Jean-Michel Rabaté

This volume makes a significant contribution to both the study of Derrida and of modernist studies. The contributors argue, first, that deconstruction is not modern; neither is it postmodern nor simply modernist. They also posit that deconstruction is intimately connected with literature, not because deconstruction would be a literary way of doing philosophy, but because literature stands out as a modern notion. The contributors investigate the nature and depth of Derrida's affinities with writers such as Joyce, Kafka, Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Paul Celan, Maurice Blanchot, Theodor Adorno, Samuel Beckett, and Walter Benjamin, among others. With its strong connection between philosophy and literary modernism, this highly original volume advances modernist literary study and the relationship of literature and philosophy.

Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism

Kafka L.O.L. Notes on Promethean Laughter

This collection of essays explores the main concepts and methods of reading launched by French philosopher Jacques Derrida who died in 2004. Derrida exerted a huge influence on literary critics in the 1980s, but later there was a backlash against his theories. Today, one witnesses a general return to his way of reading literature, the rationale of which is detailed and explained in the essays. The authors, both well-known and younger specialists, give many precise examples of how Derrida, who always remained at the cusp between literature and philosophy, posed fundamental questions and thus changed the field of literary criticism, especially with regard to poetry. The contributors also highlight the way Derrida made spectacular interventions in feminism, psychoanalytic studies, animal studies, digital humanities and post-colonial studies.

Literature, Theory and Criticism in the 21st Century

After Derrida

Professor of English & Comparative Literature Jean-Michel Rabate

This collection of specially commissioned essays, first published in 2003, explores key dimensions of Lacan's life and works.

The Cambridge Companion to Lacan

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. It's happening all the time, all around us. We cover it up. We ignore it. Rust takes on the many meanings of this oxidized substance, showing how technology bleeds into biology and ecology. Jean-Michel Rabate ́ combines art, science, and autobiography to share his fascination with peeling paints and rusty metal sheets. Rust, he concludes, is a place where things living, built, and remembered commingle. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Rust

Laurel Garver

This collection of essays was born from a wish to show to a wider audience how exciting and productive Samuel Beckett scholarship has become, at a time when there are more essays and books written about Beckett than about any key modernist authors like Joyce and Woolf. This volume contains numerous essays on Beckett that the Journal of Modern Literature has published in the last decade. Their enduring quality proves that Beckett's oeuvre has maintained its appeal today because it attracts original scholars who are also interested in issues like philosophy, psychoanalysis, ethics, contemporary history, and literary theory.

On Beckett, On!

Angeliki Spiropoulou

Examining the ways in which modernism is created within specific historical contexts, as well as how it redefines the concept of history itself, this book sheds new light on the historical-mindedness of modernism and the artistic avant-gardes. Cutting across Anglophone and less explored European traditions and featuring work from a variety of eminent scholars, it deals with issues as diverse as artistic medium, modernist print culture, autobiography as history writing, avant-garde experimentations and modernism's futurity. Contributors examine both literary and artistic modernism, combining theoretical overviews and archival research with case studies of Anglophone as well as European modernism, which speak to the current historicizing trend in modernist and literary studies.

Time, History and Modernist Aesthetics

Historical Modernisms

"In the final stages of his career, Roland Barthes abandoned his long-standing suspicion of photographic representation to write Camera Lucida, at once an elegy to his dead mother and a treatise on photography. In Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, Jean-Michel Rabate and nineteen contributors examine the import of Barthes's shifting positions on photography and visual representation and the impact of his work on current developments in cultural studies and theories of the media and popular culture."--Publisher description.

Writing the Image After Roland Barthes

Jean-Michel Rabate

spectrographies de la modernité : (Mallarmé, Breton, Beckett et quelques autres)

La pénultième est morte

1922: Literature, Culture, Politics examines key aspects of culture and history in 1922, a year made famous by the publication of several modernist masterpieces, such as T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses. Individual chapters written by leading scholars offer new contexts for the year's significant works of art, philosophy, politics, and literature. 1922 also analyzes both the political and intellectual forces that shaped the cultural interactions of that privileged moment. Although this volume takes post-WWI Europe as its chief focus, American artists and authors also receive thoughtful consideration. In its multiplicity of views, 1922 challenges misconceptions about the "Lost Generation" of cultural pilgrims who flocked to Paris and Berlin in the 1920s, thus stressing the wider influence of that momentous year.

Literature, Culture, Politics

1922

Featuring the latest research findings and exploring the fascinating interplay of modernist authors and intellectual luminaries, from Beckett and Kafka to Derrida and Adorno, this bold new collection of essays gives students a deeper grasp of key texts in modernist literature. Provides a wealth of fresh perspectives on canonical modernist texts, featuring the latest research data Adopts an original and creative thematic approach to the subject, with concepts such as race, law, gender, class, time, and ideology forming the structure of the collection Explores current and ongoing debates on the links between the aesthetics and praxis of authors and modernist theoreticians Reveals the profound ways in which modernist authors have influenced key thinkers, and vice versa

A Handbook of Modernism Studies

In this 2001 book Jean-Michel Rabaté approaches the Joycean canon through the concept of 'egoism'.

James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism

Ezra Pound's Cantos remains among the most influential and difficult of twentieth century poetic writings. But now, for the first time, Rabaté's powerful and original study presents a theory of reading adequate to the challenge of Pound's writing. Using elements from Lacanian psycho-analysis and Heidegger's powerful meditation of poetry and language, this book constructs a theory of reading which both gives full force to the strategies of writing deployed in the Cantos and to the historical and political situations to which those strategies are a response. This study provides a fresh reading of the familiar Pound canon: Homer, Dante, Ovid but also of the less well-known: Ruskin, Browning, Frobenius. Pound's practice of quotation is understood in the context of a new poetic discourse characterized by parapraxis, ellipsis, condensation and autonomous "voices" which refer the division of the speaking subject back to an "omniform" intellect capable of taking on any new personality at will. Crucial to an understanding of Pound's situation is the relationship between Chinese and Greek culture, an analysis of which allows Rabaté to elaborate the tragic dimension in Pound's life and works. This book also parallels and contrasts Pound with his major contemporaries such as Eliot and Joyce and with his immediate heirs, like William Carlos Williams, H.D., Zukofsky, and Olson.

Language, Sexuality, and Ideology in Ezra Pound's Cantos

"Rabaté's strength is that he does not treat modernism as a monolith. The study's originality is in its close examination of several 'key' themes in several 'key' texts, almost all of which he reads autobiographically. . . . It is the pattern of these themes as well as the psychoanalytic method that holds these essays together. The result is a fresh look not at modernism as a whole, but at some central themes and images of the modernists."--S. E. Gontarski, Crosscurrents Series Editor Jean-Michel Rabaté, the eminent French Joycean, combines psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts in rereading the history of modernity to give a more precise meaning to the term "modernism." Rabaté focuses throughout on a single theme, the ghostly nature of modernity. In writing a history of the concept of modernity with the awareness that the radically new has often been subject to the effects of the return of the repressed, Rabaté analyzes the notion of loss in various fields: in Freudian aesthetics of color, in literary history, and in philosophy. The postmodernist fascination with a lost object allows a reconsideration of the boundaries of such terms as "modernism" and "postmodernism." The conclusion ties together all these motifs, from Joyce to Barthes, together and shows their theoretical basis in Marx's criticism of ideology and in Freud's consideration of mourning. From the analysis of "color" as an unthinkable object of discourse to an aesthetics of the unpresentable, Rabaté points to the possibility of an "ethics of mourning," which would seem capable of overcoming the dead end of history whose ending condemns it to eternal repetition. This work will appeal to a wide community of scholars. Its strong French and continental emphasis has application in literary studies, particularly English, French, and comparative studies.

The Ghosts of Modernity

In questioning this widespread skepticism, Rabate deconstructs the pathology of lies and their logical mechanisms, leading us back to the continuing debates of the great philosophers - Plato, Nietzsche, and Aristotle - and their philosophical foundations."--BOOK JACKET.

The Ethics of the Lie

In this controversial manifesto, Jean-Michel Rabaté addresses current anxieties about the future of literary and cultural theory and proposes that it still has a crucial role to play.

The Future of Theory

The decade since the publication of Jean-Michel Rabaté's controversial manifesto The Future of Theory saw important changes in the field. The demise of most of the visible French or German philosophers, who had produced texts that would trigger new debates, then to be processed by Theory, has led to drastic revisions and starker assessments. Globalization has been the most obvious factor to modify the selection of texts studied. During the twentieth century, Theory incorporated poetics, rhetorics, aesthetics and linguistics, while also opening itself to continental philosophy. What has changed today? The knowledge that we live in a de-centered world has destabilized the primacy granted to a purely Western canon. Moreover, much of contemporary theory remains highly allusive and this is often baffling for students. Theory keeps recycling itself, producing authentic returns of basic theses, terms and concepts. Canonical modern theorists often return to classical texts, as those of Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche. And now we want to know: what is new? Crimes of the Future explores the past, present and potential future of Theory.

Theory and its Global Reproduction

Crimes of the Future

This book examines Samuel Beckett’s unique lesson in courage in the wake of humanism’s postwar crisis—the courage to go on living even after experiencing life as a series of catastrophes. Rabaté, a former president of the Samuel Beckett Society and a leading scholar of modernism, explores the whole range of Beckett’s plays, novels, and essays. He places Beckett in a vital philosophical conversation that runs from Bataille to Adorno, from Kant and Sade to Badiou. At the same time, he stresses Beckett’s inimitable sense of metaphysical comedy. Foregrounding Beckett’s decision to write in French, Rabaté inscribes him in a continental context marked by a “writing degree zero” while showing the prescience and ethical import of Beckett’s tendency to subvert the “human” through the theme of the animal. Beckett’s “declaration of inhuman rights,” he argues, offers the funniest mode of expression available to us today.

Jean-Michel Rabaté

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