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An examination of the ways major novels by Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf draw attention to their embodiment in the object of the book, The Death of the Book considers how bookish format plays a role in some of the twentieth century’s most famous literary experiments. Tracking the passing of time in which reading unfolds, these novels position the book’s so-called death in terms that refer as much to a simple description of its future vis-à-vis other media forms as to the sense of finitude these books share with and transmit to their readers.

“Cruelty” is intuitively recognized by readers as a theme and even a dramatic kernel of literary works, especially in portrayals of human interaction. Philosophers have proposed that literature is uniquely suited for examining the problem of cruelty, suggesting that it cannot be accommodated by abstract or idealizing system. What if, however, cruelty in modern literature possesses a specific form? This book elucidates that essential structure. Beginning with an overview of the historical development of the concept, it argues that the post-Enlightenment model of cruelty manifests a new and determinate outline. The two major cultural legacies of late eighteenth-century revolutionary upheaval, French and American, reveal a direct contrast, as well as important instances of entwinement, in modes of confrontation with (or suppression of) cruelty. The relationship of exchange and divergence between them uncovers the modern shape of the phenomenon. Tracing its unfolding generates a definitive understanding of classic texts (by, among others, Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Herman Melville, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Antonin Artaud) and of key theoretical frameworks from psychoanalysis to the urgent political interventions of contemporary critical and cultural theory. This study uncovers the distance between quotidian assumptions about cruelty and its philosophical, historical, and cultural variants, and identifies its driving mechanism as a literary effect.

This book examines the writing of catastrophe, mass death, and collective loss in 20th-century literature and criticism. With particular focus on texts by Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and W.G. Sebald, the book engages the century's signal preoccupation with world-ending, a mixed rhetoric of totality and rupture, finitude and survival, the end and its posthumous remainders. Fascinated with the threat of apocalypse, the century proliferates the spectacle of world-ending as a form of desire, an ambivalent compulsion to consume and outlive the end of all. In conversation with recent discussions of the century's passion for the real, and taking on the century's late aesthetics of subtraction, the book reads the century's obsession with negative forms of ending and outcome. Drawing connections between the current interest in the category of trauma and the tradition of the sublime, it reframes the terms of the modernist experiment and its aesthetics of the breaking-point from the lens of a late sublime.

This book marks out a modernist counter-tradition. The book proceeds from an anachronism common to Italian- and English-language literature and cinema: a fascination with outmoded, paradigmatically pre-modern educational forms that persists long after they are displaced in modernizing, reform-minded pedagogical theories. Old Schools shows that these old-school teaching techniques organize key works by Walter Pater, Giovanni Pascoli, James Joyce, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Glauber Rocha. All of these figures oppose ideologies of progress by returning to and creatively reimagining the Latin class long since left behind by progressive educators. Across the political spectrum, advocates of progressive education, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to John Dewey and Giovanni Gentile, had targeted Latin in particular. The dead language—taught through time-tested techniques including memorization, recitation, copying out, and other forms of repetition and recall—needed to be updated or eliminated, reformers argued, so that students could breathe free and become modern, achieving a break with convention and constraint. By contrast, the works that Old Schools considers valorize instruction’s outmoded techniques, even at their most cumbersome and conventional. Like the Latin class to which they return, these works produce constraints that feel limiting but that, by virtue of that very limitation, invite valuable resistance. As they turn grammar drills into verse and repetitious lectures into voiceovers, they find unlikely resources for creativity and critique in the very practices that progressive reformers sought to clear away.

This book shows how American literary culture in the first half of the twentieth century saw “irony” emerge as a term to describe intersections between aesthetic and political practices. Against conventional associations of irony with political withdrawal, the book demonstrates how the term circulated widely in literary and popular culture to describe politically engaged forms of writing. It is a critical commonplace to acknowledge the difficulty of defining irony before stipulating a particular definition as a stable point of departure for literary, cultural, and political analysis; this book derives definitions of irony inductively from its widespread use within modernist literature and culture. In doing so, the book situates irony’s philosophical history within an aesthetic vocabulary to show how writers employed “irony” as a keyword both before, during, and in opposition to the institutionalization of New Criticism. The book focuses on irony both as a literary and philosophical mode and also as a subject and object of discourse; therefore, chapters focus on writers who not only composed ironic texts, but who talked about irony and satire to situate their work politically: Randolph Bourne, Benjamin De Casseres, Ellen Glasgow, John Dos Passos, Kenneth Burke, Ralph Ellison, and many others. While changing conventional wisdom about irony’s salient role in literary modernism, the book also argues that current debates about irony are best be understood as proxy debates about aesthetic politics, which dismiss a vital strain of non-electoral political action from literary, cultural, and political history.

This book offers a new interpretation of the links between literature, ethics, and philosophy in Beckett’s works. It surveys the entire corpus with a focus on the post-war period, when Beckett found a wider audience and broke from his mentors Joyce and Proust. Beckett’s decision to write in French, and his subsequent bilingualism, were no accidents but followed a program placing him among post-war writers who rejected Sartre and developed a “writing degree zero” as offering a post-Holocaust literary expression. Two philosophers examined in this historical context are Adorno and Badiou. If they often contradict each other, they converge on many points: Adorno sees that one can be a poet after Auschwitz; Badiou grasps how one can combine beautiful forms and a reduction of life to its generic essentials. For both, Beckett offers a lesson in courage, showing that life is worth living in spite of innumerable reasons to despair. The theme of animals permits a further exploration of life reduced to survival. A red thread comes from Beckett’s friendship with Bataille and their fascination with the Marquis de Sade. Both debunk post-war humanism. Bataille’s philosophy of the Impossible, of excess and transgression, was rephrased in a muted manner by Beckett who preferred Dante, Descartes, Geulincx, Kant and Freud to sketch an ethics of humility. All the while, his works are marked by an inimitable sense of metaphysical comedy that creates an infectious and enduring laughter.