Results by title

Devoted to the most important American Continental philosopher of his generation and one of the discipline's founding fathers, and featuring some of the field's
most distinguished luminaries, this collection is a critical document in Continental philosophy, reflecting its recent history, its present state, and its debt to Calvin O. Schrag. Taking up themes central to Schrag's own philosophical concerns, these essays refer throughout to his salient "interventions" in the dialogue of late-twentieth-century thought characterized as "postmodernity." The authors address, implicitly or directly, the question of philosophy's role and responsibility, or "task."

The volume begins with an overview of this task and of Schrag's contributions to it, written from the perspective of a resolute defender of the phenomenological tradition that Schrag's work has extended and reconfigured. The essays are organized around the four conceptual figures widely considered Schrag's most significant and original philosophical achievements: transversal rationality, the self after post-modernity, the fourth cultural value sphere, and communication praxis. Following and expanding on the implications of these themes, the authors focus on topics ranging from Cartesian rationality to Foucauldian rational relativism; from transcendence in relation to the self to the Schragean self's connections with discourse, action, and community; from religion's disruptive presence in contemporary philosophy to recent developments in the philosophy of language. The book also contains Schrag's responses to many of the works in the collection.

The Untimely Present examines the fiction produced in the aftermath of the recent Latin American dictatorships, particularly those in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Idelber Avelar argues that through their legacy of social trauma and obliteration of history, these military regimes gave rise to unique and revealing practices of mourning that pervade the literature of this region. The theory of postdictatorial writing developed here is informed by a rereading of the links between mourning and mimesis in Plato, Nietzsche’s notion of the untimely, Benjamin’s theory of allegory, and psychoanalytic / deconstructive conceptions of mourning.

Avelar starts by offering new readings of works produced before the dictatorship era, in what is often considered the boom of Latin American fiction. Distancing himself from previous celebratory interpretations, he understands the boom as a manifestation of mourning for literature’s declining aura. Against this background, Avelar offers a reassessment of testimonial forms, social scientific theories of authoritarianism, current transformations undergone by the university, and an analysis of a number of novels by some of today’s foremost Latin American writers—such as Ricardo Piglia, Silviano Santiago, Diamela Eltit, João Gilberto Noll, and Tununa Mercado. Avelar shows how the ‘untimely’ quality of these narratives is related to the position of literature itself, a mode of expression threatened with obsolescence.

This book will appeal to scholars and students of Latin American literature and politics, cultural studies, and comparative literature, as well as to all those interested in the role of literature in postmodernity.