Literary Critique, Modernism and the Transformation of Theory

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.

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.

• IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroductionHollow formsPostcritiqueOverview and roadmap Reality Persons and volcanoes Againstness (and Euro-American relations) The plane of coevalness Chapter 1 What is Critique? Three Types of Indocility Reflective indocility Incredulity and debtThe criterion of life Criticism and critique Chapter 2 Theory: Thinking with Literature"Reading literature, not theory" "Not philosophy but a preparation for literary criticism" Postmodernism I-experience Méconnaissance and Denkraum Chapter 3 What is a Critic? Weak Thought, Weak Theory, Italian Theory Reading and democracyWeak thought/weak theory The analysis of community "Italian Theory " Living thought Modernism/modernity Amor vitae (Life vs. Forms) Chapter 4 Language: The Return to Saussure Euēmería: the natural delight of ur-attachments The many From small world to vast world The return to Saussure (language as a social fact) The hermeneutics of the subject Specters of Saussure: modernism Chapter 5 Tradition: Eliot and Work"Experimentum" (literary history) Writing the "thing" Work Who appears? The photographic portraits Double portrait Chapter 6 Text and Method: Cixous/Joyce/Lispector Living writing The hermeneutic approach (the cut) Beyond the performance of power: unwritten writing Life vs. Form according to Cixous/Lispector/Joyce What is a father? The search for method From the hermeneutical conversation to attachment Chapter 7 Poststructuralism: Faith and Lacan The spatial component of poststructuralism The problem of the gift A different relation to language From the father to paternal donation The experience of speaking The structure of the act of faith "A Slice of the Word" Conclusion Depending on your neighbor Notes Bibliography Index