Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading: A Critical Conversation

Description

Introducing readers to a new theory of ‘responsible reading’, this book presents a range of perspectives on the contemporary relationship between modernism and theory. Emerging from a collaborative process of comment and response, it promotes conversation among disparate views under a shared commitment to responsible reading practices. An international range of contributors question the interplay between modernism and theory today and provide new ways of understanding the relationship between the two, and the links to emerging concerns such as the Anthropocene, decolonization, the post-human, and eco-theory. Promoting responsible reading as a practice that reads generously and engages constructively, even where disagreement is inevitable, this book articulates a mode of ethical reading that is fundamental to ongoing debates about strength and weakness, paranoia and reparation, and critique and affect. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: Responsible Reading Part I Theory 2 The Positive of the Negative: Joycean Post-Structuralism as Felskian Critique (Robert Baines) 3 Responsible Reading of Theory (Fabio Akcelrud Durão) 4 Modernism, Critical Theory, and Affect Theory Avant La Lettre (Yan Tang) 5 The Case for Prosthetic Thinking (Kathryn Carney) Part II Method 6 Beyond the Search Image: Reading as (Re)search (Daniel Aureliano Newman) 7 On the Advantages of Saying “No” (to Binaries, Totalizations, “Weakness,” “Modesty,” “Humility”) (Cristina Ionica) 8 Weak Theory, “Responsible” Reading, and Literary Criticism (Masami Sugimori) Part III Practice 9 Absolutely Small: Sketch of an Anarchist Aesthetic (Roger Rothman) 10 Adorno as a Reader: Writing the Mediation of Literature and Philosophy (Matthew Gannon) 11 Writing from Somewhere, Reading from Anywhere: New Criticism and (Neo)liberal Globalization (Sonita Sarker) 12 Too Literal Translation: Some Poems of Roger Fry (Rivky Mondal) 13 Afterword: Necessary–Impossible and Responsible–Irresponsible Reading Contributors Index