“A handbook, yes, but so much more: an inspiriting demonstration of the divergent, energetic, and innovative approaches that are transforming our sense of how modernism was, is, and one day might be understood. Indispensable, whatever your level of engagement with modernist studies.”―Maria DiBattista, Princeton University
“Jean-Michel Rabaté’s expertly assembled Handbook of Modernist Studies rereads Modernist literary texts through the lens of the most recent and up-to-date Continental theory. The 25 essays included here are as comprehensive and authoritative as they are sophisticated: studies making use of the New Marxisms, cognitive science, queer theory, phenomenology and Rancière’s “aesthetic regime” are ingeniously flanked, in Rabaté’s Introduction and the concluding essay by Jonathan Loesberg, by reconsiderations of Clement Greenberg’s formalism and its important version of Modernism as we now understand it.”―Marjorie Perloff
“This superb collection of new essays by leading figures in the field provides the reader with a satisfyingly complete yet also excitingly cutting-edge introduction to the study of Modernism in our time. Focusing on the productive tensions between art and theory as they informed the cultural movements of the period, A Handbook of Modernist Studies will prove indispensible for both experts and newcomers to the field.”―Sianne Ngai, Stanford University
From the Inside Flap
The fourth volume in a new and innovative series exploring literature through the variegated lenses of critical theory, this bold new collection of essays examines canonical modernist texts by making sense of the conceptual, philosophical, and theoretical issues that underpin them. Edited by a renowned commentator on modernist theory and literature, the book features contributions from leading academics who have engaged in detailed analysis both of individual texts, and their links with theory and theoreticians.
The handbook explores the deep affinity of leading theorists for specific modernist texts, unravelling the intellectual links between Adorno and Beckett, Derrida and Joyce, Foucault and Borges, and ?i?ek and Kafka, among others. It also attests to the penchant of modernist authors such as Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and Fernando Pessoa for particular aspects of philosophical and theoretical discourse. This compelling examination of the philosophical confluence between modernism and literature will attract students and scholars not just of literature, but in many other disciplines.
From the Back Cover
The fourth volume in a new and innovative series exploring literature through the variegated lenses of critical theory, this bold new collection of essays examines canonical modernist texts by making sense of the conceptual, philosophical, and theoretical issues that underpin them. Edited by a renowned commentator on modernist theory and literature, the book features contributions from leading academics who have engaged in detailed analysis both of individual texts, and their links with theory and theoreticians.
The handbook explores the deep affinity of leading theorists for specific modernist texts, unravelling the intellectual links between Adorno and Beckett, Derrida and Joyce, Foucault and Borges, and ?i?ek and Kafka, among others. It also attests to the penchant of modernist authors such as Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and Fernando Pessoa for particular aspects of philosophical and theoretical discourse. This compelling examination of the philosophical confluence between modernism and literature will attract students and scholars not just of literature, but in many other disciplines.
About the Author
Jean-Michel Rabaté is Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Co-founder and curator of the Slought Foundation, which supports initiatives at the nexus of cultural and socio-political change, he has authored and edited more than thirty volumes on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, and philosophy. His recent books include 1913: The Cradle of Modernism (2007), The Ethic of the Lie (2008) and Étant Donnés: 1) L’Art, 2) Le Crime (2010). The current president of the Samuel Beckett Society, he is working on books on psychoanalysis and literature, the future of literary theory and Samuel Beckett.
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