Alterity and Criticism (eBook)

Tracing Time in Modern Literature

William D. Melaney (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017
238 Seiten
Rowman & Littlefield International (Verlag)
978-1-78660-151-3 (ISBN)

Infos

This volume engages in discussions of cultural semiotics and late phenomenology, and provides insights into how modern literature provides one way of assessing the possibility of World Literature for our own time. It will be of interest to students and scholars of both literature and philosophy.

---

How does the theme of the other--as person, experience or alternative conceptual scheme-allow us to reassess the role of the self in literary texts? This book employs phenomenology and semiotics to argue that modern literature is strongly concerned with the role of time in the construction of the self. Alterity and Criticism: Retracing Time in Modern Literature argues that the role of time in canonical literature underlies the experience of alterity and requires a new hermeneutic to clarify how the self emerges in literary texts. Romantic poetry from Goethe to Shelley and the modern prose tradition from Flaubert to Butor constitute different traditions but also indicate, on a textual basis, how alterity performs a crucial role in reading, thus encouraging us to interpret literary texts in terms of the related concerns of self, other and time. The author examines the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas and Wolfgang Iser, as well as the cultural semiotics of Julia Kristeva, to argue that modern literature provides the occasion for a new understanding of the self in time and, in this way, addresses some of the pressing literary problems of our own period.

Autor

lt;span>William D. Melaney is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo. He is the author of After Ontology: Literary Theory and Modernist Poetics and Material Difference: Modernism and the Allegories of Discourse.

Inhalt

1. Introduction: Alterity in Literary Texts / Part I: Romanticism as Beginning Alterity / 2. Time in Goethe’s Faust I: A Poetics of Disruption / 3. Reassessing the Byronic Sublime: A Critique of Pure Autonomy / 4. Coleridge as Poet-Critic: Imagination and Other Life / 5. Shelley and the Myth of Poetry: The ‘Return’ of Metaphor / Part II: Alterity and the Prose Tradition / 6. Flaubert’s Dislocations: Rethinking a Crisis in Reading / 7. Eliot and the Uses of Dante: Thresholds of the Unsayable / 8. Joyce and Metaphor in Excess: Art, Encounter, Semiosis / 9. Butor’s Rite of Passage: Reference and Repetition / Part III: Critical Discourses of Alterity / 10. Lévinas and Psychoanalysis: Engaging Alterity in Language / 11. Iser’s Aesthetic Phenomenology: Reading, Time and World / 12. Alterity and Future Criticism: Modern Literature in Context / Bibliography / Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 8.11.2017
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie der Neuzeit
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Schlagworte: Comparative Literature • Continental Philosophy • Cultural Semiotics • Literary Theory • Modern Literature • Phenomenology • Philosophy of Literature
• ISBN-10: 1-78660-151-6 / 1786601516
• ISBN-13: 978-1-78660-151-3 / 9781786601513