Michael Syrotinski

Defying Gravity is a major reassessment of the work of Jean Paulhan within the context of his own times, as well as in the light of contemporary debates in literary theory. Best known for his long-serving editorship of the influential Parisian literary review, La Nouvelle Revue Française, Paulhan is now widely acknowledged as one of the most central yet least understood figures of twentieth-century French intellectual and literary history. Syrotinski's study admirably performs the dual purpose of introducing a genuinely innovative and distinctive writer to a general anglophone readership, while engaging critically with his texts and their reception. Syrotinski's readings of Paulhan are both original and provocative, and firmly establish him as an unavoidable point of reference for twentieth-century French literary history and theory.

Jean Paulhan's Interventions in Twentieth-Century French Intellectual History

Defying Gravity

Francophone African writing is often concerned with questions of subjectivity and narrative agency, and it is this focus Michael Syrotinski takes as his point of departure in Singular Performances. Using the work of V. Y. Mudimbe as a major theoretical reference, Syrotinski sets up a number of original dialogues between francophone African literature, African philosophy, literary theory, postcolonial studies, cinema, cultural studies, and history to arrive at the notion of a "performative reinscription of subjectivity." Singular Performances covers a wide range of francophone African writers, each of whom is read within a broader theoretical context related to African subjectivity: Mudimbe and the philosophical subject, Aoua Kéita and autobiography, Bernard Dadié and ethnographic irony, Ousmane Sembene and Tierno Monénembo and the cinematic imagination, Véronique Tadjo and Werewere Liking and the female writing subject, and Sony Labou Tansi and the "spectral" subject. In this skillful interdisciplinary weaving together of contemporary theory and literature, the focus on the francophone African subject allows for a richer appreciation of the texture and rhetoric of the language of the texts themselves. What emerges from this study is the subject understood not as a single homogenized entity but as a plural celebration of singular francophone African subjectivities.

Reinscribing the Subject in Francophone African Writing

Singular Performances

Postcolonial studies have transformed how we think about subjectivity, national identity, globalization, history, language, literature, and international politics. Until recently, the emphasis has been almost exclusively within an Anglophone context, but the focus of postcolonial studies is shifting to a more comparative approach. One of the most intriguing developments has been within the Francophone world. A number of genealogical lines of influence are being drawn, connecting the work of the three figures most associated with the emergence of postcolonial theory–Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak–to an earlier generation of predominantly postructuralist French theorists. Within this emerging narrative of intellectual influences, the importance of the thought of Jacques Derrida and the status of deconstruction have been acknowledged, but not adequately accounted for. In Deconstruction and the Postcolonial, Michael Syrotinski reconsiders the underlying conceptual tensions and theoretical stakes of what he terms a "deconstructive postcolonialism" and argues that postcolonial studies stands to gain ground in terms of its political forcefulness and philosophical rigour by turning back to, and not away from, deconstruction.

At the Limits of Theory

Deconstruction and the Postcolonial

Ian Maclachlan

Bucknell University Press

Associated University Presses

Sensual Reading is a collection of essays that attempts to rearticulate the relationship between reading and the different senses as a way of moving beyond increasingly homogenized discourses of the "body" and the "subject." Contributions engage with the individual senses, with the themes of sensory richness and sensory deprivation, and with the notion of "telesensuality."

Michael Syrotinski

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