Literary Critique, Modernism and the Transformation of Theory

by Mena Mitrano

Overview

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 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399513234
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2024
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Mena Mitrano is Associate Professor of American literature and language in the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Her research area is theoretical-critical thought, which she explores from an interdisciplinary perspective. Her work covers major critical theorists (Walter Benjamin), psychoanalysis (Ferenczi), great women thinkers (Hannah Arendt). She is the author of studies on Gertrude Stein and Susan Sontag, major American women intellectuals who shaped the link between modernism and theory:Gertrude Stein: Woman Without Qualities (2005) and In the Archive of Longing: Susan Sontag’s Critical Modernism (Edinburgh UniversityPress 2016). She has written on language and literature and is interested in exploring literary/philosophical borders. She was educated at Rutgers Universityand has been a Research Associate at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, and a Visiting Lecturer at the Weissman Center for Leadership, Mount Holyoke College.

Table of Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Hollow forms

Postcritique

Overview 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 debt

The 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 democracy

Weak 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

Editorial Reviews

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.

Iperstoria - Martina Misia

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.

Tyrus Miller

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.

The Modernist Review - Andrea Lupi

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.

Alix Beeston