Juliette Cherbuliez
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823287826
- eISBN:
- 9780823290345
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823287826.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book explores the rhetorical, literary, and performance strategies through which violence appears and persists in early modern French tragedy, a genre long understood as passionless and refusing ...
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This book explores the rhetorical, literary, and performance strategies through which violence appears and persists in early modern French tragedy, a genre long understood as passionless and refusing all violence. The mythological figure of Medea, foreigner who massacres her brother, murders kings, burns down Corinth, and kills her own children, can serve as a paradigm for this violence. An alternative to western philosophy’s ethical paradigm of Antigone, the Medean presence offers a model of radically persistent and disruptive outsiderness—for classical theater and its wake in literary theory. In the Wake of Medea explores a range of artistic strategies integrating violence into drama: rhetorical devices like ekphrasis, dramaturgical special effects, and shifts in temporal structures. The full range of this Medean presence appears in literal treatments of Medea (Médée, La Conquête de la Toison d’Or) and in tragedies figuratively invoking a Medean presence (Hercule mourant, Phèdre, Athalie). Of interest to specialists, political theorists, and students of theater, it explores works by well-known dramaturges (Racine, Corneille) alongside a breadth of neoclassical political theater (spectacular machine plays, Neo-Stoic parables, didactic Christian theater). In the Wake recognizes the Medean force within these tragedies, while also exploring why violence remains so integral to literature and arts today.Less
This book explores the rhetorical, literary, and performance strategies through which violence appears and persists in early modern French tragedy, a genre long understood as passionless and refusing all violence. The mythological figure of Medea, foreigner who massacres her brother, murders kings, burns down Corinth, and kills her own children, can serve as a paradigm for this violence. An alternative to western philosophy’s ethical paradigm of Antigone, the Medean presence offers a model of radically persistent and disruptive outsiderness—for classical theater and its wake in literary theory. In the Wake of Medea explores a range of artistic strategies integrating violence into drama: rhetorical devices like ekphrasis, dramaturgical special effects, and shifts in temporal structures. The full range of this Medean presence appears in literal treatments of Medea (Médée, La Conquête de la Toison d’Or) and in tragedies figuratively invoking a Medean presence (Hercule mourant, Phèdre, Athalie). Of interest to specialists, political theorists, and students of theater, it explores works by well-known dramaturges (Racine, Corneille) alongside a breadth of neoclassical political theater (spectacular machine plays, Neo-Stoic parables, didactic Christian theater). In the Wake recognizes the Medean force within these tragedies, while also exploring why violence remains so integral to literature and arts today.
Galen A. Johnson, Mauro Carbone, and Emmanuel de Saint Aubert
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823288137
- eISBN:
- 9780823290376
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823288137.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
Merleau-Ponty’s Poetics of the World offers detailed studies of the philosopher’s engagements with Proust, Claudel, Claude Simon, André Breton, Mallarmé, Francis Ponge, and more. From Proust, ...
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Merleau-Ponty’s Poetics of the World offers detailed studies of the philosopher’s engagements with Proust, Claudel, Claude Simon, André Breton, Mallarmé, Francis Ponge, and more. From Proust, Merleau-Ponty developed his conception of “sensible ideas,” from Claudel, his conjoining of birth and knowledge as “co-naissance,” from Valéry came “implex” or the “animal of words” and the “chiasma of two destinies.” Thus also arise the questions of expression, metaphor, and truth and the meaning of a Merleau-Pontyan poetics. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, inseparably, a poetic of the flesh, a poetic of mystery, and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. This poetics is worked out across each co-author’s chapters in dialogue with Husserl, Walter Benjamin, Heidegger, and Sartre. A new optic proposes the conception of literature as a visual “apparatus” in relation to cinema and screens. Recent transcriptions of Merleau-Ponty’s first two 1953 courses at the Collège de France The Sensible World and the World of Expression and Research on the Literary Usage of Language, as well as the course of 1953–54, The Problem of Speech, lend timeliness, urgency and energy to this project. Our goal is to specify more precisely the delicate nature and properly philosophical function of literary works in Merleau-Ponty’s thought as the literary writer becomes a partner of the phenomenologist. Ultimately, theoretical figures that appear at the threshold between philosophy and literature enable the possibility of a new ontology. What is at stake is the very meaning of philosophy itself and its mode of expression.Less
Merleau-Ponty’s Poetics of the World offers detailed studies of the philosopher’s engagements with Proust, Claudel, Claude Simon, André Breton, Mallarmé, Francis Ponge, and more. From Proust, Merleau-Ponty developed his conception of “sensible ideas,” from Claudel, his conjoining of birth and knowledge as “co-naissance,” from Valéry came “implex” or the “animal of words” and the “chiasma of two destinies.” Thus also arise the questions of expression, metaphor, and truth and the meaning of a Merleau-Pontyan poetics. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, inseparably, a poetic of the flesh, a poetic of mystery, and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. This poetics is worked out across each co-author’s chapters in dialogue with Husserl, Walter Benjamin, Heidegger, and Sartre. A new optic proposes the conception of literature as a visual “apparatus” in relation to cinema and screens. Recent transcriptions of Merleau-Ponty’s first two 1953 courses at the Collège de France The Sensible World and the World of Expression and Research on the Literary Usage of Language, as well as the course of 1953–54, The Problem of Speech, lend timeliness, urgency and energy to this project. Our goal is to specify more precisely the delicate nature and properly philosophical function of literary works in Merleau-Ponty’s thought as the literary writer becomes a partner of the phenomenologist. Ultimately, theoretical figures that appear at the threshold between philosophy and literature enable the possibility of a new ontology. What is at stake is the very meaning of philosophy itself and its mode of expression.
Etienne Balibar
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823288564
- eISBN:
- 9780823290406
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823288564.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
Many on the Left have looked upon “universal” as a dirty word, one that signals liberalism's failure to recognize the masculinist and Eurocentric assumptions from which it proceeds. In rejecting ...
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Many on the Left have looked upon “universal” as a dirty word, one that signals liberalism's failure to recognize the masculinist and Eurocentric assumptions from which it proceeds. In rejecting universalism, we have learned to reorient politics around particulars, positionalities, identities, immanence, and multiple modernities. This book builds on these critiques of the tacit exclusions of Enlightenment thought, while at the same time working to rescue and reinvent what universal claims can offer for a revolutionary politics answerable to the common. In the contemporary quarrel of universals, the book shows, the stakes are no less than the future of our democracies. The book investigates the paradoxical processes by which the universal is constructed and deconstructed, instituted and challenged, in modern society. It shows that every statement and institution of the universal—such as declarations of human rights—carry an exclusionary, particularizing principle within themselves and that every universalism immediately falls prey to countervailing universalisms. Always equivocal and plural, the universal is thus a persistent site of conflict within societies and within subjects themselves. And yet, the book suggests, the very conflict of the universal—constituted as an ever-unfolding performative contradiction—also provides the emancipatory force needed to reinvigorate and reimagine contemporary politics and philosophy. In conversation with a range of thinkers from Marx, Freud, and Benjamin through Foucault, Derrida, and Scott, the book shows the power that resides not in the adoption of a single universalism but in harnessing the energies made available by claims to universality in order to establish a common answerable to difference.Less
Many on the Left have looked upon “universal” as a dirty word, one that signals liberalism's failure to recognize the masculinist and Eurocentric assumptions from which it proceeds. In rejecting universalism, we have learned to reorient politics around particulars, positionalities, identities, immanence, and multiple modernities. This book builds on these critiques of the tacit exclusions of Enlightenment thought, while at the same time working to rescue and reinvent what universal claims can offer for a revolutionary politics answerable to the common. In the contemporary quarrel of universals, the book shows, the stakes are no less than the future of our democracies. The book investigates the paradoxical processes by which the universal is constructed and deconstructed, instituted and challenged, in modern society. It shows that every statement and institution of the universal—such as declarations of human rights—carry an exclusionary, particularizing principle within themselves and that every universalism immediately falls prey to countervailing universalisms. Always equivocal and plural, the universal is thus a persistent site of conflict within societies and within subjects themselves. And yet, the book suggests, the very conflict of the universal—constituted as an ever-unfolding performative contradiction—also provides the emancipatory force needed to reinvigorate and reimagine contemporary politics and philosophy. In conversation with a range of thinkers from Marx, Freud, and Benjamin through Foucault, Derrida, and Scott, the book shows the power that resides not in the adoption of a single universalism but in harnessing the energies made available by claims to universality in order to establish a common answerable to difference.
Carlo Diano
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823287932
- eISBN:
- 9780823290338
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823287932.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
Carlo Diano’s Form and Event has long been known in Europe as a major work not only for classical studies but even more for contemporary philosophy. Already available in Italian, French, Spanish, and ...
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Carlo Diano’s Form and Event has long been known in Europe as a major work not only for classical studies but even more for contemporary philosophy. Already available in Italian, French, Spanish, and Greek, it appears here in English for the first time, with a substantial Introduction by Jacques Lezra that situates the book in the genealogy of modern political philosophy. Form and Event reads the two classical categories of its title phenomenologically across Aristotle, the Stoics, and especially Homer. By aligning Achilles with form and Odysseus with event, Diano links event to embodied and situated subjective experience that simultaneously finds its expression in a form that objectifies that experience. Form and event do not exist other than as abstractions for Diano but they do come together in an intermingling that Diano refers to as the “eventic form.” On Diano’s reading, eventic forms interweave subjectively situated and embodied experiences, observable in all domains of human and nonhuman life.Less
Carlo Diano’s Form and Event has long been known in Europe as a major work not only for classical studies but even more for contemporary philosophy. Already available in Italian, French, Spanish, and Greek, it appears here in English for the first time, with a substantial Introduction by Jacques Lezra that situates the book in the genealogy of modern political philosophy. Form and Event reads the two classical categories of its title phenomenologically across Aristotle, the Stoics, and especially Homer. By aligning Achilles with form and Odysseus with event, Diano links event to embodied and situated subjective experience that simultaneously finds its expression in a form that objectifies that experience. Form and event do not exist other than as abstractions for Diano but they do come together in an intermingling that Diano refers to as the “eventic form.” On Diano’s reading, eventic forms interweave subjectively situated and embodied experiences, observable in all domains of human and nonhuman life.
Jason Groves
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823288106
- eISBN:
- 9780823290475
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823288106.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Already in the nineteenth century, German-language writers were contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of the ...
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Already in the nineteenth century, German-language writers were contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of the Earth then in circulation. In The Geological Unconcious, Jason Groves traces the withdrawal of the lithosphere as a reliable setting, unobtrusive backdrop, and stable point of reference for literature written well before the current climate breakdown, let alone the technologies that could forecast those changes. Through a series of careful readings of romantic, realist, and modernist works by Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, Benjamin, and Brecht, the author traces out a geological unconscious—in other words, unthought and sometimes actively repressed geological knowledge—where it manifests in European literature and environmental thought. This inhuman horizon of reading and interpretation offers a new literary history of the Anthropocene in a period where this novel geological epoch, though arguably already underway, remains unnamed and otherwise unmarked. These close readings also unearth an entanglement of the human and the lithic in periods well before the geological turn of cotemporary cultural studies. In those depictions of human-mineral encounters on which The Geological Unconcious lingers, the minerality of the human and the minerality of the imagination becomes apparent. While The Geological Unconcious does not explicitly set out to imagine alternatives to fossil capitalism, in elaborating a range of such encounters and in registering libidinal investments in the lithosphere that extend beyond Carboniferous deposits and beyond any carbon imaginary, it points toward alternative relations with, and less destructive mobilizations of, the geologic.Less
Already in the nineteenth century, German-language writers were contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of the Earth then in circulation. In The Geological Unconcious, Jason Groves traces the withdrawal of the lithosphere as a reliable setting, unobtrusive backdrop, and stable point of reference for literature written well before the current climate breakdown, let alone the technologies that could forecast those changes. Through a series of careful readings of romantic, realist, and modernist works by Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, Benjamin, and Brecht, the author traces out a geological unconscious—in other words, unthought and sometimes actively repressed geological knowledge—where it manifests in European literature and environmental thought. This inhuman horizon of reading and interpretation offers a new literary history of the Anthropocene in a period where this novel geological epoch, though arguably already underway, remains unnamed and otherwise unmarked. These close readings also unearth an entanglement of the human and the lithic in periods well before the geological turn of cotemporary cultural studies. In those depictions of human-mineral encounters on which The Geological Unconcious lingers, the minerality of the human and the minerality of the imagination becomes apparent. While The Geological Unconcious does not explicitly set out to imagine alternatives to fossil capitalism, in elaborating a range of such encounters and in registering libidinal investments in the lithosphere that extend beyond Carboniferous deposits and beyond any carbon imaginary, it points toward alternative relations with, and less destructive mobilizations of, the geologic.
Ann Laura Stoler, Stathis Gourgouris, and Jacques Lezra (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823288519
- eISBN:
- 9780823290482
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823288519.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
This volume, the first sustained critical work on the writing of the French political philosopher Etienne Balibar, collects essays by sixteen prominent philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, ...
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This volume, the first sustained critical work on the writing of the French political philosopher Etienne Balibar, collects essays by sixteen prominent philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics who each identify, define, and explore a central concept in Balibar’s thought. The contributors examine “Balibar and the Philosophy of the Concept” (Warren Montag), “Anthropological” (Bruce Robbins), “Border-concept” (Stathis Gourgouris), “Civil Religion” (Judith Butler), “Concept” (Etienne Balbar), “Contre- / Counter-” (Bernard E. Harcourt), “Conversion” (Monique David-Ménard), “Cosmopolitics” (Emily Apter), “Interior Frontiers” (Ann Laura Stoler), “Materialism” (Patrice Maniglier), “The Political” (Adi Ophir), “Punishment” (Didier Fassin), “Race” (Hanan Elsayed), “Relation” (Jacques Lezra), “Rights” (J.M. Bernstein), and “Solidarity” (Gary Wilder). The result is a hybrid lexicon-engagement that makes clear the depth and importance of Balibar’s contribution to the most urgent topics in contemporary thought. Each lexical entry/essay makes a startling, novel intervention in current debates, and as a whole Thinking with Balibar offers a model of collaborative critico-political reading of great importance to global academic culture.Less
This volume, the first sustained critical work on the writing of the French political philosopher Etienne Balibar, collects essays by sixteen prominent philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics who each identify, define, and explore a central concept in Balibar’s thought. The contributors examine “Balibar and the Philosophy of the Concept” (Warren Montag), “Anthropological” (Bruce Robbins), “Border-concept” (Stathis Gourgouris), “Civil Religion” (Judith Butler), “Concept” (Etienne Balbar), “Contre- / Counter-” (Bernard E. Harcourt), “Conversion” (Monique David-Ménard), “Cosmopolitics” (Emily Apter), “Interior Frontiers” (Ann Laura Stoler), “Materialism” (Patrice Maniglier), “The Political” (Adi Ophir), “Punishment” (Didier Fassin), “Race” (Hanan Elsayed), “Relation” (Jacques Lezra), “Rights” (J.M. Bernstein), and “Solidarity” (Gary Wilder). The result is a hybrid lexicon-engagement that makes clear the depth and importance of Balibar’s contribution to the most urgent topics in contemporary thought. Each lexical entry/essay makes a startling, novel intervention in current debates, and as a whole Thinking with Balibar offers a model of collaborative critico-political reading of great importance to global academic culture.
John C. Seitz and Christine Firer Hinze (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823288359
- eISBN:
- 9780823290512
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823288359.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Philosophy of Religion
Popular interest in the kinds of conditions that make work productive, growing media attention to the grinding cycle of poverty, and the widening sense that consumption must become sustainable and ...
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Popular interest in the kinds of conditions that make work productive, growing media attention to the grinding cycle of poverty, and the widening sense that consumption must become sustainable and just, all contribute to an atmosphere thirsty for humanistic economic analysis. This volume offers such analysis from a novel and generative diversity of vantage points, including religious and secular histories, theological ethics, and business management. In particular, Working Alternatives brings modern Roman Catholic forms of engaging with economic questions—embodied in the evolving set of documents that make up the area of “Catholic social thought”—into conversation with one another and with non-Catholic experiments in economic thought and practice. Clustered not by discipline but by their emphasis on either 1) new ways of seeing economic practice 2) new ways of valuing human activity, or 3) implementation of new ways of working, the volume’s essays facilitate the necessarily interdisciplinary thinking demanded by the complexities of economic sustainability and justice. Collectively, the works gathered here assert and test a challenging and far-reaching hypothesis: economic theories, systems, and practices—ways of conceiving, organizing and enacting work, management, supply, production, exchange, remuneration, wealth, and consumption—rely on basic, often unexamined, presumptions about human personhood, relations, and flourishing.Less
Popular interest in the kinds of conditions that make work productive, growing media attention to the grinding cycle of poverty, and the widening sense that consumption must become sustainable and just, all contribute to an atmosphere thirsty for humanistic economic analysis. This volume offers such analysis from a novel and generative diversity of vantage points, including religious and secular histories, theological ethics, and business management. In particular, Working Alternatives brings modern Roman Catholic forms of engaging with economic questions—embodied in the evolving set of documents that make up the area of “Catholic social thought”—into conversation with one another and with non-Catholic experiments in economic thought and practice. Clustered not by discipline but by their emphasis on either 1) new ways of seeing economic practice 2) new ways of valuing human activity, or 3) implementation of new ways of working, the volume’s essays facilitate the necessarily interdisciplinary thinking demanded by the complexities of economic sustainability and justice. Collectively, the works gathered here assert and test a challenging and far-reaching hypothesis: economic theories, systems, and practices—ways of conceiving, organizing and enacting work, management, supply, production, exchange, remuneration, wealth, and consumption—rely on basic, often unexamined, presumptions about human personhood, relations, and flourishing.
Michelle Neely
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823288229
- eISBN:
- 9780823290307
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823288229.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Against Sustainability responds to twenty-first-century environmental crisis not by seeking the origins of U.S. environmental problems, but by returning to the nineteenth-century literary, cultural, ...
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Against Sustainability responds to twenty-first-century environmental crisis not by seeking the origins of U.S. environmental problems, but by returning to the nineteenth-century literary, cultural, and scientific contexts that gave rise to many of our most familiar environmental solutions. In readings that juxtapose antebellum and contemporary writers such as Walt Whitman and Lucille Clifton, George Catlin and Louise Erdrich, and Herman Melville and A. S. Byatt, the book reconnects sustainability, recycling, and preservation with nineteenth-century U.S. contexts such as industrial farming, consumerism, slavery, and settler colonial expansion. These readings demonstrate that the paradigms explored are compromised in their attempts to redress environmental degradation because they simultaneously perpetuate the very systems that generate the degradation to begin with. Alongside the chapters that focus on defamiliarization and critique are chapters that reveal that the nineteenth century also gave rise to more unusual and provisional environmentalisms. These chapters offer alternatives to the failed paradigms of recycling and preservation, exploring Henry David Thoreau’s and Emily Dickinson’s joyful, anti-consumerist frugality and Hannah Crafts’s and Harriet Wilson’s radical pet keeping model of living with others. The coda considers zero waste and then contrasts sustainability with functional utopianism, an alternative orienting paradigm that might more reliably guide mainstream U.S. environmental culture toward transformative forms of ecological and social justice. Ultimately, Against Sustainability offers novel readings of familiar literary works that demonstrate how U.S. nineteenth-century literature compels us to rethink our understandings of the past in order to imagine other, more just and environmentally-sound futures.Less
Against Sustainability responds to twenty-first-century environmental crisis not by seeking the origins of U.S. environmental problems, but by returning to the nineteenth-century literary, cultural, and scientific contexts that gave rise to many of our most familiar environmental solutions. In readings that juxtapose antebellum and contemporary writers such as Walt Whitman and Lucille Clifton, George Catlin and Louise Erdrich, and Herman Melville and A. S. Byatt, the book reconnects sustainability, recycling, and preservation with nineteenth-century U.S. contexts such as industrial farming, consumerism, slavery, and settler colonial expansion. These readings demonstrate that the paradigms explored are compromised in their attempts to redress environmental degradation because they simultaneously perpetuate the very systems that generate the degradation to begin with. Alongside the chapters that focus on defamiliarization and critique are chapters that reveal that the nineteenth century also gave rise to more unusual and provisional environmentalisms. These chapters offer alternatives to the failed paradigms of recycling and preservation, exploring Henry David Thoreau’s and Emily Dickinson’s joyful, anti-consumerist frugality and Hannah Crafts’s and Harriet Wilson’s radical pet keeping model of living with others. The coda considers zero waste and then contrasts sustainability with functional utopianism, an alternative orienting paradigm that might more reliably guide mainstream U.S. environmental culture toward transformative forms of ecological and social justice. Ultimately, Against Sustainability offers novel readings of familiar literary works that demonstrate how U.S. nineteenth-century literature compels us to rethink our understandings of the past in order to imagine other, more just and environmentally-sound futures.
John J. Thatamanil
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823288526
- eISBN:
- 9780823290314
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823288526.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
Christian theologians have, for some decades, affirmed that they have no monopoly on encounter with God or ultimate reality; other religions also have access to religious truth and transformation. If ...
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Christian theologians have, for some decades, affirmed that they have no monopoly on encounter with God or ultimate reality; other religions also have access to religious truth and transformation. If so, the time has come for Christians not just to learn about but also from their religious neighbors. Circling the Elephant affirms that the best way to move toward the mystery of divinity is to move toward the mystery of the neighbor. In this book, Thatamanil employs the ancient Indian allegory of the elephant and blindfolded men to argue for the integration of three, often-separated theological projects: theologies of religious diversity, comparative theology, and constructive theology. Circling the Elephant also offers an analysis of why we have fallen short in the past. Interreligious learning has been obstructed by problematic ideas about “religion” and “religions.” Thatamanil also notes troubling resonances between reified notions of “religion” and “race.” He contests these notions and offers a new theory of the religious that makes interreligious learning both possible and desirable. Christians have much to learn from their religious neighbors, even about such central features of Christian theology as Christ and Trinity. This book proposes a new theology of religious diversity, one that opens the door to true interreligious learning.Less
Christian theologians have, for some decades, affirmed that they have no monopoly on encounter with God or ultimate reality; other religions also have access to religious truth and transformation. If so, the time has come for Christians not just to learn about but also from their religious neighbors. Circling the Elephant affirms that the best way to move toward the mystery of divinity is to move toward the mystery of the neighbor. In this book, Thatamanil employs the ancient Indian allegory of the elephant and blindfolded men to argue for the integration of three, often-separated theological projects: theologies of religious diversity, comparative theology, and constructive theology. Circling the Elephant also offers an analysis of why we have fallen short in the past. Interreligious learning has been obstructed by problematic ideas about “religion” and “religions.” Thatamanil also notes troubling resonances between reified notions of “religion” and “race.” He contests these notions and offers a new theory of the religious that makes interreligious learning both possible and desirable. Christians have much to learn from their religious neighbors, even about such central features of Christian theology as Christ and Trinity. This book proposes a new theology of religious diversity, one that opens the door to true interreligious learning.
Julie Beth Napolin
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823288175
- eISBN:
- 9780823290468
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823288175.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The Fact of Resonance returns to the imperial and colonial contexts in which Anglophone and francophone narrative theory developed, seeking an alternative sonic premise for theorizing narrative form. ...
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The Fact of Resonance returns to the imperial and colonial contexts in which Anglophone and francophone narrative theory developed, seeking an alternative sonic premise for theorizing narrative form. The exclusion of postcolonial sound and acoustics is foundational not only to modernist studies, but to narrative theory, novel theory, and the strains of film theory they orient. The study is primarily focused on Joseph Conrad and concerns the bearing of his multilingual formation and attunement to the gender and race of sound in colonial encounter. To return to Conrad is to return to the repressed of colonial sound. Bringing new methodologies of sound studies and postcolonial studies to bear upon older models of narrative and close reading, the book argues the novel to be a sound technology. This technology captures not “facts,” but a fact of resonance, which is both a physical sound and a strategy of relation across difference. The book develops a methodology of reading for resonance, while also developing a vocabulary for the acoustic unconscious of texts. These readings focus on the way that imaginary sound and voice circulate within and between texts, from page to psyche, from colonial site to metropole, and across race and gender. The book follows the resonances between Conrad and a series of writers and artists, including Chantal Akerman, Walter Benjamin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, and William Faulkner. Ultimately, the transatlantic and transpacific are resonance, less a place than an event.Less
The Fact of Resonance returns to the imperial and colonial contexts in which Anglophone and francophone narrative theory developed, seeking an alternative sonic premise for theorizing narrative form. The exclusion of postcolonial sound and acoustics is foundational not only to modernist studies, but to narrative theory, novel theory, and the strains of film theory they orient. The study is primarily focused on Joseph Conrad and concerns the bearing of his multilingual formation and attunement to the gender and race of sound in colonial encounter. To return to Conrad is to return to the repressed of colonial sound. Bringing new methodologies of sound studies and postcolonial studies to bear upon older models of narrative and close reading, the book argues the novel to be a sound technology. This technology captures not “facts,” but a fact of resonance, which is both a physical sound and a strategy of relation across difference. The book develops a methodology of reading for resonance, while also developing a vocabulary for the acoustic unconscious of texts. These readings focus on the way that imaginary sound and voice circulate within and between texts, from page to psyche, from colonial site to metropole, and across race and gender. The book follows the resonances between Conrad and a series of writers and artists, including Chantal Akerman, Walter Benjamin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, and William Faulkner. Ultimately, the transatlantic and transpacific are resonance, less a place than an event.
John Fante's Ask the Dust
Noir Affect
Radical Ambivalence
Textures of the Ordinary
Uniquely Okinawan
Urban Formalism
