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:	9780823270927
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	07/01/2016
Series:	Commonalities
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Thomas Claviez is Professor for Literary Theory and Director of the Center for Cultural
Studies at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

Jean-Luc Nancy is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Universite Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, as well as a respected commentator on art and culture. His wide-ranging thought is developed in books including Listening; Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity; Noli me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body; Corpus; and Corpus II: Writings on Sexuality, all published by Fordham University Press.

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