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Returns us to Gertrude Stein’s theater by way of the modernist medium of radio

What happens when we listen to Gertrude Stein’s plays as radio and music theater? This book explores the sound of Stein’s theater and proposes that radio, when approached both historically and phenomenologically, offers technical solutions to her texts’ unique challenges. Adam J. Frank documents the collaborative project of staging Stein’s early plays and offers new critical interpretations of these lesser-known works. Radio Free Stein grapples with her innovative theater poetics from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: sound and media studies, affect and object relations theory, linguistic performativity, theater scholarship, and music composition.

Retrieves Hegelian speculative experience for literary theory.

The relationship between Hegel and literary theory has for a long time been both contested and paradoxical. On the one hand, “theory” is often skeptical of all that Hegel ostensibly stood for: idealism, systematicity, and identity at the expense of difference. Yet, in spite of itself, literary theory is taken to owe a profound debt to Hegel’s philosophy. Robert Lucas Scott’s book complicates this account and argues that literary theory has made the mistake of abstracting Hegel’s thought from its more dynamic presentation in Hegel’s writings, reducing “Hegel” to a series of propositions or positions. Literary theory, Scott argues, misses what is perhaps the greatest innovation of Hegel’s philosophy: a presentation of experience that begins precisely by setting aside all preconceptions or prior assumptions. It is on this point that Hegel’s philosophy itself approaches literature: its content cannot be simply abstracted from the singular experience of reading it. Only through a mode of reading alive to speculative experience can literary theory become truly Hegelian. Scott’s exposition of Hegel offers a model of reading with relevance beyond philosophy: one that is critical without pretensions of mastery and detachment and that honors the singularity of the reading experience without succumbing to the subjectivism of the “postcritical.”

The book also includes engagements with the work of Luther, Kant, Marx, Gillian Rose, Fredric Jameson, Robert Brandom, Catherine Malabou, and more in its recovery of Hegel’s thought for a critical understanding of our time.

A theoretical framework for understanding fiction built on nodes, links, and distributed narrative systems.

The marriage of narrative and the computer dates back to the 1980s, with the hypertext experiments of luminaries such as Judy Malloy and Michael Joyce. What has been variously called "hypertext fiction," "literary hypertext," and "hyperfiction" has surely surrendered any claim to newness in the 21st century.

David Ciccoricco establishes the category of "network fiction" as distinguishable from other forms of hypertext and cybertext: network fictions are narrative texts in digitally networked environments that make use of hypertext technology in order to create emergent and recombinant narratives. Though they both pre-date and post-date the World Wide Web, they share with it an aesthetic drive that exploits the networking potential of digital composition and foregrounds notions of narrative recurrence and return.

Ciccoricco analyzes innovative developments in network fiction from first-generation writers Michael Joyce (Twilight, a symphony, 1997) and Stuart Moulthrop (Victory Garden, 1991) through Judd Morrissey’s The Jew's Daughter (2000), an acclaimed example of digital literature in its latter instantiations on the Web. Each investigation demonstrates not only what the digital environment might mean for narrative theory but also the ability of network fictions to sustain a mode of reading that might, arguably, be called "literary." The movement in the arts away from representation and toward simulation, away from the dynamics of reading and interpretation and toward the dynamics of interaction and play, has indeed led to exaggerated or alarmist claims of the endangerment of the literary arts. At the same time, some have simply doubted that the conceptual and discursive intricacy of print fiction can migrate to new media. Against these claims, Reading Network Fiction attests to the verbal complexity and conceptual depth of a body of writing created for the surface of the screen.

Over the course of her long career, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick became one of the most important voices in queer theory, and her calls for reparative criticism and reading practices grounded in affect and performance have transformed understandings of affect, intimacy, politics, and identity. With marked tenderness, the contributors to Reading Sedgwick reflect on Sedgwick's many critical inventions, from her elucidation of poetry's close relation to criticism and development of new versions of queer performativity to highlighting the power of writing to engender new forms of life. As the essays in Reading Sedgwick demonstrate, Sedgwick's work is not only an ongoing vital force in queer theory and affect theory; it can help us build a more positive world in the midst of the bleak contemporary moment.

Contributors. Lauren Berlant, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Jason Edwards, Ramzi Fawaz, Denis Flannery, Jane Gallop, Jonathan Goldberg, Meridith Kruse, Michael Moon, José Esteban Muñoz, Chris Nealon, Andrew Parker, H. A. Sedgwick, Karin Sellberg, Michael D. Snediker, Melissa Solomon, Robyn Wiegman

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.

A study of the transformation of the realist novel in the hands of early-twentieth-century American writers, who adapted this quintessentially nineteenth-century genre to the conditions of their age. 
 
Realism after the Individual offers a new theoretical paradigm for understanding realist novels published in the United States between 1900 and 1920, a period that has been described wrongheadedly as a “gulf” or a “valley” in American literary history. In this generation of writers, only three have remained in favor among critics: Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser. Others have disappeared from view altogether—writers such as Robert Grant, Robert Herrick, and Booth Tarkington, all of whom were critically acclaimed bestsellers in their day.

As Rafael Walker shows, this generation of writers deserves new attention for the way they revised many core facets of the nineteenth-century novel in response to the historical shifts around it. This generation of novelists not only rejected liberal individualism but also formulated alternative paradigms for conceptualizing selfhood. The result was a slew of woman-centered realist novels that broke with literary precedent: The novels punish characters not for desiring too much but for failing to desire enough, they depict subjectivity not as private and interior but as outward-facing, and they view closure not as the novel’s aim but as a convention to flout. Realism after the Individual both revises prevailing views of American realism and lays the foundation for an alternative account of the development of literary modernism, one that illuminates the continuity between realism and the modernism that followed it.

This book of practical writing and publishing advice celebrates the creative, community-building pleasures of humanist expertise.

Humanities experts today are embattled. In a world of crises undermining higher education at every turn, what can still motivate humanists to write? Galvanizing, imaginative, and unrepentantly nerdy, Sarah Mesle’s Reasons and Feeling offers practical writing and publishing advice alongside a forcefully affirmative account of why humanities writing matters.

Mesle proposes that writing can help envision sustainable community, but only when we recognize that humanist authority comes from both our reasons and our feelings. Alongside everyday compositional advice—including strategies for addressing different audiences, pitching publications, and managing writing anxiety—readers will find an account of how such craft practices connect to both their intellectual commitments and their historical conditions. Mesle shows how university-trained writers at all levels benefit from embracing a broader range of styles and affects. Doing so helps them harness their writing’s community-building potential and makes them better able to value their own expertise, whether they write for the classroom, in public venues, or for the specialized scholarly communities that share their niche, weird, or beloved, objects of study.

Reasons and Feelings draws on Mesle’s expertise as a professor of writing and her work as an editor helping academics shift between writing for scholarly venues and journalistic ones. In a voice that’s honest, warm, accessible, and bracingly funny, Reasons and Feelings gives humanists a path toward bolder fantasies of the worlds their writing can make.

Reveals how literary scenes of recognition stage the process of coming to know reality

In this deeply researched and thought-provoking study, Jessica C. Resvick traces nineteenth-century German realist writing’s paradoxical investment in mediated accounts of the world and the direct, unfiltered experience of reality. Focusing on the motif and operation of recognition in its Aristotelean sense, Resvick examines self-reflexive narratives in which the authors struggle to resolve this tension between the media they choose and the immediacy they hope to create. 

Through close readings of key works by canonical authors such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, and Wilhelm Raabe, Resvick demonstrates the medially influenced and historically contingent ways in which they represent reality. Each chapter focuses on a different form of recognition, reconstructing the techniques that allow these authors to generate an effect of presence. Exploring the history and poetics of knowledge exchange, Recognizing Reality: German Realism and the Mediation of Presence expands on recent media histories of realism, examining the material bases for realist aesthetics while also investigating media’s epistemological accomplishments, and astutely elaborates the role of recognition as a medium-specific tool.

A selection of essays revealing the singular brilliance of Ferguson’s critical writing over four decades.

Ranging across literature, philosophy, and social thought, Frances Ferguson asks how forms—whether aesthetic, legal, or bureaucratic—help to assign value and thereby organize our relations as well as our personal identities. Ferguson is a literary critic who takes her lead, unexpectedly, from Jeremy Bentham, showing how modernity tracks and makes perceptible the values of a host of human activities—the knowledge that comes from early learning exercises, the specialized knowledge that funds particular professions, and the exacting if unspecialized knowledge of the social world of courtship or hanging out.

Gathering Ferguson’s most influential and still timely essays, Records of Reward includes, among others, “The Nuclear Sublime,” in which Ferguson turns to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to examine how the aesthetic logic of the sublime obscures the claims of domesticity and the beautiful; “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” which examines the history of rape law to highlight the importance of Samuel Richardson’s foregrounding of consent in Clarissa; “Pornography, the Theory,” where she explores the threshold between speech and action to identify environments—such as schools and workplaces—in which pornographic expression can be harmfully potentiated; and “Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form,” in which she analyzes Austen’s use of free indirect style to depict both her protagonist and her reader engaged in acts of “over-knowing” others in everyday life. Most unexpectedly, perhaps, the collection also includes an essay analyzing Bitcoin as a small language model that exerts enormous affective pressure on its partisans.

A vivid demonstration of the enduring rewards of theory and close reading alike, Records of Reward will be essential reading across the fields of literary studies, cultural studies, and political thought.

An entertaining and enlightening proposal for a new way to read Native American literature.

An entertaining and enlightening proposal for a new way to read Native American literature.

How can a square peg fit into a round hole? It can’t. How can a door be unlocked with a pencil? It can’t. How can Native literature be read applying conventional postmodern literary criticism? It can’t.That is Craig Womack’s argument in Red on Red. Indian communities have their own intellectual and cultural traditions that are well equipped to analyze Native literary production. These traditions should be the eyes through which the texts are viewed. To analyze a Native text with the methods currently dominant in the academy, according to the author, is like studying the stars with a magnifying glass.In an unconventional and piercingly humorous appeal, Womack creates a dialogue between essays on Native literature and fictional letters from Creek characters who comment on the essays. Through this conceit, Womack demonstrates an alternative approach to American Indian literature, with the letters serving as a “Creek chorus” that offers answers to the questions raised in his more traditional essays. Topics range from a comparison of contemporary oral versions of Creek stories and the translations of those stories dating back to the early twentieth century, to a queer reading of Cherokee author Lynn Riggs’s play The Cherokee Night.Womack argues that the meaning of works by Native peoples inevitably changes through evaluation by the dominant culture. Red on Red is a call for self-determination on the part of Native writers and a demonstration of an important new approach to studying Native works-one that engages not only the literature, but also the community from which the work grew.ISBN 0-8166-3022-4 Cloth £33.50 $47.95xxISBN 0-8166-3023-2 Paper £13.00 $18.95x288 Pages 5 7/8 x 9 November Translation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press

Explores reasons why the theoretical enterprise is blind to, or “resists,” the radical nature of reading, in six essays that offer a new level of critical and cultural understanding in reference to the works of Jauss, Riffaterre, Benjamin, and Bakhtin.

In a brilliant collection of essays, de Man explores his views, that, the resistance to theory is inherent in the theoretical enterprise itself, and the real debate is with its own methodological assumptions and possibilities.

“Indispensable. . . . There is resistance to ‘theory’ and also confusion about its status with reference to both philosophy and criticism.” -Frank Kermode, Columbia University

How modernist interartistic experimentation and the proliferation of new media technologies inspired fresh insights into poetry

Isobel Palmer spotlights Russian modernist poets’ and formalist theorists’ conscious engagement with formal convention, showing how their efforts were tied up with broader attempts in the early Soviet era to understand and articulate the nature of poetry and its most characteristic devices. Returning to critical debates around poetic encounters with three key aesthetic categories—rhythm, image, and voice—Palmer unpacks the period’s deeper interest in the material bases of poetic speech itself. Through fresh, incisive readings of canonical poets and theorists, from Andrei Bely and Vladimir Mayakovsky to Yury Tynianov and Viktor Shklovsky, Revolutions in Verse: The Medium of Russian Modernism explores the proliferation of interartistic experiments and the emergence of new media technologies that made poetry visible as a medium in its own right.

In the development of modernist fiction, perhaps no artistic product has had as vaunted a place as the novel, a genre theorized primarily with recourse to Western authors. Here, Łukasz Wodzyński challenges the primacy of the novel as the organizing principle of modernist prose in East-Central Europe, particularly in Poland and Russia. By carefully studying some of the most innovative texts in Polish and Russian from the early twentieth century, Wodzyński posits that the “novel” genre has hindered our understanding of long modernist narratives.

Instead, he proposes to read these pathbreaking works as a twentieth-century reclamation of the romance. Specifically, he argues that these latter-day romances channel early modernist apocalyptic and utopian ideals through popular genres like science fiction and adventure narratives—and thus imagine a human future freed from modern fixations on control, efficiency, and utility. The romance form, he suggests, was uniquely poised to address the deep civilizational anxieties underwriting modernist literary publications in East-Central Europe. Understanding these works and the ways in which they spoke to these anxieties thus informs not only the study of Polish and Russian literature but also the development of modernism itself.