The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form

Audrey Wasser

Published by Fordham University Press 2017

The Work of Difference

Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form

Audrey Wasser

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823270088

Overview
Contents

About this book

This book mounts a critique of persistently romantic assumptions in contemporary literary criticism and advances an original theory of literary production. Along the way, it offers new readings of major modernist novels of Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, and Gertrude Stein.

Author / Editor information

Wasser Audrey :

Audrey Wasser is Assistant Professor of French at Miami University, Ohio.

Reviews

—Martin Hägglund:
Lucid and beautifully written, The Work of Difference gives us an ontology of literature that is at once theoretical and practical. Audrey Wasser not only teaches us what literature can be but also what it can do and how it works in its most groundbreaking operations. Combining profound new readings of major modernist writers (Proust, Beckett, Stein) with a sophisticated philosophical understanding of Deleuze, The Work of Difference develops an innovative theory of literary production. Equally at home in conceptual thinking and rhetorical close reading, Wasser is an important new critic to reckon with.

The Work of Difference is an engaging, accessible, and insightful study... its focus on the brief but rich moment in romantic history is an important contribution to scholarly debate and will provide a welcome new paradigm for the rethinking of modernism's relationship to modernity.

...Wasser's achievement is a considerable one, and this book deserves a wide readership. In a literary-critical landscape too often cowed by the imperatives of context to ignore the immanent productivities of literary form, we have in this book a work of great theoretical depth and superlative imagination that captures better thanmost the sources and consequences of that energy.

As philosophically rich as it is provocative, Audrey Wasser's The Work of Difference is a book about many things: the rhetoric of modernist fiction, the lingering presence of romantic ideals in twentieth-century criticism, and the relevance of Deleuze's ontology to thinking about the production of literary works.

Wasser's expansion of the repertoire of critical questions typically asked of the work of literature succeeds in opening up ways of reading focused less on what a particular work or genre of literature might mean, and more on its production—through its rhetorical capacities—of what is continuously and innovatively new in the world.

Wasser's book... stands as a testament to the current relevance of rethinking modernism and the new along the lines of a literary ontology of difference and offers a renewed understanding of form that challenges romantic conceptions of literature and subjectivity.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Content Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Form and Fragmentation: Romantic Legacies Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	11
2. The Book of the World: Form and Intent in New Criticism, Revisited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	38
3. Tyranny of the Possible: Blanchot Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	52
4. A Genesis of the New: Deleuze Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	72
5. From Figure to Fissure: Self-Correction in Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	94
6. Hyperbole in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	117
7. “How Anything Can Be Different from What It Is”: Tautology in Stein’s The Making of Americans Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	139
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	160
Appendix Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	163
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	165
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	185
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	201
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	207

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Pages
- Main content: 216
Keywords: Gertude Stein; Gilles Deleuze; Individuation; Marcel Proust; Modernism; Modernist Novel; Newness; rhetoric; romanticism; Samuel Beckett

eBook

Published: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 9780823270088