Negation, Critical Theory, and Postmodern Textuality features 14 new essays by leading specialists in critical theory, comparative literature, philosophy, and English literature. The essays, which present wide-ranging historical considerations of negation in light of recent developments in poststructuralism and postmodernism, range over many of the siginificant texts in which negation figures prominently. The book includes a wide-ranging introductory chapter that examines how attention to negation -- the inescapable nescience that is posited in any and every linguistic expression -- enhances the hermeneutic possibilities present in language. In addition, the four sections of the book bring together major critical interventions on, among others, negative meaning, unrecognizability, elenctic negation, apocalypse, nihilism, negation and gender, and denegation. All the essays involve close attention to key texts by major authors, including William Shakespeare, Henry James, Federico Garcรญa Lorca, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Walt Whitman, E.M. Forster, Mary Shelley, Margaret Atwood, Roland Barthes, Douglas Barbour, Paul de Man, bp Nichol, Jacques Derrida, and Dogen Kigen. The volume opens up new areas in critical theory, comparative literature, and the philosophy of language, and defines a major new area of inquiry in relation to notions of postmodern textuality. Critical theorists, students of comparative literature, English literature, and the history of ideas, and those interested in the hermeneutic implications of postmodernism will find this volume of substantial interest. Its extensive bibliographical apparatus and index make the collection a valuable reference tool for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students as well as for those seeking a variety of interpretive approaches to the problem of negation in literature
CONTENT
Introduction: Negation, Critical Theory, and Postmodern Textuality -- I Negative Meaning, Unrecognizability, Elenctic Negation, and Apocalypse -- Deconstruction and Negative Meaning in Medieval Mysticism -- โIn No Recognizable Wayโ The Tempest -- โMy Real Smashโ: Elenctic Negation in Henry Jamesโs The Ambassadors -- โWhere Dream used to Collide with its Realityโ: The Apocalyptic Space of Negation in Garcรญa Lorcaโs Poet in New York -- II Nothing Doing and Nihilism -- Nothing Doing: The Repudiation of Action in Beckettโs More Pricks Than Kicks -- The Shadow Life: Negation, Nihilism, and Insanity in Thomas Bernhardโs Correction -- III Engendering Negation -- Beyond Negation: Paradoxical Affirmation in Whitmanโs Third Edition -- Forsterโs Ghosts: A Passage to India and the Emptying of Narrative -- Putting on the Feminine: Gender and Negativity in Frankenstein and the Handmaidโs Tale -- IV Theory, Practice, and Denegation -- Negation and the Evil Eye: A Reading of Camera Lucida -- โTheres More Nothing to Sayโ: Unspeaking Douglas Barbourโs โStory for a Saskatchewan Nightโ -- Monstrosity, Illegibility, Denegation: De Man, Nichol, and the Resistance to Postmodernism -- Derrida and D?gen: Denegation and the Liberation of Discriminating Thought -- Contributors
