Rhetoric of Sincerity

Ernst van Alphen is Professor of Literary Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Mieke Bal is Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Professor. She is based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. Carel Smith is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the Meijers Research Institute in Law, both at Leiden University, The Netherlands.

"This brilliantly conceived and well-executed volume combines the surprising and the obvious in the very best way: there is, to my knowledge, no existing significant body of contemporary critical discourse on the subject, but once we are presented with its theme, it appears not only exciting and important, but inevitable. The Rhetoric of Sincerity is the kind of book that calls an entire field of inquiry into being." —Mark Reinhardt, Williams College

• Contents List of Contributorsxxx Introduction000 Ernst van Alphen and Mieke Bal Part I. Sincerity as Subjectivity Effect 1"Why do you tear me from Myself?": Torture, Truth, and the Arts of the Counter-Reformation000 Jane Taylor 2Melody and Monotone: Performing Sincerity in Republican France000 Katherine Bergeron 3The Irreconcilability of Hypocrisy and Sincerity000 Frans-Willem Korsten 4The Rhetoric of Justification: The Preponderance of Decisions over Rules000 Carel Smith 5Must We (NOT) Mean What We Say? Seriousness and Sincerity in the Work of J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell000 Hent de Vries Part II. Declining Sincerity 6Can the Subaltern Confess? Pasolini, Gramsci, Foucault, and the Deployment of Sexuality000 Cesare Casarino 7Like a Dog: Narrative and Confession in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace and The Lives of Animals000 Yasco Horsman 8Putting Sincerity to Work: Acquiescence and Refusal in Postfordist Art000 David McNeill 9When Sincerity Fails: Literatures of Migration and the Emblematic Labor of Personhood000 Leslie A. Adelson Part III. Sincerity as a Media Effect 10A Feeling of Insincerity: Politics, Ventriloquy, and the Dialectics of Gesture in Mediality 000 Jill Bennet 11Derrida on Film: Staging Spectral Sincerity000 Michael Bachmann 12Documenting September 11th: Trauma and the (Im)possibility of Sincerity000 Alison Young 13Being Angela Merkel000 Maaike Bleeker 14"Saying Everything" and Affected Self-Disclosure in the Works of Reinaldo Arenas and Herv' Guibert000 Reindert Dhondt Notes000 Bibliography000 Index000