Negation, Critical Theory, and Postmodern Textuality

✍ Scribed by Daniel Fischlin (auth.), Daniel Fischlin (eds.)

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1994
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 330
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Negation, Critical Theory, and Postmodern Textuality features 14 new essays by leading specialists in critical theory, comparative literature, philosophy, and English literature. The essays, which present wide-ranging historical considerations of negation in light of recent developments in poststructuralism and postmodernism, range over many of the siginificant texts in which negation figures prominently. The book includes a wide-ranging introductory chapter that examines how attention to negation -- the inescapable nescience that is posited in any and every linguistic expression -- enhances the hermeneutic possibilities present in language. In addition, the four sections of the book bring together major critical interventions on, among others, negative meaning, unrecognizability, elenctic negation, apocalypse, nihilism, negation and gender, and denegation. All the essays involve close attention to key texts by major authors, including William Shakespeare, Henry James, Federico García Lorca, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Walt Whitman, E.M. Forster, Mary Shelley, Margaret Atwood, Roland Barthes, Douglas Barbour, Paul de Man, bp Nichol, Jacques Derrida, and Dogen Kigen. The volume opens up new areas in critical theory, comparative literature, and the philosophy of language, and defines a major new area of inquiry in relation to notions of postmodern textuality. Critical theorists, students of comparative literature, English literature, and the history of ideas, and those interested in the hermeneutic implications of postmodernism will find this volume of substantial interest. Its extensive bibliographical apparatus and index make the collection a valuable reference tool for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students as well as for those seeking a variety of interpretive approaches to the problem of negation in literature.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xi
Introduction: Negation, Critical Theory, and Postmodern Textuality....Pages 1-37
Front Matter....Pages 39-39
Deconstruction and Negative Meaning in Medieval Mysticism....Pages 41-58
“In No Recognizable Way” The Tempest ....Pages 59-87
“My Real Smash”: Elenctic Negation in Henry James’s The Ambassadors ....Pages 89-109
“Where Dream used to Collide with its Reality”: The Apocalyptic Space of Negation in García Lorca’s Poet in New York ....Pages 111-142
Front Matter....Pages 143-143
Nothing Doing: The Repudiation of Action in Beckett’s More Pricks Than Kicks ....Pages 145-156
The Shadow Life: Negation, Nihilism, and Insanity in Thomas Bernhard’s Correction ....Pages 157-171
Front Matter....Pages 173-173
Beyond Negation: Paradoxical Affirmation in Whitman’s Third Edition....Pages 175-190
Forster’s Ghosts: A Passage to India and the Emptying of Narrative....Pages 191-202
Putting on the Feminine: Gender and Negativity in Frankenstein and the Handmaid’s Tale ....Pages 203-224
Front Matter....Pages 225-225
Negation and the Evil Eye: A Reading of Camera Lucida ....Pages 227-239
“Theres More Nothing to Say”: Unspeaking Douglas Barbour’s “Story for a Saskatchewan Night”....Pages 241-257
Monstrosity, Illegibility, Denegation: de Man, Nichol, and the Resistance to Postmodernism....Pages 259-300
Derrida and Dōgen: Denegation and the Liberation of Discriminating Thought....Pages 301-320
Back Matter....Pages 321-331

✦ Subjects

Comparative Literature; Romance Languages; Philosophy of Language; Germanic Languages; Modern Philosophy