The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form

by Audrey Wasser

Overview

"The Work of Difference addresses a fundamental ontological question: What is literature? And at the heart of this question, it argues, is the problem of the new. How is it that new works or new forms are possible within the rule-governed orders of history, language use, or the social? How are new works in turn recognizable to already-existing institutions? Tracing the relationship between literature and the problem of newness back to a set of concerns first articulated in early German romanticism, this book goes on to mount a critique of romantic tendencies in contemporary criticism in order, ultimately, to develop an original theory of literary production. Along the way, it offers new readings of major modernist novels by Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, and Gertrude Stein. The Work of Difference addresses a fundamental ontological question: What is literature? And at the heart of this question, it argues, is the problem of the new. How is it that new works or new forms are possible within the rule-governed orders of history, language use, or the social? How are new works in turn recognizable to already-existing institutions? Tracing the relationship between literature and the problem of newness back to a set of concerns first articulated in early German romanticism, this book goes on to mount a critique of romantic tendencies in contemporary criticism in order, ultimately, to develop an original theory of literary production. Along the way, it offers new readings of major modernist novels by Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, and Gertrude Stein."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823270057
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2016
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Audrey Wasser is Assistant Professor of French at Miami University, Ohio.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1
1. Form and Fragmentation: Romantic Legacies
2. The Book of the World: Form and Intent in New Criticism, Revisited
3. Tyranny of the Possible: Blanchot
4. A Genesis of the New: Deleuze
5. From Figure to Fissure: Self-Correction in Beckett's Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable
6. Hyperbole In Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu
7. "How Anything Can Be Different from What It Is": Tautology in Stein's The Making of Americans
Conclusion

Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Lucid and beautifully written, The Work of Difference gives us an ontology of literature that is at once theoretical and practical. Audrey Wasser not only teaches us what literature can be but also what it can do and how it works in its most groundbreaking operations. Combining profound new readings of major modernist writers (Proust, Beckett, Stein) with a sophisticated philosophical understanding of Deleuze, The Work of Difference develops an innovative theory of literary production. Equally at home in conceptual thinking and rhetorical close reading, Wasser is an important new critic to reckon with." — Martin Hägglund, Yale University

From the Publisher

Lucid and beautifully written, The Work of Difference gives us an ontology of literature that is at once theoretical and practical. Audrey Wasser not only teaches us what literature can be but also what it can do and how it works in its most groundbreaking operations. Combining profound new readings of major modernist writers (Proust, Beckett, Stein) with a sophisticated philosophical understanding of Deleuze, The Work of Difference develops an innovative theory of literary production. Equally at home in conceptual thinking and rhetorical close reading, Wasser is an important new critic to reckon with.

Yale University - Martin Hägglund

The Work of Difference is an engaging, accessible, and insightful study... its focus on the brief but rich moment in romantic history is an important contribution to scholarly debate and will provide a welcome new paradigm for the rethinking of modernism's relationship to modernity.

Studies in the Novel

...Wasser's achievement is a considerable one, and this book deserves a wide readership. In a literary-critical landscape too often cowed by the imperatives of context to ignore the immanent productivities of literary form, we have in this book a work of great theoretical depth and superlative imagination that captures better thanmost the sources and consequences of that energy.

Novel: A Forum on Fiction

As philosophically rich as it is provocative, Audrey Wasser's The Work of Difference is a book about many things: the rhetoric of modernist fiction, the lingering presence of romantic ideals in twentieth-century criticism, and the relevance of Deleuze's ontology to thinking about the production of literary works.

Syndicate

Wasser's expansion of the repertoire of critical questions typically asked of the work of literature succeeds in opening up ways of reading focused less on what a particular work or genre of literature might mean, and more on its production—through its rhetorical capacities—of what is continuously and innovatively new in the world.

Modernism/Modernity

Wasser's book... stands as a testament to the current relevance of rethinking modernism and the new along the lines of a literary ontology of difference and offers a renewed understanding of form that challenges romantic conceptions of literature and subjectivity.

Twentieth-Century Literature