Contaminations: Beyond Dialectics in Modern Literature, Science and Film

Michael Mack

Published by Edinburgh University Press 2016

Contaminations

Beyond Dialectics in Modern Literature, Science and Film

Michael Mack

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474470490

Overview
Contents

About this book

Introduces the figure of contamination as alternative to dialectics

Listen to a podcast on Contaminations by the author.

This book enquires into the problem of various oppositions between pure entities such as nature and society, body and mind, science and the arts, subjectivity and objectivity. It examines how works of literature and cinema have contaminated constructions of the pure and the immune with their purported opposite. As an advanced critical introduction to the figure of contamination, the book makes explicit what so far has remained unarticulated − what has only been implied − within postmodern, poststructuralist and deconstructive theory.

Combining theory with literary criticism, the book sheds light on how overlooked aspects of 'the novels of Henry James, Herman Melville and H. G. Wells question notions of natural order as well as an opposition between the subjective and the objective. It offers fresh readings of classic films and literary texts, including Vertigo and Moby Dick, with the aim to ground theoretical insights in close analysis.

Key Features

Critically engages with some aspects of contemporary theory that keep propounding a Cartesian notion of the mind’s control over the body
Analyses how key thinkers such as Spinoza, Benjamin, Pasolini and Freud attempt to re-evaluate what Agamben calls ‘bare life’
Offers original readings of Pasolini’s notion of scandalo in terms of contamination
Alerts us to the ways in which some aspects of contemporary posthumanism may merely reproduce the dialects of inclusion and exclusion which is still premised on traditional notions of purity and immunity

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Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgements Publicly Available Download PDF	vi
Introduction: Climate Change and the Contamination of the Anthropocene Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1 Contaminating Psychology with Biology: Descartes, Spinoza, Freud and Žižek Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
2 Contaminating the Visible with the Invisible: From Einstein via H. G. Wells to Hannah Arendt, Luhmann and Derrida Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	50
3 Contamination of Nature with Society: The Collapse of Natural Order from Melville to Wells and Ellison Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	77
4 Contaminating Judgement with its Suspension: Guilt and Punishment in Walter Benjamin, Herman Melville and Henry James Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	107
5 Contaminating the Digital: Action and Perception in Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	129
6 Contaminating the Sacred with the Profane: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Biopolitics Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
7 Contaminating Posthumanism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	191
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	216
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	225

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 240
Keywords: Literary Studies

eBook

Published: February 2, 2016
ISBN: 9781474470490