Work of Difference

Audrey Wasser

Description

The Work of Difference addresses a fundamental ontological question: What is literature? And at the heart of this question, it argues, is the problem of the new. How is it that new works or new forms are possible within the rule-governed orders of history, language use, or the social? How are new works in turn recognizable to already-existing institutions? Tracing the relationship between literature and the problem of newness back to a set of concerns first articulated in early German romanticism, this book goes on to mount a critique of romantic tendencies in contemporary criticism in order, ultimately, to develop an original theory of literary production. Along the way, it offers new readings of major modernist novels by Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, and Gertrude Stein.

Sujets

• Literary theory

Informations

• Publié par: Fordham University Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780823270088
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Work of Difference

The Work of Difference

m o d e r n i s m , r o m a n t i c i s m , a n d t h e p r o d u c t i o n o f l i t e r a r y f o r m

Audrey Wasser

f o r d h a mu n i v e r s i t yp r e s sNew York2 0 1 6

thisbookismadepossiblebyacollaborativegrant fromtheandreww.mellonfoundation.

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Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Wasser, Audrey.  The work of difference : modernism, romanticism, and the production of literary form / Audrey Wasser.  pages cm  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN9780823270057(hardback)  ISBN9780823270064(paper) 1. Literary form.2. Criticism.3I. Title.. Modernism (Literature) PN45.5.W372016 808—dc23 2015028995

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c o n t e n t s

 Introduction 1. Form and Fragmentation: Romantic Legacies 2Book of the World: Form and Intent. The in New Criticism, Revisited 3. Tyranny of the Possible: Blanchot 4Genesis of the New: Deleuze. A 5. From Figure to Fissure: SelfCorrection in Beckett’s Molloy,Malone Dies, andThe Unnamable 6 . Hyperbole in Proust’sA la recherche du temps perdu

7Anything Can Be Different from What It Is”:. “How Tautology in Stein’sThe Making of Americans  Conclusion

Appendix Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

1 11

38 52 72

94 117

139 160

163 165 185 201 207

Introduction

The problem of art in the modern era is the problem of the new. Most of our assumptions and desires about art—that it be creative and thoughtprovoking; that it be produced by a person of genius; that it be something as yet unseen in the world, let alone unseen in the classroom or the museum—all of these circle around the fundamental proposition that the artwork is thenewwork. Even when we praise a work’s timeless or universal qualities, perhaps some “power of imagi nation” shining through the work, we are liable to agree that if there is not something new about it, perhaps something formally new, it does not really count as art. If we look back to the early twentieth century, to the experimental ethos of literary modernism epitomized by Ezra Pound’s exhortation to “make it new,” and beyond that to the early nineteenth century, to romanticism’s valorization of modernity against neoclassical standards of beauty, we readily see that “new ness” has a particular history. “Newness,” in no small way, is our inheritance. This book is concerned with literary modernism from the perspective of this inheritance: with a poetics of the new that belongs to modernism’s selfunderstanding—and which, I will argue, has still not been adequately theorized. Instead, a certain nineteenthcentury way of thinking about the new continues to hold sway over the way we read modernist texts. Rather than contest the value of the new, my goal is to consider the terms in which the new has been transmitted to us, terms that end up dragging a whole set of unquestioned, metaphysical assumptions in their wake.

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