone -- which become the identifying markers or signatures of multinational corporations, where the border between music and noise is negotiated. From Lizst and Beethoven to Schoenberg and Stravinsky, from Charlie Parker and Bill Evans to more recent experiments in digital sampling, Szendy takes us across a wide territory with an ease and lightness that are beautifully rendered in Charlotte Mandell's translation." -- -Charles Shepherdson University at Albany, State University of New York "Every child knows about the right to speak, and when to shut up and listen. But do we know what listening is? In this book Peter Szendy asks who has the right to listen when it comes to music. It turns out that listening is a species of theft disguised under polite terms like transcription and arrangement, but it is mischief all the same. There may be no such thing as a work of music. Szendy gives us a rogue's history of the ear, filled with splendid and hilarious anecdotes about the things we do to music, and the uncanny machines we have used on it, tin ears among them. Read this book and find out what you have an ear for." -- -Gerald Bruns University of Notre Dame

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Book SynopsisExamines what the role of the listener is, and has been, through the centuries. The author explains his love of musical arrangement (since arrangements allow him to listen to someone listening to music), and wonders whether it is possible in other ways to convey to others how we ourselves listen to music.Trade Review"Swerving away from the grand abstractions of late-deconstructive theory, the book has no labyrinthine close-readings, no world-historical announcements, and ties itself in no tortured linguistic knots." -Current Musicology "Szendy's meditation on listening and on music is a dreamlike mixture of philosophy, personal memoir, and intellectual history. Listening is not hearing (perception or sensation), but neither is it understanding ("entendre"), as opera especially makes clear, in those ecstatic moments when the libretto is least important, and the human voice suspends all sense, but holds the listener most. What subject is brought into being in such moments, beyond the interiority of the person, as a relation to the world and to others with whom one shares (or disputes about) this experience? And how has the history and transmission of such listening, especially in music, been caught in the great questions of law and copyright, citation, quotation, reproduction and sampling, original text and its "translation" in performance (a secondary repetition without which music cannot exist)? How are the questions of instrumentation and mechanical reproduction, so dear to Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno and other theorists of modernity, played out in the economy of the listening ear? And how are these issues aggravated today by advertizing and media that sample and distribute, but also copyright and turn into property even those random noises -- the sound of a car engine or the tone of a cell phone -- which become the identifying markers or signatures of multinational corporations, where the border between music and noise is negotiated. From Lizst and Beethoven to Schoenberg and Stravinsky, from Charlie Parker and Bill Evans to more recent experiments in digital sampling, Szendy takes us across a wide territory with an ease and lightness that are beautifully rendered in Charlotte Mandell's translation." -- -Charles Shepherdson University at Albany, State University of New York "Every child knows about the right to speak, and when to shut up and listen. But do we know what listening is? In this book Peter Szendy asks who has the right to listen when it comes to music. It turns out that listening is a species of theft disguised under polite terms like transcription and arrangement, but it is mischief all the same. There may be no such thing as a work of music. Szendy gives us a rogue's history of the ear, filled with splendid and hilarious anecdotes about the things we do to music, and the uncanny machines we have used on it, tin ears among them. Read this book and find out what you have an ear for." -- -Gerald Bruns University of Notre Dame

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Book SynopsisArguing that the practice of architecture occupies not just a historical position between Stonborough-Wittgenstein's early and late philosophy, this book demonstrates that Wittgenstein's practice of architecture constitutes a fundamental component in the development of his philosophy of language from its early to late phases.Trade Review"This book opens new and unexpected vistas into the complex landscape - or perhaps I should say the complex architecture and spatiality - of Wittgenstein's philosophy. In that sense, it makes an important, dual contribution to the history of philosophy and to the history of modern architecture." -- -Mark Jarzombek Massachusetts Institute of Technology " ... An interesting and thought-provoking work, one that adds to the corpus of writings on Wittgenstein's ideas about architecture and aesthetics." -Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics "Accessible...Brings forward the virtues of applied abstraction through keen and historical treatment of both the writings and the Stonborough project." -- -Tom Conley Harvard University "A strikingly brilliant and lucid piece of work. Last shows how Wittgenstein's entanglements of philosophy and architecture become the necessary prologue to his accomplishment in the Investigations. Wittgenstein's House takes what is often considered a marginal or extraneous interlude in his work and demonstrates how it in fact forms the indispensable pivot of a major reorientation in Wittgenstein's thought." -- -Bruce Clarke Texas Tech University " ... Reveals heretofore unseen and unsuspected edifying relations between architecture and philosophy and their distinctive ways of seeing and thinking." -Postmodern Culture "A noteworthy synthesis of Wittgenstein's philosophy with the subject of architecture." -wittgenstein-news.org

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Book SynopsisArguing that the practice of architecture occupies not just a historical position between Stonborough-Wittgenstein's early and late philosophy, this book demonstrates that Wittgenstein's practice of architecture constitutes a fundamental component in the development of his philosophy of language from its early to late phases.Trade Review"This book opens new and unexpected vistas into the complex landscape - or perhaps I should say the complex architecture and spatiality - of Wittgenstein's philosophy. In that sense, it makes an important, dual contribution to the history of philosophy and to the history of modern architecture." -- -Mark Jarzombek Massachusetts Institute of Technology " ... An interesting and thought-provoking work, one that adds to the corpus of writings on Wittgenstein's ideas about architecture and aesthetics." -Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics "Accessible...Brings forward the virtues of applied abstraction through keen and historical treatment of both the writings and the Stonborough project." -- -Tom Conley Harvard University "A strikingly brilliant and lucid piece of work. Last shows how Wittgenstein's entanglements of philosophy and architecture become the necessary prologue to his accomplishment in the Investigations. Wittgenstein's House takes what is often considered a marginal or extraneous interlude in his work and demonstrates how it in fact forms the indispensable pivot of a major reorientation in Wittgenstein's thought." -- -Bruce Clarke Texas Tech University " ... Reveals heretofore unseen and unsuspected edifying relations between architecture and philosophy and their distinctive ways of seeing and thinking." -Postmodern Culture "A noteworthy synthesis of Wittgenstein's philosophy with the subject of architecture." -wittgenstein-news.org

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Book SynopsisMusical understanding has evolved dramatically, principally through an appreciation of musical meaning in its social, cultural, and philosophical dimensions. This book examines the open and active circle between the values and valuations placed on music by individuals and societies, and the discovery, through music, of what and how to value.Trade Review"With star turn after star turn, Musical Meaning and Human Values unleashes a vast sprawl of keywords-Fantasy, Devotion, Performance, Eden, Evil, Law, Nature, Modernity-into an adventurous variety of musics and critical maneuvers, including close readings, open analyses, transdisciplinary encounters, Narratives Lost and Found. Rarely does a collection of essays so diverse stay so closely in tune with itself: the hermeneutic enterprise as realized by Lawrence Kramer over the past quarter century still exerts gravity enough to allow these lively spirits their multifarious orbits." -- -Scott Burnham Princeton University "Musical Meaning and Human Values is a stimulating and multihued collection that will be valuable to anyone engaged in criticism. Its essays together offer ample demonstration that, as one of its editors says, "making music is always making values," whether in sixteenth-century madrigals, in recordings of Brahms, or hidden unexpectedly in "embarrasing" half-forgotten works. While variously exploring the meanings of "fantasy," or of nature as a cultural construct, or of music's own judgment of evil characters represented on stage, at the same time the volume contemplates aspects of modernity along the way, illuminating many of the values the essays explore." -- -Ruth A. Solie editor of Musicology and Difference, author of Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations "... This interesting collection focuses on the inherent value and meaning within music and examines topics such as how music produces value and what the editors label 'moments of transformative reflection... An interesting and unusual collection indeed. Recommended." -Choice "This remarkable collection of essays, which grew out of a symposium on Lawrence Kramer's work, shares his bold vision of musicology as an enterprise rooted in the world of human interactions, alert to the historical constitution of meaning while avoiding historicist relativism. Although traditional aesthetics had linked works of art to human values by portraying the beautiful as a symbol of the morally good, these essays complicate that linkage by seeing the construction of values as a site of ambivalence and contestation. The interdisciplinary scope of the essays will appeal to readers far beyond the confines of any single field." -- -Kevin Korsyn Author of Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research "A precious contribution to both music and letters that transends purely musical concerns." -- -Byron Adams University of California, Riverside "Brings to fruition the advances in richness and complexity in our thinking about music for which over two decades of groundbreaking scholarship in the New Musicology have prepared the field." -- -Gary C. Thomas University of Minnesota

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Book SynopsisMusical understanding has evolved dramatically, principally through an appreciation of musical meaning in its social, cultural, and philosophical dimensions. This book examines the open and active circle between the values and valuations placed on music by individuals and societies, and the discovery, through music, of what and how to value.Trade Review"With star turn after star turn, Musical Meaning and Human Values unleashes a vast sprawl of keywords-Fantasy, Devotion, Performance, Eden, Evil, Law, Nature, Modernity-into an adventurous variety of musics and critical maneuvers, including close readings, open analyses, transdisciplinary encounters, Narratives Lost and Found. Rarely does a collection of essays so diverse stay so closely in tune with itself: the hermeneutic enterprise as realized by Lawrence Kramer over the past quarter century still exerts gravity enough to allow these lively spirits their multifarious orbits." -- -Scott Burnham Princeton University "Musical Meaning and Human Values is a stimulating and multihued collection that will be valuable to anyone engaged in criticism. Its essays together offer ample demonstration that, as one of its editors says, "making music is always making values," whether in sixteenth-century madrigals, in recordings of Brahms, or hidden unexpectedly in "embarrasing" half-forgotten works. While variously exploring the meanings of "fantasy," or of nature as a cultural construct, or of music's own judgment of evil characters represented on stage, at the same time the volume contemplates aspects of modernity along the way, illuminating many of the values the essays explore." -- -Ruth A. Solie editor of Musicology and Difference, author of Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations "... This interesting collection focuses on the inherent value and meaning within music and examines topics such as how music produces value and what the editors label 'moments of transformative reflection... An interesting and unusual collection indeed. Recommended." -Choice "This remarkable collection of essays, which grew out of a symposium on Lawrence Kramer's work, shares his bold vision of musicology as an enterprise rooted in the world of human interactions, alert to the historical constitution of meaning while avoiding historicist relativism. Although traditional aesthetics had linked works of art to human values by portraying the beautiful as a symbol of the morally good, these essays complicate that linkage by seeing the construction of values as a site of ambivalence and contestation. The interdisciplinary scope of the essays will appeal to readers far beyond the confines of any single field." -- -Kevin Korsyn Author of Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research "A precious contribution to both music and letters that transends purely musical concerns." -- -Byron Adams University of California, Riverside "Brings to fruition the advances in richness and complexity in our thinking about music for which over two decades of groundbreaking scholarship in the New Musicology have prepared the field." -- -Gary C. Thomas University of Minnesota

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Book SynopsisOn the basis of a careful analysis of Olivier Messiaen's work, this book argues for a renewal of our thinking about religious music. Addressing his notion of a "hyper-religious" music of sounds and colors, it aims to show that Messiaen has broken new ground.Trade Review"Labeled "philosophy" by the publisher, this book contains neither musical examples (either in score or CD form) nor an index, but it does offer 40 pages of notes and an extensive bibliography that includes Augustine, Eduard Hanslick, Heidegger, Kant, and Kierkegaard. The writings of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Jean-Luc Marion serve as points of departure and scrutiny. Positing that listening to Messiaen's music requires more than aesthetics, theology, musicology, or theory, musicologist Sander van Maas investigates whether the "musical experience of the work of Messiaen merely results from ingenious rhetorical techniques" or whether there is something more. Is the music, as Messiaen himself believed, a "breakthrough toward the beyond" (i.e., an inner "dazzlement" or religious experience)? Or, in the contrary view, is this "breakthrough" a nonreligious "adoration of music"? According to the author, Messiaen "situates the listener at once inside and outside faith." Not meant for casual reading, the book includes sentences such as "Thinking about the phenomenon in terms of objectivity mystifies the original phenomenality of the phenomenon." Those who do embark on the book will likely find Messiaen's The Technique of My Musical Language (Eng. tr., 1956) and a CD of "La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jesus-Christ" useful aids. Summing Up: Recommended. Researchers, faculty, professionals." -Choice "A penetrating and thought-provoking exploration of what might be entailed by Messiaen's musical 'breakthrough to the beyond'. The Reinvention of Religious Music provides us with a wealth of fresh and original perspectives on this complex, endlessly fascinating musician." -- -Jeremy Begbie Duke University "In his eloquent and detailed study, van Maas discusses the theological meaning of Messiaen's music and the ways in which this unique sound world seeks to configure and even evangelize Messiaen's Christian thought. Maas presents an absorbing and provocative insight into Messiaen's faith in music that will enhance appreciation of this often misunderstood composer and his work." -- -Andrew Shenton Boston University "If the idea that religious music is a thing of the past helps you sleep better, Sander van Maas' provocative book should wake you up. Did you ever think that an ear could be circumcised? From the Bible to Messiaen and Derrida, he radically rethinks the relationships between ear and flesh." -- -Peter Szendy Universite de Paris X Nanterre "Examines the religious dimension of this composer's music." -Publishers Weekly

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"Contemporary philosophy is badly in need of a new philosophical vocabulary enabling it to shed new light on old problems. This book proves clear that no notion will be more successful here than that of the sublime. And that the sublime is best exemplified by the experience of music. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth wrote a superior book on a fascinating theme. Her book will be landmark in contemporary philosophy." -- -Frank Ankersmit University of Groningen "An excellent textbook on the complex history of the philosophical sublime and an innovative rethinking of musical aesthetics." -- -Peter Szendy University of Paris X, Nanterre "Analyzing critical and philosophical writing from the mid-eighteenth century on, Wurth moves from Burke through Kant and Schopenhauer to Lyotard to posit a complex, multifaceted notion of the sublime, citing music as its crucial source." -- -Annette Richards Cornell University "Wurth does better than merely document the history of the sublime in music. By engaging with the term in its various incarnations, she offers the reader a full sense of the complexities of the term, the scope of various theories, and finally, offers a strong theory of the postmodern sublime." -- -Benjamin Downs Music Research Forum "In the history of Western aesthetics, the beautiful and the sublime have maintained an antipodal relationship: beauty is pleasing and sublime is overpowering, with the former in a dominant position. During the 18th century that position changed because instrumental music became predominant and aestheticians increasingly noted its expressive qualities. The sonata, symphony, and many other purely instrumental forms were expanding rapidly. Without an accompanying text, this music seemed "meaningless" yet full of expressive features. For much music, the sublime might be a more adequate definition if one could expand and enhance its definition. Wurth (comparative literature, Univ. of Utrecht) traces the changing concept of sublime beginning with its classical use in pseudo-Longinus; continuing to important treatises by Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, Freidrich Nietzsche, Arthur Seidl, et al.; and on to the work of postmodernist philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard. The author presents her own theory of the sublime, using subtexts--"indeterminacy," "infinite," "irresolvability"--as guideposts not only to analysis of today's postmodern music but to music of the late-18th and particularly the 19th century. Readers should have some background in philosophy and music aesthetics to understand this study, which unfortunately lacks an index. Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. Graduate students, researchers." -Choice "Juxtaposes analysis of instrumental music against 18th-and 19th-century ideas of the infinite, the divided self, and unconscious drives." -The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Book SynopsisTrade Review" ...[The reader] will learn much about how a great thinker tries, without any technical jargon or presupposed set of common references, to approach subjects as significant and challenging as the nature of justice, love, and beauty." -- -Michael Naas DePaul University

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Book SynopsisTrade Review" ...[The reader] will learn much about how a great thinker tries, without any technical jargon or presupposed set of common references, to approach subjects as significant and challenging as the nature of justice, love, and beauty." -- -Michael Naas DePaul 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 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 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 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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