Description
Book SynopsisChodat exposes a major shortcoming in recent accounts of twentieth-century discourse, arguing that what is often seen as the "death" of agency is better described as the displacement of agency onto new and varied entities.
Trade ReviewIntervening in debates about agency in modern thought, Robert Chodat argues that accounts of agency's dissolution in 20th-century literature and theory overlook agency's proliferation, its 'gradual displacement... onto new and varied forms.' Attuned to how language posits 'forms of life,' Chodat traces patterns of family resemblances in works by Gertrude Stein, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and Don DeLillo that ascribe sentience, even intention, to various entities, thereby expanding the sense of affective agency.... His unpolemical scholarship is primarily descriptive, not prescriptive. He favors ordinary-language accounts of agency but cogently describes complex systems-theoretical accounts confirming the relevance of autopoietics, the study of self-organizing systems, for 21st-century literary studies. Highly recommended.
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