Overview

"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 subdisciplines 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 this 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."

Full Product Details

Author:   Mantra Mukim ,  Derek Attridge (University of York, UK)
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Weight:   0.560kg
ISBN:  

9781032157412

ISBN 10:   1032157410
Pages:   296
Publication Date:   31 May 2023
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

"'From, Event' MANTRA MUKIM SECTION I Senses 1 Plasticity and the Event of Literature: Reading Catherine Malabou with Anne Carson STEPHEN DOUGHERTY 2 Margin, Letter, and Sentence: The Graphic Event THOMAS GOULD 3 Unexceptional Events; Or, Cixous’s Scarcely Audible Literature NAOMI WALTHAM- SMITH 4 ‘Peut- e tre aurais- je d u penser’: Research and Event in Proust BRYAN COUNTER SECTION II Possibility/ Impossibility 5 Poetics of the Event or Evental Poetics? Writing as Becoming Imperceptible in Howard Barker’s Hurts Given and Received ALIREZA FAKHRKONANDEH 6 Literature, Event, and Formal Compossibility KURT CAVENDER 7 The Withness of the Earth: Haptic Epistemology in Climatic Times MIN JI CHOI 8 What Happens When Nothing Happens? Near- and Micro- Events in Contemporary Poetry SARAH BOUTTIER SECTION III After: History, Narrative, Form 9 Plastic Events, Spectral Events: Literature and the ""Real of the Phantasm,"" Between Malabou and Derrida THOMAS CLÉMENT MERCIER 10 On Deities: The Aesthetics of Concretion MILIND WAKANKAR 11 Lẹyìn Kété Níbi N Sẹlẹ: Disaster, Event, and Ideophone ADÉLÉKÈ ADÉẸKỌ 12 The Eventful Shipwreck: Robinson Crusoe, Jenichiro Oyabe, and the World Literary Map of the Drifters IRMAK SAYGIN SECTION IV Forms 13 The Event of the Literary Work DEREK ATTRIDGE 14 History, Tearing: Hamacher’s Literary Events RONALD MENDOZA- DE JESÚS 15 Serendipitous Events: Failures and Transformations of Projects in Contemporary Anglophone Literature ALEXANDER SCHERR 16 Narrating the Other: On Speaking of the Origin of Time and the Time of the Origin LUCAS SCOTT WRIGHT"

Reviews

Literature and Event is full of surprises. This rich collection by a group of iconoclastic thinkers moves through classic theories of the event into experiments that test how literature - as gesture, inscriptive mark of graphic agency, or happening (at once exceptional and unexceptional) - might be defined eventally. The book provides rich interdisciplinary applications for the event's conceptual panoply: Aristotelian kairos, Heideggerian Ereignis , Badiou's truth-event, Althusser's time of times (of capital), Benjamin's Jetztzeit, Malabou's plastic event; a politics awaited or infinitely deferred, the decision, the standstill, revolution, cataclysm, survival, the accident, the actant, the micro-event, the moment of living death, the instance of the letter, the question of what a poem does or might do. An excellent teaching tool, this book is no small publishing event in itself, with multifaceted contributions that lay the groundwork for a new critical appreciation of what the event is, and how it can be theorized in literature, aesthetics, historical analysis and politics. Emily Apter, Silver Professor of Comparative Literature and French, New York University. Author of Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018) Moving beyond the occasion of the conference at which many of the essays were first presented, this volume is something of an event in literary theory. Attending to what is irruptive and aporetic, undecidable and singular in the literary work, the chapters collectively offer incisive explorations of the literary by focusing, across languages and cultures, on what one contributor refers to as its 'conceptually alluring' status as event. Andrew Bennett, Professor of English, University of Bristol The relationship between literature and history is perhaps the conceptual problem of literary studies today. One way of addressing the relation - the dominant way - is through form . The other, more interesting route is through the notion of the event . The essays in this collection offer multiple angles on this question, and they vastly expand the field beyond the limits of, say, the Badiou (exceptional) event and the Deleuze (unexceptional) event. Fascinating discussions of micropolitics, theories of plasticity and contingency, autofiction, and experiments in graphic events that straddle writing and drawing, shift the debate into new theoretical and practical terrain. This is an indispensable, field-shaping volume. Timothy Bewes, Professor of English, Brown University, author of The Event of Postcolonial Shame (Princeton University Press, 2011) From trace, exception, and the work of art to impossibility, singularity and gift, the event has taken the guise of many of the most salient categories in literary and cultural theory. This volume shows that such events continue to play a motivating role in theory today, providing a unique and literary prism through which we can address, from unexpected angles, such questions as climate change, political action, and the limits of conceiving of life and death. Julia Ng, Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths, University of London Literature and Event: Twenty-First Century Reformulations is an important intervention into contemporary literary studies. The volume considers afresh the concept of the event, so crucial to continental philosophy and literary criticism alike. In a series of thought-provoking essays, this is a tour-de-force through key thinkers and writers of the event, highlighting its conceptual, aesthetic and critical import for literature and literary studies. With remarkable breadth and across genres, the collection reflects on the unique power of literature to provoke newness and invoke indeterminacy. As such, the volume is a crucial contribution to calibrating literary studies for the twenty-first century. Birgit Mara Kaiser, Utrecht University

Author Information

"'Mantra Mukim is an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies (Warwick), where his research focuses on global modernism and precariousness. His research articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Journal of Modern Literature, Interventions, Textual Practice, and Irish Studies Review.' . Derek Attridge is Emeritus Professor at the University of York. His publications span such topics as the history of poetry, South African literature, James Joyce, poetic form, and literary theory. His theoretical works include Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Cornell, 1988, reissued by Routledge in 2004), The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2004; reissued as a Routledge Classic in 2017), Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction’s Traces (Edinburgh, 2010), and The Work of Literature (Oxford, 2015). He co-edited Post-structuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge, 1987), Theory after ""Theory"" (Routledge, 2011), and The Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2021), and edited Jacques Derrida's Acts of Literature (Routledge, 1992). He is a Fellow of the British Academy"

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