Overview

Literary Critique, Modernism and the Transformation of Theory demonstrates the non-linear temporalities and trajectories through which theory operates. Italian Theory acts as the fulcrum of a more inclusive and less combative notion of critique. This 'living thought' cuts across the translation of European thought into Anglo-American theory and carries with it lingering modernist motifs linked to feminist and psychoanalytic criticism. While connecting to the 'post-critique' debate, the study focuses on recovering the ethical underpinnings of critique. Mena Mitrano demonstrates that before being a specific method or disciplinary practice, critique is a stance towards others including indocility, receptiveness, openness to transformation, awareness of relationality, attention to language, attunement to the body, distance, displacement, externality and wonder.

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9781399513234

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Reviews

"With this book Mitrano provides literature scholars with a research perspective that identifies the practice of reading not only as a way of knowing and thinking about the world around us, but also and above all as a way of elaborating concrete possibilities for action. By interweaving ethical commitment and theoretical scrupulousness, Mitrano thus provides the academic community she addresses with the tools to elaborate a critical method that starts from the ethical foundation of critique itself and invites us to rediscover an affirmative resource in language and its potential.--Martina Misia ""Iperstoria"" Mena Mitrano recasts the literary scholar's work in terms of an essential commitment to knowing and thinking the world through its texts. Written with ethical seriousness and theoretical suppleness, Literary Critique, Modernism and the Transformation of Theory is a bold program for literary scholars and students, under pressure from forces inside and beyond the contemporary academy, to reengage critique as a practice of gracious attention, radical reconstitution and creative experimentation. --Alix Beeston, Cardiff University Mitrano's book challenges the notion that our engagements with literature today should become 'post-critical.' Inspired by Italian theory and examples from literary modernism, she proposes an alternative, open-hearted conception of critique as an affirmative form of life and as an ethical stance towards others. --Tyrus Miller, University of California, Irvine Mitrano's essay addresses crucial questions in literary studies and theory nowadays - 'What does it mean to read?', 'What does it mean to speak?', and 'What is a method?' - and does so by offering a detour that takes the reader through a valuable gallery of co-related issues, bringing forth the same plan of coevalness advocated in her book. [...] Literary Critique, Modernism and the Transformation of Theory is thus an invitation to modernist scholars to retrieve a legacy of themes, authors, and texts in which the transfer between language, life, and thought achieved its full potential and contributed to the aliveness of Theory as we know nowadays.--Andrea Lupi, University of Pisa ""The Modernist Review"""

Author Information

Mena Mitrano is Associate Professor of American literature and language in the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Her research area is theoretical-critical thought, which she explores from an interdisciplinary perspective. Her work covers major critical theorists (Walter Benjamin), psychoanalysis (Ferenczi), great women thinkers (Hannah Arendt). She is the author of studies on Gertrude Stein and Susan Sontag, major American women intellectuals who shaped the link between modernism and theory: Gertrude Stein: Woman Without Qualities (2005) and In the Archive of Longing: Susan Sontag's Critical Modernism (Edinburgh University Press 2016). She has written on language and literature and is interested in exploring literary/philosophical borders. She was educated at Rutgers University and has been a Research Associate at the Five College Women's Studies Research Center, and a Visiting Lecturer at the Weissman Center for Leadership, Mount Holyoke College.

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