Literature and Event: Twenty-First Century Reformulations

Description

If ‘event’ is a proper name we reserve for monumental changes, crises, transitions and ruptures that are by their very nature unnameable or unthinkable, then this volume is an attempt to set up an encounter between such eventhood as it comes to have a bearing on literary works and the work of reading literature. As the event continues to provide a valuable analytical paradigm for work undertaken within the newer sub-disciplines of literary and critical theory, including close reading, bio-politics, world literature, and eco-criticism, this volume makes a concerted effort to update the scholarship in this area and foreground the recent resurgence of interest in the concept. The book provides both a retrospective appraisal of the significance of events to literary studies and the literary humanities, as well as contemporary and prospective appraisals of the same, and thus would appeal scholars and instructors in the areas of literary theory, comparative literature and philosophical aesthetics alike. Along with a specialist focus on thinkers such as Derrida, Badiou, Deleuze and Malabou, the essays in volume read a wide corpus of literature ranging from Han Kang, Homer, Renee Gladman, Proust and Flaubert to Yoruba ideophones, Browning, Anne Carson, Jenichiro Oyabe and Ben Lerner. Cover Endorsement Half Title Series Information Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Contributors From, Event Philosophy’s Dice Disciplinary Action Historiography and Event Traumatic Event Politics, Ethics and the Event Literature’s Answer What Is (a) Literary Event? I.3.b What Become of Language? I.3.c How Can the Literary Event Be Read? I.3.d What Is at Stake With the Literary Event? Notes Bibliography Section I Senses 1 Plasticity and the Event of Literature: Reading Catherine Malabou With Anne Carson Notes Bibliography 2 Margin, Letter, and Sentence: The Graphic Event Margin: Barthes’ Twombly Letter: Twombly With Dickinson Sentence: Pure Syntax Notes Bibliography 3 Unexceptional Events; Or, Cixous’s Scarcely Audible Literature Cixous’s Genius The Unexceptional Almost Silent Homonymy Notes Bibliography Chapter 4 ‘Peut-Être Aurais-Je Dû Penser’: Research and Event in Proust Socrates’ Leisure and the Vocation of the Philosopher The Event of Research ‘Peut-être Aurais-Je Dû Penser’ Research and Literature Notes Bibliography Section II Possibility/Impossibility 5 Poetics of the Event Or Evental Poetics?: Writing as Becoming Imperceptible in Howard Barker’s Hurts Given and Received The Phantasm of Revolutionary Writing Bach’s Evental Poetics: Hurts Given and Received Evental Poetics and the Aporias of Pain and the Other Poetic Event, Intimacy, and Infection Notes Bibliography 6 Literature, Event, and Formal Compossibility Totality and Commensurability Multiplicity and Compossibility Judgment and the Count Conclusion Notes Bibliography 7 The Withness of the Earth: Haptic Epistemology in Climatic Times Apocalypse Now The Wit(h)ness of the Body In Dreams Begin Responsibilities Notes Bibliography 8 What Happens When Nothing Happens?: Near- and Micro-Events in Contemporary Poetry Notes Bibliography Section III After: History, Narrative, Metaphor 9 Plastic Events, Spectral Events: Literature and the “Real of the Phantasm,” Between Malabou and Derrida Notes Bibliography 10 On Deities: The Aesthetics of Concretion The Cosmology of the Moksadharma The Origins of Metaphor (The Design—Imprint of the Will) Designation: Deification, Will, and Design Notes Bibliography 11 Lẹ́yìn Kété Nibi Ń Ṣẹlẹ́: Disaster, Event, and Ideophone Dandan Kı̀ı́ Sélẹ̀ (The Insistent Will Never But Come to Pass) Containing the Event in Rhetoric What Is the Linguistic Equivalent of the Singular? Appreciating the Metalanguage of Events in Yorùbá Notes Bibliography 12 The Eventful Shipwreck: Robinson Crusoe, Jenichiro Oyabe, and the World Literary Map of the Drifters Notes Bibliography Section IV Forms 13 The Event of the Literary Work I II Notes Bibliography 14 History, Tearing: Hamacher’s Literary Events Event(s), in the Singular Literary Events Hamacher’s Literary Events Odysseus Tearing Tears: History as Departure Notes Bibliography 15 Serendipitous Events: Failures and Transformations of Projects in Contemporary Anglophone Literature Introduction Events Delayed: Failures and Transformations of Projects in Lerner and Dyer Serendipity and the Event of Literature in the Project Novel Coda: Towards an Essayistic Attitude to Events in Research Projects Notes Bibliography 16 Narrating the Other: On Speaking of the Origin of Time and the Time of the Origin Introduction: Narrativity and Philosophy Narrativity, Myth and the Unsayable Narration and the Inexpressible as Event and as Mystical Notes Bibliography Index