Search results for ""author tilottama rajan""

Tilottama Rajan illuminates a crisis of representation within romanticism, evident in the proliferation of stylistically and structurally unsettled literary texts that resist interpretation in terms of a unified meaning. The Supplement of Reading investigates the role of the reader both in romantic literary texts and in the hermeneutic theory that has responded to and generated such texts. Rajan considers how selected works by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft explore the problem of understanding in relation to interpretive difference, including the differences produced by gender, class, and history.

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This book disentangles two terms that were conflated in the initial Anglo-American appropriation of French theory: deconstruction and poststructuralism. Focusing on Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard (but also considering Levinas, Blanchot, de Man, and others), it traces the turn from a deconstruction inflected by phenomenology to a poststructuralism formed by the rejection of models based on consciousness in favor of ones based on language and structure. The book provides a wide-ranging and complex genealogy of French theory from the 1940s onward, placing particular emphasis on the largely neglected early work of the theorists involved and on deconstruction's continuing relevance. The author argues that deconstruction is a form of radical, antiscientific modernity: an interdisciplinary reconfiguration of philosophy as it confronted the positivism of the human sciences in the 1960s. By contrast, poststructuralism is a type of postmodern theory inflected by changes in technology and the mode of information. Inasmuch as poststructuralism is founded upon its "constitutive loss" of phenomenology (in Judith Butler's phrase), the author is also concerned with the ways phenomenology (particularly Sartre's forgotten but seminal Being and Nothingness) is remembered, repeated in different ways, and never quite worked through in its theoretical successors. Thus the book also exemplifies a way of reading intellectual history that is not only concerned with the transmission of concepts, but also with the processes of transference, mourning, and disavowal that inform the relationships between bodies of thought.

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Often identified with its lyric poetry, Romanticism has come to be dismissed by historicists as an ineffectual idealism. By focusing on Romantic narrative, noted humanist Tilottama Rajan takes issue with this identification, as well as with the equation of narrative itself with the governmental apparatus of the Novel. Exploring the role of narrativity in the works of Romantic writers, Rajan also reflects on larger disciplinary issues such as the role of poetry versus prose in an emergent modernity and the place of Romanticism itself in a Victorianized nineteenth century. While engaging both genres, Romantic Narrative responds to the current critical shift from poetry to prose by concentrating, paradoxically, on a poetics of narrative in Romantic prose fiction. Rajan argues that poiesis, as a mode of thinking, is Romanticism's legacy to an age of prose. She elucidates this thesis through careful readings of Shelley's Alastor and his Gothic novels, Godwin's Caleb Williams and St. Leon, Hays' Memoirs of Emma Courtney, and Wollstonecraft's The Wrongs of Woman. Rajan, winner of the Keats-Shelley Association's Distinguished Lifetime Award and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is one of Romanticism's leading scholars. Effective, articulate, and readable, Romantic Narrative will appeal to scholars in both nineteenth-century studies and narrative theory.

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Internationally recognised scholars explore central themes and questions in Roberto Esposito's thought Helps scholars and readers of Esposito's work to understand the rich background that gives rise to and situates his bio-political works Includes an important new essay by Roberto Esposito himself that highlights the object of the his current philosophical focus: the outside of human thought Provides a rich critical assessment of Esposito's philosophical corpus, ultimately extending the philosophical debates launched by his work Gathers leading international experts including Timothy Campbell, Olga Zorzi Pugliese and Gary Genosko This collection invites readers to reposition Esposito's thought and explore the interdisciplinarity and unique methodology of his whole corpus. It addresses Esposito's long-standing engagement with early modern philosophy, philosophy of biology, biopolitics, and the impolitical and the impersonal, together with his significant dialogues with contemporary philosophers like Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Simone Weil, Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot. A new essay by Esposito himself reveals the importance of philosophical sources and ideas that condition his thinking, especially outside and beyond the dominant biopolitical interpretative framework that has come to mark his reception in the English-speaking world.

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This collection addresses Esposito's long-standing engagement with early modern philosophy, philosophy of biology, biopolitics, the impolitical and the impersonal as well as significant dialogues with contemporary philosophers like Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Simone Weil, Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot. A new essay by Esposito himself reveals the importance of philosophical sources and ideas that condition his thinking, especially outside and beyond the dominant biopolitical interpretative framework that has come to mark his reception in the English-speaking world.Readers are invited to reposition Esposito's thought and explore the interdisciplinarity and unique methodology of his whole corpus.

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William Godwin’s Mandeville was described as his best novel by Percy Shelley, who sent a copy to Lord Byron, and it was immediately recognized by its other admirers as a work of unique power. Written one year after the battle of Waterloo and set in an earlier revolutionary period between the execution of Charles I and the Restoration, Mandeville is a novel of psychological warfare. The narrative begins with Mandeville’s rescue from the traumatic aftermath of the Ulster Rebellion of 1641 and proceeds through his early education by a fanatical Presbyterian minister to his persecution at Winchester school, his constant (and not unjustified) paranoia, and his confinement in an asylum. Mandeville’s final, desperate attempt to prevent his sister’s marriage to his enemy ends with his disfiguration, which also defaces endings based on settlement or reconciliation. The novel’s events have many resonances with Godwin’s own period.The historical appendices offer contemporary reviews, including Shelley’s letter to Godwin praising Mandeville, material explaining the novel’s complex historical background, and contemporary writings on war, madness, and trauma.

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