Deleuze and American Literature: Affect and Virtuality in Faulkner, Wharton, Ellison, and McCarthy

by A. Bourassa

Overview

Bourassa demonstrates what happens when the set of concepts developed by Deleuze come into contact with the complex and philosophically problematic worlds of William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Edith Wharton and Ralph Ellison.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349380022
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	11/18/2009
Edition description:	1st ed. 2009
Pages:	210
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

ALAN BOURASSA is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at St. Thomas University, Canada.

Table of Contents

Literature, Character and the Human Wharton's Aesthetics and the Ethics of Affect Invisible Man : Affect, History, Race Cormac McCarthy and the Event of the Human The Moral Singularity: Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles and McCarthy's Blood Meridian Absalom, Absalom! Time and the Virtual Riders of the Virtual Sage: Zane Grey, Cormac McCarthy and the Transformation of the Popular Western Conclusion: The Ethic of the Nonhuman

Editorial Reviews

"Bourassa has written a splendid book that speaks to the deep relation of the novel as a literary form to the meaning of being...This book marks an important contribution to the growing theoretical work concerned with reading Deleuze in the context of literature and film." - Choice

"Deleuze and American Literature expertly spins a unique weave of concepts for the analysis of the novel. Affect, event, force, singularity, the outside, and the virtual. These concepts interlace and vary to generate a series of refreshingly original readings of nineteenth and twentieth century authors revolving around the notion of the nonhuman. Provocatively, it is from this notion that Bourassa draws his theory of character. The tension between the humanity of the novelistic character and its nonhuman conditions of literary emergence unfolds into an extended meditation on the difference between morality and ethics, playing out in particular around issues of race and gender. A masterful contribution to literary theory and the philosophy of the novel." - Brian Massumi, University of Montreal and author of Parables for the Virtual

From the Publisher