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This book argues that language and literature actively produced chance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by categorizing injuries and losses as innocent of design. Automobile collisions and occupational injuries became “car accidents” and “industrial accidents.” During the post-Civil War period of racial, ethnic, and class-based hostility, chance was an abstract enemy against which society might unite. By producing chance, novels by William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Anna Katharine Green, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and James Cain documented and helped establish new modes of collective interdependence. Chance here is connected not with the competitive individualism of the Gilded Age, but with important progressive and social democratic reforms, including developments in insurance, which had long employed accident narratives to shape its own “mutual society.” This book reveals the extent to which American collectivity has depended—and continues to depend—on the literary production of chance.

How can we account, in a rigorous way, for alchemy's ubiquity? We think of alchemy as the transformation of a base material (usually lead) into gold, but “alchemy” is a word in wide circulation in everyday life, often called upon to fulfill a metaphoric duty as the magical transformation of materials. Almost every culture and time has had some form of alchemy. This book looks at alchemy, not at any one particular instance along the historical timeline, not as a practice or theory, not as a mode of redemption, but as a theoretical problem, linked to real gold and real production in the world. What emerges as the least common denominator or “intensive property” of alchemy is ambivalence, the impossible and paradoxical coexistence of two incompatible elements. The book moves from antiquity, through the golden age of alchemy in the Dutch seventeenth century, to conceptual art, to alternative fuels, stopping to think with writers such as Dante, Goethe, Hoffmann, the Grimm Brothers, George Eliot, and Marx. Eclectic and wide-ranging, it considers alchemy in relation to literary and visual theory in a comprehensive way.

This book exposes the relation between literary imagination, autonomous politics, and violence through the close analysis of literary texts—in particular Sophocles' Antigone, D. A. F. de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, and Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat—that speak to a blind spot in democratic theory, namely, how we decide democratically on the borders of our political communities. These works bear the imprint of the anxieties of democracy concerning its other—violence—especially when the question of a redefinition of membership is at stake. The book shares the philosophical interest in rethinking politics that has recently surfaced at the crossroads of literary criticism, philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. The book takes seriously the responsibility to think through and give names to the political uses of violence and to provoke useful reflection on the problem of violence as it relates to politics and on literature as it relates to its times.

This is a comparative and interdisciplinary study exploring the unexpected yet essential relationship between irony and capital in the texts of Baudelaire and Marx. It argues for the renewed relevance of their work to contemporary thinking about the place of aesthetic and cultural experience in social and political life, and articulates their poetic and philosophical innovations with their political statements. Through readings of Baudelaire's poetry and prose and Marx's Capital, this book illuminates their ongoing contribution to our understanding of themes and topics at the forefront of contemporary theoretical debate, including the effects of new technologies on the means of human action and transformation, and the prospects for community and memory under capitalism. It also revisits Walter Benjamin's interpretations of the philosopher and the poet. Rereading Baudelaire and Marx together with the unplumbed lessons of Benjamin's interpretations, the book contributes to a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on the political dimensions and effects of language, and to the current rethinking, in Marxist and post-Marxist theory, of conceptions of political time and agency.

This study begins by surveying and critiquing previous attempts to define a common denominator unifying the various modern Jewish literatures. The book argues that these prior efforts have all been trapped by the need to see these literatures as a continuum. It seeks to break through this impasse by acknowledging discontinuity as the staple characteristic of modern Jewish writing. These literatures instead form a complex of independent, yet touching, components related through contiguity. This book offers original insights into modern Hebrew, Yiddish, and other Jewish literatures, including a new interpretation of Franz Kafka's place within them and discussions of Sholem Aleichem, Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, Akhad ha'am, M. Y. Berditshevsky, Kh. N. Bialik, and Y. L. Peretz.

Impossible Modernism reveals in the modernism of T.S. Eliot and Walter Benjamin a shared project: both authors sought to resist the forms of narrating events that had been codified by academic historians during the nineteenth century; and both sought to re-envision the possibilities of historical representation by turning to specifically literary devices. Tracing the fraught relationship between poetry and history back to Aristotle’s Poetics and forward to Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, the book begins by establishing the coordinates of the intellectual-historical problem that Eliot and Benjamin would inherit. Turning to Eliot and Benjamin, it discovers in their major works—Eliot’s poetic experiments from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to The Waste Land, and Benjamin’s critical writings from “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy” to The Arcades Project—alternative models for imagining the shape of historical time and the possibility of historical change, models derived from literary forms such as lyric, satire, anecdote, allegory, and myth. The book thus cuts across debates over the autonomy of the aesthetic, the political investment of modernism, and the relative merits of formalist or historicist reading practices so as to develop an original understanding of the familiar incitement to “make it new.”

This book comprehensively redefines literary primitivism, arguing that it was an aesthetic project formed in reaction to the high point of imperialist expansion at the start of the twentieth century. As those spaces in which “primitive” forms of existence were imagined to be possible were either directly colonized or otherwise forcibly integrated into a geographically totalized capitalist world-system, so dissenting writers responded by trying to reawaken primitive experience by means of literary practice. This thesis breaks with the orthodox understanding of primitivism as a transhistorical tendency according to which the “civilized” idealize the “primitive,” something that is usually thought to correspond to a binary of the “West” and its “Others.” Adopting the “point of view of totality,” Literary Primitivism argues that it was artists from peripheral societies who most energetically pursued primitivism’s project of immediacy as it was they who most keenly felt the loss of unalienated social worlds. The major debates are reviewed concerning primitivism and the thinkers, artists, and concept--including expressionism, modernism, surrealism, Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Luxemburg, the writers of négritude, Carl Einstein, the Frankfurt School, and Alain Locke. In close studies of the work of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, D. H. Lawrence, and Claude McKay the book identifies a morphology of literary primitivism that centers on the literary activation of the primitive remnant. Along the way, the book reassesses the politics of primitivism, especially with regard to its decolonial horizon, and the prospects for understanding literary primitivism as an event of world literature.

Characters” are those fictive beings in novels whose coherent patterns of behavior make them credible as people. “Character” is also used to refer to the capacity—or incapacity—to sustain one's core principles. What is behind this esteem for unwavering consistency? Fitful Character examines literary characters who test and defy our culture's models of personal integrity. It argues that modernist writers Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot challenge conventional literary, moral, and even psychoanalytic conceptions of character, which encourage the false equation of moral integrity with consistency. Rather than regarding a rigid character as something that inoculates us against the shifting tides of circumstance, James, Stein, and Eliot thought that our ethical existence consists in forming vigorous, dynamic social relationships and learning how to adapt and thrive in a world of mutability. These modernists take inspiration from vitalist psychology, which enabled them to rethink their approach to presenting literary characters. The book draws out Bergson's understanding of psychology and perception, which provide for powerfully new languages for conceptualizing the situational and relational bases of selfhood. Along with William James, Darwin, and Nietzsche, Bergson is obsessed with the question of how to think about life. The modernist writers that these intellectual figures stirred give us sense of what life—particularly psychic life—looks like at its most intricate, complex, and unpredictable.

This book deals with the complex interface between literature and life through the prism of the lives and works of three poets: the German-Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor, Paul Celan (1920–1970); the Leningrad native, U.S. poet laureate, and Nobel Prize winner, Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996); and Germany's premier contemporary poet, Durs Grünbein (born 1962). Focusing on their poetic dialogues with such interlocutors as Shakespeare, Seneca, and Byron, respectively—veritable love affairs unfolding in and through poetry—the author offers readings of Celan's, Brodsky's, and Grünbein's lives and works, and discloses the ways in which poetry articulates and remains faithful to the manifold “truths”—historical, political, poetic, erotic—determining human existence.

This book provides a study of linguistic force and its influence on poetry in the nineteenth century. The idea of poetic force can be traced ultimately to a thesis implicit in Kantian philosophy: that of an a priori capacity of language to free itself from having empirical content. This linguistic capacity, which is derived indirectly from a cognitive incapacity occasioned by spectacles of dynamic sublimity, emerges as a key motif or theme in Kant's thinking. But the very ability to communicate or produce the feeling of this force of language is also accompanied by an unforce that must be felt in Kant's writing even as it remains (perhaps aptly) unstressed. In this sense the productivity of the poetic force emerging in Kantian philosophy is haunted by the unproductivity of apoetic unforce. After drawing out this theory of force and unforce, in particular on the basis of Walter Benjamin's reinterpretation of Kantian aesthetics and moral philosophy, the main chapters of this book go on to trace this dynamic in the writing of three poets working in diverse languages and different intellectual contexts more or less directly influenced by Kantian philosophy: Friedrich HÖlderlin, Charles Baudelaire, and Matthew Arnold.

This book seeks to find the premises for dialogue between cultures, especially religious fundamentalisms—including Islamic fundamentalism—and modern Western secularism. It argues that in order to be genuinely open, dialogue needs to accept possibilities such as religious apocalypse in ways which can be best understood through the experience of poetry. The author reads Christian epic and prophetic tradition as a secularization of religious revelation that preserves an understanding of the essentially apocalyptic character of truth and its disclosure in history. The usually neglected negative theology that undergirds this apocalyptic tradition provides the key to a radically new view of apocalypse as at once religious and poetic.

This book is devoted to the major American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962). Jeffers, the best known poet of California and the American West, particularly valorized the Big Sur region, making it his own as Frost did New England and Faulkner, Mississippi, and connecting it to the wider tradition of the American sublime in Emerson, Thoreau, and John Muir. The book also links Jeffers to a Puritan sublime in early American verse and explores his response to the Darwinian and Freudian revolutions and his engagement with modern astronomy. This discussion leads to a broad consideration of Jeffers' focus on the figure of Christ as emblematic of the human aspiration toward God—a God whom Jeffers defines not in Christian terms, but in those of an older materialist pantheism and of modern science. The later sections of the book develop a conspectus of the democratic sublime that addresses American exceptionalism through the prism of Jeffers' Jeffersonian ethos. A final chapter places Jeffers' poetic thought in the larger cosmological perspective he sought in his late works.

This book argues that the uniquely human phenomenon of representation, as manifested in language, art, and ritual, is a scenic event focused on a central object designated by a sign. The originary hypothesis posits the necessity of conceiving the origin of the human as such an event. In traditional societies, the scenic imagination through which this scene of origin is conceived manifests itself in sacred creation narratives. Modern thought is defined by the independent use of the scenic imagination to create anthropological models of the origin of human institutions, beginning with the social contract scene in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan that puts an end to the reciprocal violence of the state of nature. The book follows the work of the scenic imagination in selected writings of twenty thinkers including John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Emile Durkheim, Franz Boas, and Sigmund Freud, and concludes with a critical examination of contemporary writing on the origins of religion and language. In the process, it demonstrates that the originary hypothesis offers the most cohesive explanation of the origin and function of these fundamental institutions.

This book offers a new reading of early modern romance in the light of historically contemporary accounts of mind, and specifically the medical tradition of love-melancholy. It argues that the medical profile of the melancholic lover provides an essential context for understanding the characteristic patterns of romance: narrative deferral, epistemological uncertainty, and the endless quest for a quasi-phantasmic beloved. The book establishes a detailed historical basis for investigating the psychological structure of romance. It begins by tracing the development of the medical disorder first known in the Latin west as amor hereos (lovesickness) from its earliest roots in Greek and Arabic medicine to its translation into the Latin medical tradition. Drawing on this detailed historical material, the book considers three important early modern romances: Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, concluding with a brief consideration of the significance of this literary and medical legacy for Romanticism. Most broadly, the interdisciplinary nature of this study allows the author to investigate the central critical problem of early modern subjectivity in new ways.

The history of Asian American literature reveals the ongoing attempt to work through the fraught relationship between identity politics and literary representation. This relationship is especially evident in literary works which claim that their content represents the socio-historical world. This book argues that the reframing of the field as a critical, rather than identity-based, project nonetheless continues to rely on the logics of identity. Drawing on the writings of philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukacs, it identifies a persistent composite figure that it calls the “idealized critical subject,” which provides coherence to oppositional knowledge projects and political practices. It reframes identity as an aesthetic figure that tries to articulate the subjective conditions for knowledge. Harnessing Theodor Adorno's notion of aesthetic semblance, the book offers an alternative account of identity as a figure akin to modern artwork. Like art, it argues, identity provides access to imagined worlds that in turn wage a critique of ongoing histories and realities of racialization. This book assembles a transnational archive of literary texts by Eileen Chang, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Michael Ondaatje, and Jose Garcia Villa, revealing the intersections of subjectivity and representation, and drawing our attention to their limits.

This book is a unique collection of essays by allegory specialists and other scholars who engage allegory in exciting new ways. The essays are not limited to an examination of literary texts and works of art, and in fact focus on a wide range of topics that includes architecture, philosophy, theater, science, and law. The book proves the truth of the statement that all language is allegorical, and more importantly it shows its consequences. To “think allegory otherwise” is to think otherwise—to rethink not only the idea of allegory itself, but also the law and its execution, the literality of figurative abstraction, and the figurations upon which even hard science depends.

What Is a Classic? revisits the famous question posed by critics from Sainte-Beuve and T. S. Eliot to J. M. Coetzee to ask how classics emanate from postcolonial histories and societies. Exploring definitive trends in twentieth- and twenty-first century English and Anglophone literature and an international field of literary criticism, Mukherjee demonstrates the relevance of the question of the classic for the global politics of identifying and perpetuating so-called core texts. Emergent canons are scrutinized in the context of the wider cultural phenomena of book prizes, the translation and distribution of world literatures, and multimedia adaptations of world classics. Topics discussed include the canonical conceptions of Eliot and Coetzee, the intertextuality of Derek Walcott's works, the legacy of Joseph Conrad's fiction and narrative theory, rewriting and postcolonial revisionism, variant Englishes and vernacularization, and popular Shakespeare in the postcolony. Throughout, Mukherjee attunes traditional literary critical concerns to the value contestations mobilizing postcolonial and world literature. The breadth of debates and topics she addresses, as well as the book's ambitious historical schema, which includes South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and North America, set this study apart from related titles on the bookshelf today.