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In a world of matter, how can we express what matters? This book examines a constellation of post-WWII authors who pose this question through both art and argument. Seeking to dramatize our highest words, these postwar sages raise essential questions about meaning, language, science, and modernity.
Arguing that Gertrude Stein's monumental novel The Making of Americans models a radically aesthetic relation to the world, E. L. McCallum demonstrates how the novel teaches us to read differently, unmaking our habits of reading. Each of the chapters works through close readings of Stein's text and a philosophical interlocutor to track a series of theoretical questions: what forms queer time, what are the limits of story, how do we feel emotion, how can we agree on a shared reality if interpretation and imagination intervene, and how do particular media shape how we convey this rich experience? The formally innovative agenda and epistemological drive of Stein's novel stages rich thought experiments that bear on questions that are central to some of the most vibrant conversations in literary studies today. In the midst of ongoing debates about the practices of reading, the difficulty of reading, and even the impossibility of reading, the moment has come to have a fuller critical engagement with this landmark novel. This book shows how.
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At the time of his death in 2007, Richard Rorty was widely acclaimed as one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers. Stanley Cavell, who has been a leading intellectual figure from the 1960s to the present, has been just as philosophically influential as Rorty though perhaps not as politically divisive. Both philosophers have developed from analytic to post-analytical thought, both move between philosophy, literature and cultural politics, and both re-establish American philosophical traditions in a new and nuanced key. The Ironist and the Romantic: Reading Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell finds the sound of Rorty's cheerful pragmatism strikingly at odds with the anxious romanticism of Cavell. Beginning from this tonal discord, and moving through comprehensive comparative analysis on the topics of scepticism, American philosophy, literature, writing style and politics, this book presents the work of its central figures in a novel and mutually illuminating perspective. Áine Mahon's unique and original comparative reading will be of interest not only to those working on Rorty and Cavell but to anyone concerned with the current state of American philosophy.
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Explores abstraction as a keyword in aesthetic modernism and in critical thinking since Marx
The definitive biography of a pivotal figure in American literary history A major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation. In this definitive biography, the first full-scale life of Dunbar in half a century, Gene Andrew Jarrett offers a revelatory account of a writer whose Gilded Age celebrity as the “poet laureate of his race” hid the private struggles of a man who, in the words of his famous poem, felt like a “caged bird” that sings. Jarrett tells the fascinating story of how Dunbar, born during Reconstruction to formerly enslaved parents, excelled against all odds to beco...
An authoritative and lively account of the development of the genre, by leading experts in the field.
Maurice Lee's study illustrates how writers such as Poe, Melville, Douglass, Thoreau, Dickinson, and others participated in a broad intellectual and cultural shift in which Americans increasingly learned to live with the threatening and wonderful possibilities of chance.