The Common Growl: Toward a Poetics of Precarious Community

by Thomas Claviez, Jean-Luc Nancy (Foreword by)

Overview

No longer able to read community in terms colored by a romantic nostalgia for homogeneity, closeness and sameness, or the myth of rational choice, we nevertheless face an imperative to think the common. The prominent scholars assembled here come together to articulate community while thinking seriously about the tropes, myths, narratives, metaphors, conceits, and shared cultural texts on which any such articulation depends. The result is a major contribution to literary theory, postcolonialism, philosophy, political theory, and sociology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823270910
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	07/01/2016
Series:	Commonalities
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Thomas Claviez is Professor for Literary Theory at the Universityof Bern, where he is responsible for the MA program in World Literature. He is the author of Grenz fälle: Mythos- Ideologie- American Studies (1998) and Aesthetics and Ethics: Otherness and Moral Imagination from Aristotle to Levinas and from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to House Made of Dawn (2008) and the coauthor, with Dietmar Wetzel, of Zur Aktualität von Jacques Rancière (2016). He has published widely on issues of community, recognition, literary theory, and moral philosophy. He is the editor of The Conditions of Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics on the Threshold of the Possible (2013) and of The Common Growl: Towards a Poetics of Precarious Community (2016) and the coeditor of Aesthetic Transgressions: Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature (2006) and of Critique of Authenticity (2019). He is currently working on a monograph with the title A Metonymic Community? Towards a New Poetics of Contingency.

Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Universityé Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. His wide-ranging thought runs through many books, including Being Singular Plural, The Ground of the Image, Corpus, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence. His book The Intruder was adapted into an acclaimed film by Claire Denis.

Table of Contents

Foreword: The Common Growl
Jean-Luc Nancy

Introduction: Toward a Poetics of Community
Thomas Claviez

The Poetics of Community
Community and Ethnos
Robert J. C. Young
A Metonymic Community? Toward a Poetics of Contingency
Thomas Claviez
Poetics of Anxiety and Security: The Problem of Speech and Action in Our Time
Homi K. Bhabha
Literature, the World, and You
Djelal Kadir

The Politics of Aesthetics
Literary Communities
Jacques Rancière
Antiracism and (re)Humanization
Paul Gilroy

Sociological Reflections
Can Society Be Commodities All the Way Down? Post-Polanyian Reflections on Capitalist Crisis
Nancy Fraser
Two Examples of Recent Aesthetico-Political Forms of Community: Occupy and Sharing Economy
Dietmar Wetzel

Acknowledgments
Works Cited
List of Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Revolt does not discourse, it growls. What does ‘growl’ mean? It’s almost an onomatopoeia. It means to bawl, bellow, and roar. It means to shout together, to murmur, mumble, grouse, become indignant, protest, become enraged together. One tends to grumble alone but people growl in common. The common growl is a subterranean torrent: it passes underneath, making everything tremble."—from Jean-Luc Nancy's Foreword

From the Publisher