Daniel Dufournaud is an Assistant Professor at the University of Macau. He is the editor of ReFocus: The Films of John Singleton (EUP, 2024). His work appears in such journals as Poetics Today, College Literature, Studies in the Novel, Journal of Modern Literature and Journal of American Studies.

For the first time the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, too often reduced to the foregrounding of ethics, offers original and comprehensive strategies for literary criticism. Daniel Dufournaud blends illuminating close readings with a theoretical apparatus that constructs a ‘grammar of interruption’ applied to contemporary American literature. In it, failure appears as a paradoxical praxis that works at many levels to rupture the complacencies of neoliberalism and open new dialogues with politics, economics and aesthetics.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: What is an Interruption?1. Otherwise than Entrepreneurial Subjectivity: Performing Badly in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful2. Optimism and Infinity: Emotional Negativity and Gestural Alterity in Claudia Rankine’s Poetry3. Dwelling with(out) Others: Family Dysfunction in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America4. The Knots of Realism: Formal Discontinuity and Parataxis in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange and Rachel Kushner’s The FlamethrowersCoda: Failure as Praxis; or, Agency InterruptionNotesBibliographyIndex

Daniel Dufournaud is an Assistant Professor at the University of Macau. He is the editor of ReFocus: The Films of John Singleton (EUP, 2024). His work appears in such journals as Poetics Today, College Literature, Studies in the Novel, Journal of Modern Literature and Journal of American Studies.

For the first time the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, too often reduced to the foregrounding of ethics, offers original and comprehensive strategies for literary criticism. Daniel Dufournaud blends illuminating close readings with a theoretical apparatus that constructs a ‘grammar of interruption’ applied to contemporary American literature. In it, failure appears as a paradoxical praxis that works at many levels to rupture the complacencies of neoliberalism and open new dialogues with politics, economics and aesthetics.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: What is an Interruption?1. Otherwise than Entrepreneurial Subjectivity: Performing Badly in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful2. Optimism and Infinity: Emotional Negativity and Gestural Alterity in Claudia Rankine’s Poetry3. Dwelling with(out) Others: Family Dysfunction in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America4. The Knots of Realism: Formal Discontinuity and Parataxis in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange and Rachel Kushner’s The FlamethrowersCoda: Failure as Praxis; or, Agency InterruptionNotesBibliographyIndex

Daniel Dufournaud is an Assistant Professor at the University of Macau. He is the editor of ReFocus: The Films of John Singleton (EUP, 2024). His work appears in such journals as Poetics Today, College Literature, Studies in the Novel, Journal of Modern Literature and Journal of American Studies.

For the first time the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, too often reduced to the foregrounding of ethics, offers original and comprehensive strategies for literary criticism. Daniel Dufournaud blends illuminating close readings with a theoretical apparatus that constructs a ‘grammar of interruption’ applied to contemporary American literature. In it, failure appears as a paradoxical praxis that works at many levels to rupture the complacencies of neoliberalism and open new dialogues with politics, economics and aesthetics.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: What is an Interruption?1. Otherwise than Entrepreneurial Subjectivity: Performing Badly in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis and Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful2. Optimism and Infinity: Emotional Negativity and Gestural Alterity in Claudia Rankine’s Poetry3. Dwelling with(out) Others: Family Dysfunction in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America4. The Knots of Realism: Formal Discontinuity and Parataxis in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange and Rachel Kushner’s The FlamethrowersCoda: Failure as Praxis; or, Agency InterruptionNotesBibliographyIndex