Literary Critique, Modernism and the Transformation of Theory
- It sets out an innovative agenda for approaching literary critique which will open new avenues of research especially with regard to the formation of disciplines and critical method in literary studies
- It deals with the link between modernism and theory as an important object of intellectual history and discusses theory as much more than a transatlantic moment of modernization
- It elaborates on the potential of feminism and psychoanalysis to respond to the new relational ontologies by opening up affirmative resources in language
Literary Critique, Modernism and the Transformation of Theory demonstrates the non-linear temporalities and trajectories through which theory operates. Italian Theory acts as the fulcrum of a more inclusive and less combative notion of critique. This 'living thought' cuts across the translation of European thought into Anglo-American theory and carries with it lingering modernist motifs linked to feminist and psychoanalytic criticism. While connecting to the 'post-critique' debate, the study focuses on recovering the ethical underpinnings of critique. Mena Mitrano demonstrates that before being a specific method or disciplinary practice, critique is an a stance towards others including indocility, receptiveness, openness to transformation, awareness of relationality, attention to language, attunement to the body, distance, displacement, externality and wonder.
IllustrationsAcknowledgements
IntroductionHollow formsPostcritiqueOverview and roadmap Reality Persons and volcanoes Againstness (and Euro-American relations) The plane of coevalness
Chapter 1 What is Critique? Three Types of Indocility Reflective indocility Incredulity and debtThe criterion of life Criticism and critique
Chapter 2 Theory: Thinking with Literature"Reading literature, not theory" "Not philosophy but a preparation for literary criticism" Postmodernism I-experience Méconnaissance and Denkraum
Chapter 3 What is a Critic? Weak Thought, Weak Theory, Italian Theory Reading and democracyWeak thought/weak theory The analysis of community "Italian Theory " Living thought Modernism/modernity Amor vitae (Life vs. Forms)
Chapter 4 Language: The Return to Saussure Euēmería: the natural delight of ur-attachments The many From small world to vast world The return to Saussure (language as a social fact) The hermeneutics of the subject Specters of Saussure: modernism
Chapter 5 Tradition: Eliot and Work"Experimentum" (literary history) Writing the "thing" Work Who appears? The photographic portraits Double portrait
Chapter 6 Text and Method: Cixous/Joyce/Lispector Living writing The hermeneutic approach (the cut) Beyond the performance of power: unwritten writing Life vs. Form according to Cixous/Lispector/Joyce What is a father? The search for method From the hermeneutical conversation to attachment
Chapter 7 Poststructuralism: Faith and Lacan The spatial component of poststructuralism The problem of the gift A different relation to language From the father to paternal donation The experience of speaking The structure of the act of faith "A Slice of the Word"
Conclusion Depending on your neighbor Notes Bibliography Index
Mena Mitrano recasts the literary scholar’s work in terms of an essential commitment to knowing and thinking the world through its texts. Written with ethical seriousness and theoretical suppleness, Literary Critique, Modernism and the Transformation of Theory is a bold program for literary scholars and students, under pressure from forces inside and beyond the contemporary academy, to reengage critique as a practice of gracious attention, radical reconstitution and creative experimentation.
Mitrano’s essay addresses crucial questions in literary studies and theory nowadays – ‘What does it mean to read?’, ‘What does it mean to speak?’, and ‘What is a method?’ – and does so by offering a detour that takes the reader through a valuable gallery of co-related issues, bringing forth the same plan of coevalness advocated in her book. [...] Literary Critique, Modernism and the Transformation of Theory is thus an invitation to modernist scholars to retrieve a legacy of themes, authors, and texts in which the transfer between language, life, and thought achieved its full potential and contributed to the aliveness of Theory as we know nowadays.
With this book Mitrano provides literature scholars with a research perspective that identifies the practice of reading not only as a way of knowing and thinking about the world around us, but also and above all as a way of elaborating concrete possibilities for action. By interweaving ethical commitment and theoretical scrupulousness, Mitrano thus provides the academic community she addresses with the tools to elaborate a critical method that starts from the ethical foundation of critique itself and invites us to rediscover an affirmative resource in language and its potential.
With this book Mitrano provides literature scholars with a research perspective that identifies the practice of reading not only as a way of knowing and thinking about the world around us, but also and above all as a way of elaborating concrete possibilities for action. By interweaving ethical commitment and theoretical scrupulousness, Mitrano thus provides the academic community she addresses with the tools to elaborate a critical method that starts from the ethical foundation of critique itself and invites us to rediscover an affirmative resource in language and its potential.
Mitrano’s book challenges the notion that our engagements with literature today should become ‘post-critical.’ Inspired by Italian theory and examples from literary modernism, she proposes an alternative, open-hearted conception of critique as an affirmative form of life and as an ethical stance towards others.
