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This book explores the imaginative identification with animals enabled by aggression and the narcissistic aversion from them manifested as destructiveness. It explores the attraction to the society of other animals that finds expression in stories about human beings who try to join them, and the affects that cluster around the possibility that the human body is susceptible in various ways to becoming animal. The book looks at two different kinds of attempt to imagine the removal of the boundary separating human beings from other animals. A discussion is presented of the correlation between articulate utterance and social complexity in Aristotle's zoological and political works, which leaves open the possibility that birds may be capable of a degree of political organization comparable to that of human beings. The book contrasts Aristotle's curiosity about the social lives of other animals with Aristophanes' Birds, Herman Melville's Moby Dick, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Rigadoon, in all of which isolated individuals who have fallen out of human society experience some form of fascination with the social groups of animals they discover beyond its confines.

This book examines contemporary notions of humanism and ethics by reconstructing a little-known but crucial underground tradition of theorizing the animal from Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lyotard to Lévinas, Derrida, Maturana, and Varela. Through detailed readings of how discourses of race, sexuality, colonialism, and animality interact in twentieth-century American culture, the author explores what it means, in theory and critical practice, to take seriously “the question of the animal.”

Modern theory needs a history lesson. Neither Marx nor Nietzsche first gave us theory. Hegel did. To support this contention, The Birth of Theory presents a refreshingly clear and lively account of the origins and legacy of Hegel’s dialectic as theory. It begins with the untold story about Hegel, who boldly broke from modern philosophy when he adopted medieval dialectical habits of thought to fashion his dialectic. While his contemporaries rejected premodern dialectic as outdated dogma, Hegel embraced both its emphasis on language as thought and its fascination with the categories of identity and difference, creating what we now recognize as theory as distinct from systematic philosophy. Not content merely to change philosophy, Hegel also used this dialectic to expose the persistent archaism of modern life itself, establishing a method of social analysis that has influenced everyone from Marx and the nineteenth-century Hegelians, to Nietzsche and Bakhtin, all the way to Deleuze and Jameson. By uncovering these theoretical filiations across time, The Birth of Theory will not only change the way we read Hegel, but also the way we think about the histories of theory. With chapters that reanimate the overly familiar topics of ideology, commodity fetishism, and political economy, along with a powerful reinterpretation of Hegel’s famous master/slave dialectic, The Birth of Theory places the disciplines of philosophy, literature, and history in conversation with one another in an unprecedented way. Daring to reconcile the sworn enemies of Hegelianism and Deleuzianism, this timely book revitalizes dialectics for the twenty-first century.

Bleak Liberalism advances a renewed account of liberalism, with the aim of providing a better understanding of the way liberal concepts, principles, and aspirations have informed novelistic art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Britain and the US. From the writings of John Stuart Mill through the debates of the cold war and beyond, liberalism is a philosophical and political project conceived in an acute awareness of the challenges and often bleak prospects confronting it. These challenges are shown to be various, encompassing a range of psychological, sociological, and economic conditions. This renewed account of liberalism forms the basis for literary analyses focused on the interplay of political themes and elements of literary form, including narrative, dialogue, character, and perspective. The study includes analyses of canonical works of high realism (Dicken’s Bleak House, Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Trollope’s The Way We Live Now), political novels (Dickens’s Hard Times, Gaskell’s North and South, Forster’s Howards End, Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey), and experimental works of modernism (Ellison’s Invisible Man, Lessing’s The Golden Notebook) that dramatize the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century in striking ways. A central role is played in this study by the liberalism of the war and cold war era, and especially the work of Lionel Trilling, given the vivid debates during this era about the role of art in the face of challenging experiences of political disenchantment and renewed aspiration. The impact of neoliberalism on theories of liberalism is also discussed.

In Robert Bresson’s cinematography the linkage of fragmented, heterogeneous images challenges our assumption that we know what things are, or the infinite ways persons, animals, and material objects can be attuned or entangled. In Bresson’s films, an aesthetic principle thus becomes an ethical instrument to carve out an ontology in which the truth of categorical fixities is menaced. The Bond of the Furthest Apart argues that Bresson’s visionary rethinkings run parallel to suppositions about individuality, ontology, and the demystification of human privilege in the philosophical fiction of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Kafka. The bond of the book’s title refers to the counterpoint and antinomy within particular works and beneath the strains of these literary and cinematic works which are kindred in their revelation of things that lure us toward them in the absence of an orienting perspective that would make what is seen precisely recognizable.

“After Auschwitz to write even a single poem is barbaric.” This book challenges Theodor Adorno’s famous statement about aesthetic production after the Holocaust, arguing for the possibility of literature to bear witness to extreme collective and personal experiences. It considers how novels about the Holocaust relate to fictions written before and after it, and uses theories of community from Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida to explore the dissolution of community bonds in its wake. The chapter juxtaposes readings of books about the Holocaust—Keneally’s Schindler’s List, McEwan’s Black Dogs, Spiegelman’s Maus, and Kertész’s Fatelessness-with Kafka’s novels and Morrison’s Beloved, asking what it means to think of texts as acts of testimony. Throughout, the chapter questions the resonance between the difficulty of imagining, understanding, or remembering Auschwitz—a difficulty so often a theme in records of the Holocaust—and the exasperating resistance to clear, conclusive interpretation of these novels. The book is a study of literature’s value to fathoming the unfathomable.

Do killers, artists, and terrorists need one another? This book explores the disturbing adjacency of literary creativity to violence and even political terror. The book begins by anchoring the discussions in the events of 9/11 and the scandal provoked by composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's reference to the destruction of the World Trade Center as a great work of art, and they go on to show how political extremism and avant-garde artistic movements have fed upon each other for at least two centuries. The book reveals how the desire beneath many romantic literary visions is that of a terrifying awakening that would undo the West's economic and cultural order. This is also the desire, of course, of what is called terrorism. As the authority of writers and artists recedes, it is criminals and terrorists, the book suggests, who inherit this romantic, destructive tradition. Moving freely between the realms of high and popular culture, and fictional and actual criminals, the book describes a web of impulses that catches an unnerving spirit. This unorthodox approach pairs Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment with Martin Scorsese's King of Comedy, and connects the real-life Unabomber to the surrealist Joseph Cornell and to the hero of Bret Easton Ellis's bestselling novel American Psycho. The book evokes a desperate culture of art through thematic dialogues among authors and filmmakers as varied as Don DeLillo, Joseph Conrad, Francis Ford Coppola, and Jean Genet, among others.

In the late 1960s Derrida speculated that “Cultural Graphology” could be the name of a new human science, a discipline combining psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and a commitment to the topic of writing. He never undertook the project himself, but he did leave two brief sketches of how he thought cultural graphology might proceed. This book picks up where Derrida left off. Using his early thought and the psychoanalytic texts to which it is addressed to examine printed books in early modern England, it argues that the single most important lesson to survive from Derrida’s early work is that we do not know what writing is. It demonstrates the consequence of this thought for a new history of the book and a new theory of literature. Taking the topic of writing in the four areas that Derrida suggested might be the founding locales of cultural graphology, and putting these into conversation with early modern texts, it proposes radical deformations to the meanings of fundamental and apparently simple terms such as “error,” “letter,” “surface,” and “cut”.

As literary historians have learned to compare thousands of volumes at a time, they have stumbled onto century-spanning trends that are not yet fully understood. This book explores some of those trends in English-language literature. It shows, for instance, that patterns of literary judgment are very durable: a model trained on reviewing patterns in the nineteenth century can also predict the choices of twentieth-century reviewers. Chapter 2 traces the consolidation of detective fiction and science fiction; Chapter 4 measures the gradual blurring of boundaries between grammatically masculine and feminine characters. Throughout the argument, emphasis falls on the gradual emergence of a specialized literary language that continues to shape our assumptions about the purpose of poetry and fiction even today. The book also explains the new modes of quantitative analysis that are making these patterns visible. Instead of framing a debate about “digital humanities,” or a conflict between “close” and “distant" reading, the book presents statistical models as interpretive strategies akin to humanistic interpretation. The argument relies especially on the premise that machine learning can be trained on different subsets of evidence, in order to help scholars reason about the differences between historical perspectives.

For well over a century, academic disciplines have studied human behavior using quantitative information. Until recently, however, the humanities have remained largely immune to the use of data—or vigorously resisted it. Thanks to new developments in computer science and natural language processing, literary scholars have embraced the quantitative study of literary works and have helped make Digital Humanities a rapidly growing field. But these developments raise a fundamental and as yet unanswered question: what is the meaning of literary quantity? This book answers that question across a variety of domains fundamental to the study of literature. It focuses on the elementary particles of literature, from the role of punctuation in poetry and the matter of plot in novels, to the study of topoi and the behavior of characters, to the nature of fictional language and the shape of a poet’s career. How does quantity affect our understanding of these categories? What happens when we look at 3,388,230 punctuation marks, 1.4 billion words, or 650,000 fictional characters? Does this change how we think about poetry, the novel, fictionality, character, the commonplace, or the writer’s career? In the course of answering these questions the book introduces readers to the analytical building blocks of computational text analysis and brings them to bear on fundamental concerns of literary scholarship.

The identity and role of writing have evolved in the age of digital media. But how did writing itself make digital media possible in the first place? This book offers a study of the political history of digital writing and its fateful entanglement with the Freudian unconscious. Its analysis brings the work of theorists and writers back into conversation with one another to document significant meetings of minds and disciplines. The book shows how the earlier avant-garde literary experiments with alphabetical writing and the word-association games of psychoanalysis contributed to the mathematical making of digital media. Such intellectual convergence, it argues, completed the transformation of alphabetical writing into the postphonetic, ideographic system of digital media, which not only altered the threshold of sense and nonsense in communication processes but also compelled a new understanding of human–machine interplay at the level of the unconscious.

This is a book about the neglected dialogue between several influential twentieth-century theorists of political theology and early modern texts. It focuses on Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Ernst Kantorowicz, Ernst Cassirer, Walter Benjamin, and Sigmund Freud, and their readings of Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Spinoza. The book argues that the modern critics find in the early modern period a break with an older form of political theology construed as the theological legitimation of the state, a new emphasis on a secular notion of human agency, and, most important, a new preoccupation with the ways art and fiction reoccupy the terrain of religion. In particular, the book argues that poiesis is the missing third term in both early modern and contemporary debates about politics and religion. Poiesis refers to the principle, first advocated by Hobbes and Vico, that we can only know what we make ourselves. This kind of making encompasses both the art of poetry and the secular sphere of human interaction, the human world of politics and history. Attention to poiesis reconfigures the usual terms of the debate and helps us see that the contemporary debate about political theology is a debate about what Hans Blumenberg called “the legitimacy of the modern age.” Against contemporary critics, who are asserting the “permanence of political theology,” the book proposes a critique of political theology and a defense of poetry broadly conceived.

The most prevalent critical perspective on the meaning of studying the Middle Ages has been the coupling of medievalism with nineteenth-century European nationalisms. This book does not endeavor to dislodge the association of the nation-state with medieval studies, but instead introduces still-understudied connections between medievalism and empire into this nationalist disciplinary discourse. Because the book is concerned with a critique of the national philologies and the national epic through the medievalist work of Andrés Bello, the author explains the parameters and relationships between the two in the nineteenth century. The background of settler postcolonial studies used in the book leads to positing that the non-Indian inhabitants of Spanish America before and after Klor de Alva's nineteenth-century “civil wars of separation” were indeed colonized subjects. The author tries to examine the situation of Hispanic American philology within international parameters of knowledge production. The book also explores the identification of epics with metropolitan identity and the metropolitan need to possess a bona fide national epic and national philology. It furthermore makes an attempt to explore the epic nationalism in and for Castilian-speaking America.

The discipline of American studies was established in the early days of World War II and drew on the myth of American exceptionalism. Now that the so-called American Century has come to an end, what would a truly globalized version of American studies look like? This book offers a new standard for the field's transnational aspiration. The chapters offer a comparative, multilingual, or multisited approach to ideas and representations of America. They explore unexpected perspectives on the international circulation of American culture: the traffic of American movies within the British Empire, the reception of the film Gone with the Wind in the Arab world, the parallels between Japanese and American styles of nativism, and new incarnations of American studies itself in the Middle East and South Asia. The chapters elicit a forgotten multilateralism long inherent in American history and provide accounts of post-Revolutionary science communities, late-nineteenth century Mexican border crossings, African American internationalism, Cold War womanhood in the United States and Soviet Russia, and the neo-Orientalism of the new obsession with Iran, among others.

This book argues that today's humanities are an invention of the American academy in the years following World War II, when they were first conceived as an expression of American culture and an instrument of American national interests. The humanities portray a “dream of America” in two senses: they represent an aspiration of Americans since the first days of the Republic for a state so secure and prosperous that people could enjoy and appreciate culture for its own sake; and they embody in academic terms an idealized conception of the American national character. Although they are struggling to retain their status in America, the concept of the humanities has spread to other parts of the world and remains one of America's most distinctive and valuable contributions to higher education. This book explores a number of linked problems that have emerged in recent years: the role, at once inspiring and disturbing, played by philology in the formation of the humanities; the reasons for the humanities' perpetual state of “crisis”; the shaping role of philanthropy in the humanities; and the new possibilities for literary study offered by the subject of pleasure.

Current rates of species extinction exceed the evolutionary background rate, and some biologists claim we are witnessing the sixth mass extinction in the history of life on Earth. This book analyzes the narratives that shape public and expert debates about the extinction crisis to argue that biodiversity is primarily a cultural and political issue. Endangered and extinct species typically meet with interest when they are connected to stories about what a particular community believes to have lost through modernization and colonization. The first three chapters trace such engagements with modernization through texts and artworks (novels, poems, popular scientific books, paintings, films, and musical compositions) as well as through global biodiversity databases and biodiversity protection laws. Stories about endangered species often rely on the genre templates of elegy or tragedy; databases and photographic inventories also mobilize the strategies of epic and encyclopedia to convey the scope of the crisis. The last three chapters discuss the cultural meanings of biodiversity conservation in its conflicts and convergences with the animal welfare movement, the environmental justice movement, and debates about the Anthropocene. Drawing on multispecies ethnography, theories of cosmopolitanism, and Actor-Network-Theory, the book proposes multispecies justice as a new narrative for environmentalism that joins justice for disenfranchised human communities and justice for nonhuman species. By extending ecological cosmopolitanism across species boundaries, this form of justice foregrounds that definitions of what is human and what is just are culturally contingent and need to be negotiated in multispecies communities that are being modeled in speculative fiction.

Philosophers have long debated the subjects of person and personhood. This book ushers this debate into the literary realm by considering impersonality in the works of major American writers and figures of international modernism—writers for whom personal identity is inconsequential and even imaginary. In chapters on William Empson, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, T. S. Eliot, and Simone Weil, the book examines the impulse to hollow out the core of human distinctiveness, to construct a voice that is no one's voice, to fashion a character without meaningful attributes, a being that is virtually anonymous. “To consent to being anonymous,” Weil wrote, “is to bear witness to the truth. But how is this compatible with social life and its labels?” Throughout these chapters, the book examines the friction, even violence, set in motion from such incompatibility—from a “truth” that has no social foundation. The book investigates the uncompromising nature of writing that suspends, eclipses, and even destroys the person as a social, political, or individual entity, of writing that engages with personal identity at the moment when its usual markers vanish or dissolve.

Driven by global economic forces to innovate, today's society paradoxically looks forward to the future while staring only at the nearest, most local present—the most recent financial quarter, the latest artistic movement, the instant message or blog post at the top of the screen. Postmodernity is lived, it seems, at the end of history. This book takes the pulse of such postmodern historicism by tracking two leading indicators of its acceleration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: postmodern cultural criticism—including the new historicism, the new cultural history, cultural anthropology, the new pragmatism, and postmodern and postindustrial theory—and digital information technology. What is the relation between the new historicist anecdote and the database field, and can either have a critical function in the age of postmodern historicism? The book includes two previously unpublished essays and a synthetic introduction in which the author traverses from his earlier work on the theory of historicism to his recent studies of information culture to propose a theory of contingent method incorporating a special inflection of history: media history.

This book overturns the most familiar form of racial analysis in contemporary culture: the idea that race is constructed, that it operates by attaching visible marks of difference to arbitrary meanings and associations. Searching for the history of the constructed racial sign, this book argues that if people instantly perceive racial differences despite knowing better, then the underlying function of race is to produce this immediate knowledge. Racial perception, then, is not just a mark of acculturation, but a part of how people know one another. The book begins the investigation in the Enlightenment, at the moment when skin first came to be used as the primary mark of racial difference. Through Kant and his writing on the relation of philosophy and medicine, it describes how racialized skin was created as a mechanism to enable us to perceive the likeness of individuals in a moment. From there, the book tells the story of instantaneous racial seeing across centuries—from the fictive bodies described but not seen in Wilkie Collins’s realism to the medium of common public opinion in John Stuart Mill, from the invention of the notion of a constructed racial sign in Darwin’s late work to the institutionalizing of racial sight on display in the HBO series The Wire.

Victorian novels, this book argues, hurtle forward in prose as violent as the brutal human existence they chronicle. The book explains how such language assaults the norms of written expression and how, in doing so, it counteracts the narratives it simultaneously propels. Immersing himself in the troubling plots of Charles Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, the author uses his new method of narratography to trace the microplots of language as they unfold syllable by syllable. By pinpointing where these linguistic narratives collide with the stories that give them context, he makes a case for the centrality of verbal conflict to the experience of reading Victorian novels. The author also maps his argument on the spectrum of influential theories of the novel—including those of Georg Lukács and Ian Watt—and tests it against Edgar Allan Poe's antinovelistic techniques. In the process, he shifts critical focus toward the grain of narrative and away from more abstract analyses of structure or cultural context, revealing how novels achieve their semantic and psychic effects, and unearthing, in prose, something akin to poetry.