Bøger i Theory and History of Literature serien

Construction of the Aesthetic intends to recuperate the sphere of the aesthetic from the dialectic of existence: 'not to forget in dreams the present world, but to change it by the strength of an image.'

This work examines community as an idea that has dominated modern thought and traces its relation to concepts of experience, discourse and the individual.

¿Noise is a model of cultural historiography. . . . In its general theoretical argument on the relations of culture to economy, but also in its specialized concentration, Noise has much that is of importance to critical theory today.¿ SubStance¿For Attali, music is not simply a reflection of culture, but a harbinger of change, an anticipatory abstraction of the shape of things to come. The book¿s title refers specifically to the reception of musics that sonically rival normative social orders. Noise is Attali¿s metaphor for a broad, historical vanguardism, for the radical soundscapes of the western continuum that express structurally the course of social development.¿ EthnomusicologyJacques Attali is the author of numerous books, including Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order and Labyrinth in Culture and Society.

Twenty-five essays and reviews, not available in earlier collections of de Man's work. His subjects include the work of Montaigne, Rousseau, Keats, Goethe, Holderlin, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Sartre, Gide, and Camus.

Maurice Blanchot here sustains a dialogue with a number of thinkers, including Kafka, Pascal, Nietzsche, Brecht, and Camus, who are central to the history of Western thought and who have influenced virtually all the themes that inflect contemporary literary and philosophical debate.

This book is not only a major twentieth-century contribution to Dostoevsky’s studies, but also one of the most important theories of the novel produced in our century. As a modern reinterpretation of poetics, it bears comparison with Aristotle.“Bakhtin’s statement on the dialogical nature of artistic creation, and his differentiation of this from a history of monological commentary, is profoundly original and illuminating. This is a classic work on Dostoevsky and a statement of importance to critical theory.” Edward Wasiolek“Concentrating on the particular features of ‘Dostoevskian discourse,’ how Dostoevsky structures a hero and a plot, and what it means to write dialogically, Bakhtin concludes with a major theoretical statement on dialogue as a category of language. One of the most important theories of the novel in this century.” The Bloomsbury Review

In Kafka Deleuze and Guattari free their subject from his (mis)intrepreters. In contrast to traditional readings that see in Kafka's work a case of Oedipalized neurosis or a flight into transcendence, guilt, and subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari make a case for Kafka as a man of joy, a promoter of radical politics who resisted at every turn submission to frozen hierarchies.

Bringing together a variety of texts about modern China, Chow examines the relationship of "woman" with issues of non-Western culture, including ethnic spectatorship, popular literature, the construction of literary history and the revolutionary production and reception of national literature.

Since the publication of Visions of Excess in 1985, there has been an explosion of interest in the work of Georges Bataille. The French surrealist continues to be important for his groundbreaking focus on the visceral, the erotic, and the relation of society to the primeval. This collection of prewar writings remains the volume in which Batailles¿s positions are most clearly, forcefully, and obsessively put forward.This book challenges the notion of a ¿closed economy¿ predicated on utility, production, and rational consumption, and develops an alternative theory that takes into account the human tendency to lose, destroy, and waste. This collection is indispensible for an understanding of the future as well as the past of current critical theory.Georges Bataille (1897-1962), a librarian by profession, was founder of the French review Critique. He is the author of several books, including Story of the Eye, The Accused Share, Erotism, and The Absence of Myth.

A paradigmatic contribution to literary theory and interpretation from Latin American writing.

The texts that comprise this volume were selected from Cixous' seminars on the work of Clarice Lispector. They reflect Cixous' meditations on the art of reading, writing and related themes such as giving and loving as well as trace the influence of Lispector on Cixous' own development.

Presents a sustained examination of the relation between literature and philosophy with special emphasis on the problem of the subject and of representation.

Costa Lima examines European literary traditions from the perspective of a Latin American who sees the culture of his native Brazil haunted by unresolved questions from the Northern Hemisphere.

The fourteen contributors to this volume address de Man's theory and practice of reading, the nature of those readings and what they signify for reading in general, not just literary texts.

Sets out an ordered system of the arts - music, painting, sculpture, narrative, poetry and tragedy - based on the precepts of German Idealism.

A collection of picture postcards of Algerian women exploited by the French, this “album” illustrates a powerful analysis of the distorting, denigrating effects of their presence on Algerian Society.