Description
Book SynopsisThis volume demonstrates the importance of Slavoj Žižek's work to literary criticism and theory by showing how his practice of reading theory and literature can be used in numerous theoretical frameworks and applied to literature across historical periods, nationalities, and genres, creating new interpretations of familiar works.
Trade Review"A truly delightful collection of essays, bursting with fresh and genuinely interesting ideas. From the first to the last essay Zizek proves to be an unfailing source of inspiration. Rather than taking literature as the object of study, the essays-following Zizek in this approach-take it as the object with the help of which they think about various important topics and concepts. The result is a most powerful and compelling read." -- Alenka Zupancic, author of Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan "This superb collection of essays is testimony not only to the fact that Slavoj Zizek is the most profoundly original critical theorist of our time, but also to the enormously productive influence he has had on a new generation of literary critics. Beyond the sterile opposition between the so-called 'new historicism' and old 'high theory,' Zizek's thinking opens up new possibilities of theoretically informed reading, not only for the letter, but more importantly, we might say, for its Joycean 'litter,' the real." -- Kenneth Reinhard, coauthor of The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction: Did Somebody Say Žižek and
Literature? / Russell Sbriglia 1
Part I. Theory
1. Reading the Real: Žižek's Literary Materialism / Anna Kornbluh 35
2. Looking Awry: Žižek's Ridiculous Sublime / Shawn Alfrey 62
3. The Bankruptcy of Historicism: Introducing Disruption into Literary Studies / Todd McGowan 89
4. The Symptoms of Ideology Critique; or, How We Learned to Enjoy the Symptom and Ignore the Fetish / Russell Sbriglia 107
5. Concrete Universality and the End of Revolutionary Politics: A Žižekian Approach to Postcolonial Women's Writings / Jamil Khader 137
6. A Robot Runs through It: Žižek and Ecocriticism / Andrew Hageman 169
Part II. Interpretation
7. Shakespeare after Žižek: Social Antagonism and Ideological Exclusion in
The Merchant of Venice / Geoff Boucher 195
8. Beyond Symbolic Authority:
La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes and the Aesthetics of the Real / Louis-Paul Willis 222
9. Wake-Up Call: Žižek, Burroughs, and Fantasy in the Sleeper Awakened Plot / Daniel Beaumont 245
10. Courtly Love Hate Is Undead: Sadomasochistic Privilege in Chaucer's
Troilus and Criseyde / Paul Megna 267
11. The Minimal Event: Subjective Destitution in Shakespeare and Beckett / Slavoj Žižek 290
Contributors 317
Index 321
