Description
Book SynopsisIn Literature and the Encounter with Immanence Brynnar Swenson collects nine original essays that approach the relationship between literature and immanence through methodologies grounded in the philosophy of Spinoza. One of Spinoza’s most provocative claims is a simple declaration of ignorance: “We do not know what a body can do.” A literary theory based on immanence privileges the ontological status of the text and the material act of reading. Rather than ask what a text means, the essays here ask what a text can do. Each essay documents a distinct literary and philosophical encounter with immanence and, as a result, opens up a space to read literature as one would read philosophy and vice versa.
Table of ContentsReading the Encounter: An Introduction Brynnar Swenson 1. ’We’ve been inside what we wanted all along’: David Foster Wallace’s Immanent Structures Jeff Severs 2. Suffering Immanence in Beckett’s The Unnamable Christopher Langlois 3. Immanence with a (Negative) Difference: Spinoza, Borges, and Barth Zachary Tavlin 4. Explosions in the Family Theater: A Schizoanalytic reading of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day Emaline Friedman and Hans Skott-Myhre 5. Immanent Realism: Time and the Corporate Form in William Gaddis’s JR Brynnar Swenson 6. Peace and Love (and Fuck) as the Foundation of the World: Spinoza’s Ethics in Samuel Delany’s Through the Valley of the Nest of the Spiders Stephen Zepke 7. The Wanderings of Displaced Memory: Immanence in the Essays of Czeslaw Milosz Ignas Kalpokas 8. A Voyage in Immanence: The Particular Case of Fernando Pessoa’s Alberto Caeiro Bartholomew Ryan 9. ’One Kind of Knowledge’: Poetic Language, Human Being, and Immanent Truth Johanna Skibsrud, University of Arizona
