Pushing the boundaries of critical reading and the role of objects in literature
 
How does literary objecthood contend with the challenge of writing objects that emerge at an extreme limit of material presence? Jacob McGuinn delves into the ways literature writes this indeterminate presence in the context of pre- and post-’68 Paris, a vital moment in the history of criticism. The works of poet Paul Celan, philosopher Theodor Adorno, and writer Maurice Blanchot highlight how the complexities of reading such a dematerialized object are part of the indeterminacy of material itself. Indeterminate objects—glass, snow, walls, screens—are subjects Celan describes as existing in “meridian” space, while for Adorno and Blanchot, criticism not only responds to this indeterminacy but also takes it as its condition. Reading at the Limits of Poetic Form: Dematerialization in Adorno, Blanchot, and Celan shows how these readings simultaneously limit the object of criticism and outline alternative ways of thinking that lie between the models of critical formalism and historicism, ultimately revealing the possible materiality of literature in unrealized history, incomplete politics, and nondetermining thinking.

Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva offers striking and novel textual studies of major literary figures and emergent authors. Selected from Cixous’s seminars taught between 1980 and 1986 at the Universite de Paris VII (Saint-Denis) and at the College International de Philosophie, the texts chronicle the French intellectual scene with its shifting tastes over the decade following May 1986.

In their simple and accessible language, the texts can be read as inspiration for Cixous’s fictional and critical practices. They not only introduce readers to emergent texts from Brazil and Russia, such as Clarice Lispector’s “Foreign Legion” and Marina Tsvetayeva’s “Mother and Music,” but also give new, incisive insights into Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist and Kafka’s “Before the Law.” Drawing from philosophy and psychoanalysis, Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva can be read side-by-side with Reading with Clarice Lispector, as an ongoing meditation on ethics and poetics.Also from MinnesotaReading with Clarice LispectorHelene CixousEdited, translated, and introduced by Verena Andermatt ConleyFor Cixous, Lispector’s work represents one of the finest examples of ecriture feminine in that she practices, in writing, what Cixous is searching for in her theoretical practice: the giving, spending, and inscribing of pleasure; an apprenticeship in the lessons of life.Theory and History of Literature, volume 73