Henry Sussman

"A splendid addition to the now-long list of Professor Sussman's admirable books."---J. HILLIS MILLER, University of California, Irvine --

Systems and Literacy

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Ambitious in scope and innovative in concept, this book offers an overview and critique of the conventions surrounding artistic creativity and intellectual endeavor since the outset of "the broader modernity", which the author sees as beginning with the decline of feudalism and the Church. As a work of intellectual history, it suggests that art and the conventions associated with the artistic constitute a secular institution that has supplanted pre-Reformation theology. From the perspective of the "subject," modernity has entailed a heightened sense of individuation, moral conflict, and pervasive loss and disaster. Yet the pitfalls that have earmarked personal experience have taken on positive value in an artistic enterprise that aspires to be a salutary replacement for externally imposed theological dogmas. Beginning with Luther, Calvin, and Shakespeare and culminating with the Kantian notion of the artist as an "original genius," the author reconstructs the steps by which art and creative activity were installed as the redemptive values of a modernity in which human beings were forced to define knowledge and establish authority according to their own devices. In the process, the author reads passages from Plato, Proust, Donne, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kleist, Rousseau, Melville, Wittgenstein, as well as Benjamin, as well as the graphic works of Holbein, Dürer, Mondrian, and Rothko. As a work of critical theory, The Aesthetic Contract posits an alternative model to Kant's "original genius." The author explores an understanding of art powered by the notion of the aesthetic contract, in which artists and intellectuals choose to operate within the parameters of certain explicit experiments until the contractual clauses that delimit these endeavors lose their currency or validity. As an intellectual analog to Rousseau's social contract, the aesthetic contract has allowed the modern artist to address issues of knowledge, authority, and experience once thought to fall within the domain of arbitrary, remote, and inaccessible agencies.

Statutes of Art and Intellectual Work in Modernity

The Aesthetic Contract

This is a guide, in theory and in practice, to how current technological changes have impacted our interaction with texts and with each other. Henry Sussman rereads pivotal moments in literary, philosophical and cultural modernity as anticipating the cybernetic discourse that has increasingly defined theory since the computer revolution. Cognitive science, psychoanalysis and systems theory are paralleled to current trends in literary and philosophical theory. Chapters alternate between theory and readings of literary texts, resulting in a broad but rigorously grounded framework for the relation between literature and computer science. This book is a refreshing perspective on the analog-orientated tradition of theory in the humanities – and offers the first literary-textual genealogy of the digital.

Digitizing Tradition

Playful Intelligence

Carol Jacobs

This outstanding collection brings together essays that reflect on the nature of narrative, literary criticism, and history from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, ranging from deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and trauma theory, to narratology, technology, economics, and aesthetics. Acts of Narrative includes responses from renowned scholars across a wide range of disciplines: philosopher Jacques Derrida; the literary critic J. Hillis Miller; W. J. T. Mitchell, well-known for his reflections on the visual world; and Cathy Caruth, one of the founders of the field of trauma theory. These essays are brilliant in their readings of other texts, but are also striking in the manner in which each becomes itself a narrative performance. Moreover, what starts out as an exercise in theorizing and reading moves, more often than not, into a meditation on social and political issues crucial for our own sense of ourselves.

Acts of Narrative

Professor Henry Sussman

Structure and Indifference in Twentieth-century Literature

Afterimages of Modernity

Avalon Professor of Comparative Literature Samuel Weber

Textual Studies

Glyph Six

Few writers of fiction anticipate the preoccupations of twentieth-century culture with violence, derangement, and language with the lucidity that Franz Kafka achieved in his novel The Trial. The dull hammering of dread and loneliness in daily life - anonymous menace, bureaucratic complexity, isolation, punishment without crime - furnish a distressing snapshot of not just the author's time and place, but the whole of the twentieth century. The manifold components of World War I - elements which seem as poignant and divisive today as in 1914 - enter the fictive domain of The Trial as well. Nationalism, worldwide economic downturn, class strife, and massive ethnic upheaval all color the events of the novel. Yet, despite the remarkable detail of social and political history, The Trial represents Kafka's greatest unleashing of psychological, philosophical, and aesthetic insight. In The Trial: Kafka's Unholy Trinity, author Henry Sussman places the novel in its historical, aesthetic, and philosophical contexts, and examines Kafka's insight as a psychologist of the artistic process. Sussman argues persuasively that Kafka may have anticipated his century's infatuation with linguistic processes and distortions, pointing out a vast and profound body of original and disturbing literary works that bear the unique mark of Franz Kafka. He examines the interplay between those processes and the psychological structures of the novel, detailing Kafka as an uncanny theorist of art and language. So too does he examine the building blocks in Kafka's work: the forerunners of the trial scenario within his aphorisms and short fictions; the writers he cherished - Dostoevsky, Gogol, Balzac, and Dickens; and the sustained influence of filial, aesthetic, and messianic mentalities in his work.

Henry Sussman

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