First sustained critical reading of Lacoue-Labarthe's Phrase, which provides insights into a philosophically inspired work of prose poetry. This book presents an interpretation of a volume of poetry and theoretical reflections (Phrase) by the late Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, who is widely known as one of the major contributors to thinking about the relation between philosophy and literature in the continental tradition. His work has shaped the deconstructive...

Provides an innovative and theoretically rigorous approach to the subject of testimony in Latin America. This book rethinks the nature of testimony beyond the ground of the human in works produced in Chile and Argentina from the 1970s to the present. Focusing on literature by Juan Gelman, Sergio Chejfec, and Roberto Bolaño, as well as art by Eugenio Dittborn, Kate Jenckes argues that these works represent life, death, and the relation between self...

Focuses on how nuances of poetic form alter how we have come to understand cultural aspects of time. Figures of Time proposes radically new ideas about the very poetic ground of culture. Presenting unique close readings of six modern poets-Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, and T. S. Eliot-David Ben-Merre brings recent theoretical questions about the rhetoric of modernism and poetic figuration into...

Explores how violence structures language and the writing of literature and philosophy. Within the violence our societies must confront today exists a dimension proper to language. Anyone who has been through the educational system, for example, recognizes how language not only shapes and models us, but also imposes itself upon us. During the twentieth century, this system revealed how language can condemn one to a certain death. In The Vocation...

Charts the vicissitudes of a distinctly modern and peculiarly human vulnerability-our intimate dependence on the fragile, time-bound cultural framework that we inhabit-in the history of the realist novel. The Blossom Which We Are traces the emergence of a distinctly modern form of human vulnerability-our intimate dependence on the fragile and time-bound cultural frameworks that we inhabit-as it manifests in the realm of the novel. Nir Evron juxtaposes...

Juxtaposes five contemporary French poets, illuminating the philosophical elements of their work while making their sometimes difficult writing newly accessible. Drawing from five contemporary French poets-Jacques Roubaud, Emmanuel Hocquard, Danielle Collobert, Anne Portugal, and Jacques Jouet-Ann Smock juxtaposes them and provides a milieu suitable for philosophical reflection on identity, on not-being and being, on communication, and on secrets....

An important examination of the thought of W. E. B. Du Bois, with attention to its potential for reorienting present-day critical theory and political philosophy.

Examines the skeptical foundations of literature in order to reassess the status of fiction. Literature and Skepticism links the skeptic attitude to the conditions of possibility in (modern) literature—in particular, the narrative form and the essay. Pablo Oyarzun proposes that narrative and the essay document the relationship between literature and skepticism in different but complementary and, at the same time, complicit ways. As the narrative...

This book investigates synaesthesia in philosophy and literature, from Aristotle to Charles Baudelaire to Jean-Luc Nancy and beyond. Its central claim is that while synaesthesia is generally read as a figure of transcendence and unity, there is another effect of synaesthesia, one that articulates differences and displaces essence. This other synaesthesia opens up within or alongside the more familiar sense of synaesthesia as synthesis, pointing to...

Paul Celan's works dwell on the threshold between the extremes of poetic expression and philosophical reflection. The divergent literary and critical idioms that have marked Celan's writing-and that Celan's writing has come to mark for others (Hamacher, Derrida, Szondi)-thus call for a new philology. This philology cannot be situated within presupposed genres or fields but rather explores the ways in which poetic and philosophical ambitions meet in...