Browse

Today democracy has become fundamental. It extends increasingly deeply into everyday life; it grounds and limits our political thought and values. We can't think past or beyond it as a political or even as a social system. This is a sense in which we do indeed live at history's end. But this end is not a happy one, because the democratic system we now live in does not satisfy tests that we can legitimately put to it. In this situation, it is important to come to new terms with the fact that literature, at least until about 1945, was hostile to political democracy in particular. It continually attempted not just to resist democracy but to explore other ways of being democratic than those instituted politically. Today, Against Democracy argues, literature helps us not so much to imagine political and social possibilities beyond democracy as to understand how life might be lived simultaneously in and outside of democratic state capitalism. Drawing on political theory, intellectual history, and the techniques of close reading, Against Democracy offers new accounts of the ethos of refusing democracy, of literary criticism's contribution to that ethos, and of the history of conservative resistances to capitalism and democracy. It also proposes innovative interpretations of a range of writers, including Tocqueville, Disraeli, George Eliot, E. M. Forster, and Saul Bellow.

Amid radical transformation and rapid mutation in the nature, transmission, and deployment of information and communications, this book offers a status report and theoretically nuanced update on the traditions and medium of the book. What, it asks, are the book's current prospects? The study highlights the most radical experiments in the book's history as trials in what the author terms the Prevailing Operating System at play within the fields of knowledge, art, critique, and science. The investigations of modern systems theory, as exemplified by Gregory Bateson, Anthony Wilden, and Niklas Luhmann, turn out to be inseparable from theoretically astute inquiry into the nature of the book. The author's primary examples of such radical experiments with the history of the book are Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book (both the text and Peter Greenaway's screen adaptation), Stéphane Mallarmé's Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard, Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Jacques Derrida's Glas, Maurice Blanchot's Death Sentence, and Franz Kafka's enduring legacy within the world of the graphic novel. In the author's hands, close reading of these and related works renders definitive proof of the book's persistence and vitality. The book medium, with its inbuilt format and program, continues, he argues, to supply the tablet or screen for cultural notation. The perennial crisis in which the book seems to languish is in fact an occasion for readers to realize fully their role as textual producers, to experience the full range of liberty in expression and articulation embedded in the irreducibly bookish process of textual display.

Radical aestheticism describes a recurring event in some of the most powerful and resonating texts of nineteenth-century British literature, offering us the best way to reckon with what takes place at certain moments in texts by Shelley, Keats, Dickinson, Hopkins, Rossetti, and Wilde. This book explores what happens when these writers, deeply committed to certain versions of ethics, politics, or theology, nonetheless produce an encounter with a radical aestheticism that subjects the authors’ projects to a fundamental crisis. A radical aestheticism offers no positive claims for art, whether on ethical or political grounds or on aesthetic grounds, as in “art for art’s sake.” It provides no transcendent or underlying ground for art’s validation. In this sense, a radical aestheticism is the experience of a poesis that exerts so much pressure on the claims and workings of the aesthetic that it becomes a kind of black hole from which no illumination is possible. The radical aestheticism encountered in these writers, in its very extremity, takes us to the constitutive elements—the figures, the images, the semblances—that are at the root of any aestheticism, an encounter registered as evaporation, combustion, or undoing. It is, therefore, an undoing by and of art and aesthetic experience, one that leaves this important literary tradition in its wake. The book embraces diverse theoretical projects, from Walter Benjamin to Jacques Derrida.

In transposing the Freudian dream work from the individual subject to the collective, Walter Benjamin projected a “macroscosmic journey” of the individual sleeper to “the dreaming collective, which, through the arcades, communes with its own insides.” This book examines the figurative status of sleeping and awakening within the allegorical structure of The Arcades Project and in Benjamin’s thought more broadly. For Benjamin, memory is not antiquarian: it functions as a solicitation, a call to a collectivity to come. The motif of awakening involves a qualified but crucial performative intention that was central to Benjamin’s undertaking. Benjamin’s passages are not just the Paris arcades: they refer also to Benjamin’s effort to negotiate the labyrinth of his writings. In tracing these corridors of thought, the book treats many of Benjamin’s most important works and examines important critical questions: the interplay of aesthetics and politics, the genre of The Arcades Project, citation, language, messianism, aura and image, and the motifs of memory, the crowd, and awakening.

A unique feminist approach to the legacy of Jacques Derrida, this book provides a series of disparate readings, genres, and themes, offering a powerful reflection of love in—and as—deconstruction. Looking especially at relationships between women, the book provides a wide-ranging investigation of interpersonal relationships: the love of a teacher, the anxiety-ridden bond between a mother and daughter as manifested in anorexia, passion between two women, love after separation and in mourning, and the tension between one's self and the internalized other. Traversing each of these investigations, the text takes up Derrida's Memoires for Paul de Man and The Post Card, Lillian Hellman's famed friendship with a woman named Julia, and adaptations of the biblical “The Book of Ruth”. Above all, it is a treatise on the love of theory in the name of poetry, a passionate book on love and friendship.

No longer able to read community in terms colored by a romantic nostalgia for homogeneity, closeness and sameness, or the myth of rational choice, we nevertheless face an imperative to think the common. The prominent scholars assembled here come together to articulate community while thinking seriously about the tropes, myths, narratives, metaphors, conceits, and shared cultural texts on which any such articulation depends. The result is a major contribution to literary theory, postcolonialism, philosophy, political theory, and sociology.

Communities in Fiction reads in detail six novels or stories (one each by Trollope, Hardy, Conrad, Woolf, Pynchon, and Cervantes) by way of theories of community worked out (contradictorily) by Raymond Williams and Martin Heidegger for communities in the real world. Communities in Fiction’s topic is the question of how communities or non-communities are represented in fictional works. Such fictional communities help the reader understand real communities, including those in which the reader lives. As against the presumption that the trajectory in literature from Victorian to Modern to Postmodern is the story of a gradual loss of belief in the possibility of community, this book demonstrates that communities have always been presented in fictions as precarious and fractured. Moreover, the juxtaposition of Pynchon and Cervantes in the last chapter is in part a demonstration that period characterizations are never to be trusted. All the themes and narrative devices of Western fiction from the beginning of the print era to the present were there at the beginning, in Cervantes. Most of all, however, Communities in Fiction looks in detail at its six fictions, with entire allegiance to their texts, to see just what they say, what stories they tell, and what narratological and rhetorical devices they use to say what they do say and to tell the stories they do tell. This book attempts to express the joy of reading these works and to demonstrate the exemplary insight they provide into living in real communities that are always problematic and unstable.

Constellation: Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in the Now-Time of History is the first extended presentation of the relationship between Weimar-era revolutionary cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and the radical philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). In five chapters, the book reconstructs the changing figure of Nietzsche as Benjamin encountered him: an inspiration to his student activism, an authority for his skeptical philology, a manifestation of his philosophical nihilism, a companion in his political exile, and ultimately a subversive collaborator in his efforts to think beyond the hopeless temporality – new and always the same – of the disillusioned historical present. By carefully excavating this neglected relationship philologically and elaborating its philosophical implications in the surviving work of both thinkers, Constellation produces new and compelling readings of Benjamin and of Nietzsche and uses their writings to triangulate a theoretical limit in the present, a fractured “now-time” suspended between madness and suicide, from which the collective future regains a measure of consequential and transformative vitality.

Corporate Romanticism offers an alternative history of the connections between modernity, individualism, and the rise of the novel. In early nineteenth-century England, two developments—the rise of corporate persons and the expanded scale of industrial action—undermined the basic assumption underpinning both liberalism and the law: that individual human persons can be meaningfully correlated with specific actions and particular effects. Reading a set of important Romantic novels—Caleb Williams, Mansfield Park, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Frankenstein, and A Tale of Two Cities—alongside a wide-ranging set of debates in nineteenth-century law and Romantic politics and aesthetics, this book argues that the novel, a literary form long understood as a reflection of individualism’s ideological ascent, in fact registered the fragile fictionality of accountable individuals in a period defined by corporate actors and expansively entangled fields of action. Examining how liberalism, the law, and the novel all wrestled with the moral implications of a highly collectivized and densely packed modernity, Corporate Romanticism reconfigures our sense of the nineteenth century and its novels, arguing that we see in them not simply the apotheosis of laissez-fair individualism but the first chapter of a crucial and distinctly modern problem about how to fit the individualist and humanist terms of justice onto a world in which the most consequential agents are no longer persons.

Asking whether one can develop an approach to studying political life that reflects its heterogeneity, Jane Anna Gordon offers the creolization of political theory as a viable response. Creolization, she argues, describes mixtures that were not supposed to have emerged in the plantation societies of the Caribbean but did through their capacity to exemplify living culture, thought, and political practice. In so doing, they provide a useful way of understanding similar processes that continue today, namely of one potential outcome when people who were previously strangers find themselves as unequal co-occupants of new political locations they seek to call “home.” In demonstrating a path that is different from the one usually associated with multiculturalism, in which different cultures are thought to co-exist relatively separately and the aim is for each to tolerate the other by letting it remain in relative isolation, creolization describes how people reinterpret themselves through interaction with one another to create forms of belonging that are familiar but also distinctive and new. These are useful models for reconsidering how contemporary political solidarities could be constructed and how relationships may be forged among what have become radically separate fields for studying a shared world. Gordon demonstrates the generative capacity of creolizing methodologies through bringing together the ideas of the 18^th century revolutionary Swiss thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the 20^th century Martinican-born Algerian liberationist Frantz Fanon. Fanon, she argues, outlined a vision of how to bring into being the decolonial methodologies and democratically legitimate alternatives that Rousseau mainly imagined.

Reading is good for us. The reading of literature, we are told, enlarges our horizons, extends our experience beyond our own lives. But the moral and political dangers that attend the association of reading with experience have long been understood. And is that association even valid? What if precisely our most important literary texts are constructed so as to challenge or disrupt it? This book is a radical criticism of the concept of reading, especially of the concept of the reader, as commonly used in literary criticism. The author starts with the point that reading does not name a single, identifiable type of experience or class of experiences. He then sketches in broad terms the historical provenance of the reader, in an argument that includes discussions of Dante, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Marlowe, and German idealist philosophy. In two concluding chapters on modern German novellas, the author suggests that most major European literary works since the eighteenth century have been written in direct opposition to the central concepts by which criticism has sought to lay hold of them.

Almost all twentieth-century philosophy stresses the immanence of death-as drive, as the context of Being, as the essence of humanity's defining ethics or language. Limon makes use of literary analysis (Sebald, Bernhard, Stoppard), cultural analysis, and autobiography to argue that death is best conceived as always unfathomably beyond ourselves, neither immanent nor (in principle) imminent. Thus he rejects the courage of twentieth-century death philosophy-bravely facing death within life-as an evasion of the real inhuman facelessness of death. The two key concepts of the book are adulthood-the prolonged anti-ritual for experiencing the full distance on the look of death-and dirtiness, as theorized by a Jewish joke, a logical exemplum, and T.S. Eliot's “Ash Wednesday.” Limon throughout vouches for the mediocrity of the “They,” humanity (according to Heidegger) in its dirty and ludicrous adulthood. Mediocrity, according to Limon, is the privileged position for previewing death, practice for being forgotten.

A Desire Called America examines the relationship between American exceptionalism and U.S. literature. It focuses on how literary works by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William S. Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon draw on the utopian energies of American exceptionalism only to overturn exceptionalism’s investments in capitalism and the nation-state. The book analyzes what it terms the excluded middle between American exceptionalism and its critique, or the conceptual and libidinal space in which critique and complicity mutually determine one another. The book also offers a theory of the relationship between biopolitics and utopia, arguing that in the context of American literature, bodies become figures for alternative forms of social life. It pays particular attention to how these figures contribute to a literary commons, or the imagination of non-capitalist forms of cooperation and non-sovereign forms of democratic self-governance. In doing so, it articulates a model of literary history linking nineteenth-century literature to contemporary literature by way of the rise and decline of American hegemony. The book draws on and contributes to the fields of American Studies, American literary history, Marxist criticism, queer theory, political theory, continental philosophy, and utopian studies.

Drawing the Line examines the ways in which cultural, political, and legal lines are imagined, drawn, crossed, erased, and redrawn in post-apartheid South Africa— through literary texts, artworks, and other forms of cultural production. Under the rubric of a philosophy of the limit, and with reference to a range of signifying acts and events, this book asks what it takes to recalibrate a socio-political scene, shifting perceptions of what counts and what matters, of what can be seen and heard, of what can be valued or regarded as meaningful. The book thus argues for an aesthetics of transitional justice and makes an appeal for a post-apartheid aesthetic inquiry, as opposed to simply a political or a legal one. Each chapter brings a South African artwork, text, speech, building, or social encounter into the ambit of topical conversations in critical theory and continental philosophy, asking: What challenge do these South African acts of signification and resignification pose, and what contribution do they make to current literary-philosophical thinking?

Victorian England was both the world’s first industrial society and its most powerful global empire. Ecological Form coordinates those facts to show how one version of the Anthropocene first emerged into visibility in the nineteenth century. Many of that era’s most sophisticated observers recognized that the systemic interconnections and global scale of both empire and ecology posed challenges best examined through aesthetic form. Using “ecological formalism” to open new dimensions to our understanding of the Age of Coal, contributors reconsider Victorian literary structures in light of environmental catastrophe; coordinate “natural” questions with social ones; and underscore the category of form—as built structure, internal organizing logic, and generic code—as a means for generating environmental and therefore political knowledge. Together these essays show how Victorian thinkers deployed an array of literary forms, from the elegy and the industrial novel to the utopian romance and the scientific treatise, to think interconnection at world scale. They also renovate our understanding of major writers like Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, John Ruskin, and Joseph Conrad, even while demonstrating the centrality of less celebrated figures, including Dinabandhu Mitra, Samuel Butler, and Joseph Dalton Hooker, to contemporary debates about the humanities and climate change. As the essays survey the circuits of dispossession linking Britain to the Atlantic World, Bengal, New Zealand, and elsewhere—and connecting the Victorian era to our own—they advance the most pressing argument of Ecological Form, which is that past thought can be a resource for reimagining the present.

“Who speaks?” Core ideas of modern literary theory—the author as producer, the contingency of the text, intertextuality, the “device”—were pioneered in the reflection on oral literature. Authorless, loosely dated, and variable, oral texts have always posed a challenge to interpretation. When it began to be thought that culturally significant texts—starting with Homer and the Bible—had emerged from an oral tradition, their understanding was greatly perturbed. This book retraces the history of the hypothesis of oral composition, focusing particularly on the period when ethnographic collection of contemporary oral texts came together with sound recording and new styles of literary analysis to cast a different light on canonical works. The genealogy of the concept, closely studied, shows when and how orality came to be polemically opposed to writing. In response, oral tradition is here shown to be a means of inscription in its own right, rather than as the natural forerunner made obsolete by all media and data-storage devices. Through readings that range from ancient Greece, Rome, and China to the Cold War imaginary, The Ethnography of Rhythm situates the study of oral traditions in the contentious space of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking about language, mind, and culture. It also demonstrates the role of technologies in framing this category of poetic creation. By excavating the links among Paulhan, Jousse, Parry, Jakobson, Bogatyrev, MacLuhan, and a host of others, it makes possible a new understanding of Maussian “techniques of the body” as belonging to the domain of Derridean “arche-writing.”

The work of Samuel Weber has greatly influenced writers and thinkers across the arts and humanities: including literary, critical, and cultural theory; media, communication, theatre, and cultural studies; new media and technology; psychoanalysis; and philosophy. His remarkable and inaugural texts have been especially important to the deconstructive tradition, given his early recognition of the importance of the writings of Jacques Derrida. Taught by Theodor W. Adorno and Peter Szondi, he is equally at home in the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, in the German literary tradition, or in psychoanalysis. Weber played an important role in the process of translation, publication, and interpretation that brought theory to prominence in the United States. His work continues to reactivate and transform the legacy bequeathed to us by figures such as Kant, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger, de Man, and Derrida, not least by exposing the field of philosophy to contemporary questions in the arenas of media, technology, politics, and culture. This volume brings together a number of scholars seeking to assess the intellectual impact of Weber's large body of writings. It also contains two new and previously unpublished essays by Weber himself: “God Bless America!” and “Going Along for the Ride: Violence and Gesture.”

This book offers a dramatic new account of cultural change, an account based on the distinction between two familiar rhetorical figures, metonymy and metaphor. The book treats metonymy as the basic organizing trope of traditional culture and metaphor as the basic organizing trope of modern culture. On the one hand, metonymies present themselves as analogies that articulate or reaffirm preexisting states of affairs. They are guarantors of facticity, a term that can be translated or defined as fact-like-ness. On the other hand, metaphors challenge the similarity they claim to establish, in order to feature departures from preexisting states of affairs. On the basis of this distinction, the author argues that metaphor and metonymy can be used as instruments both for the large-scale interpretation of tensions in cultural change and for the micro-interpretation of tensions within particular texts. In addressing the functioning of the two terms, the author draws upon and critiques the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Roman Jakobson, Christian Metz, Paul Ricoeur, Umberto Eco, Edmund Leach, and Paul de Man.

What is flirtation, and how does it differ from seduction? In historical terms, the particular question of flirtation has tended to be obscured by that of seduction, which has understandably been a major preoccupation for twentieth-century thought and critical theory. Both the discourse and the critique of seduction are unified by their shared obsession with a very determinate end: power. In contrast, flirtation is the game in which no one seems to gain the upper hand and no one seems to surrender. The counter-concept of flirtation has thus stood quietly to the side, never quite achieving the same prominence as that of seduction. It is this elusive (and largely ignored) territory of playing for play's sake that is the subject of this book. This book addresses the under-theorized terrain of flirtation not as a subgenre of seduction but rather as a phenomenon in its own right. Drawing on the interdisciplinary history of scholarship on flirtation even as it re-approaches the question from a distinctly aesthetic and literary-theoretical point of view, the chapters here thus give an account of the practice of flirtation and of the figure of the flirt, taking up the act's relationship to issues of mimesis, poetic ambiguity, and aesthetic pleasure. The art of this poetic playfulness—often read or misread as flirtation's “empty gesture”—becomes suddenly legible as the wielding of a particular and subtle form of non-teleological power.

Can looking at disaster and mass death destroy us? This book provides a theory and a fragmentary history of destructive spectatorship in the twentieth century. Its subject is the notion that the sight of historical catastrophe can destroy the spectator. The fragments of this history all lead back to the story of Lot's wife: looking back at the destruction of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, she turns into a pillar of salt. This biblical story of punishment and transformation, a nexus of sexuality, sight, and cities, becomes the template for the modern fear that looking back at disaster might petrify the spectator. Although rarely articulated directly, this idea remains powerful in our culture. This book traces some of its aesthetic, theoretical, and ethical consequences. The author traces the figure of Lot's wife across media. In extended engagements with examples from twentieth-century theatre, film, and painting, he focuses on the theatrical theory of Antonin Artaud, a series of American films, and paintings by Anselm Kiefer. These examples all return to the story of Lot's wife as a way to think about modern predicaments of the spectator. On the one hand, the sometimes veiled figure of Lot's wife allows these artists to picture the desire to destroy the spectator; on the other, she stands as a sign of the potential danger to the spectator. These works, that is, enact critiques of the very desire that inspires them. The book closes with an extended meditation on September 11, criticizing the notion that we should have been destroyed by witnessing the events of that day.