Pathos of Distance

Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He is the author or editor of more than thirty books, including Crimes of the Future (2014), The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis (2014), the edited volume 1922: Literature, Culture, Politics, and Think, Pig! Beckett at the Limit of the Human (2016).

An often fascinating mix of theoretical reflection, intellectual history and literary criticism ... The Pathos of Distance is invariably interesting and its amazing erudition is simply dazzling.

• Introduction: Formations of Pathos: Nietzsche, Benjamin, Warburg1.“Pathos of distance”: Huneker and Barthes reading Nietzsche2. “Hard” modernism: Alfred Jarry3. The Birth of Irish Modernism from the Spirit of Nietzscheism 4. Ethos vs. Pathos of the New in 19105. Affect Effects Affects: Deleuzian Affect vs. Lacanian Pathos6.“Playing Possum”: War, Death and Distance in Eliot's poetry7. Let the wound speak: Cocteau's Pathosformel 8. The Pathos of History: Trauma in Siri Hustvedt's The Sorrows of an American9. Pathos of the Future: Nihilism and Hospitality in The Childhood of JesusConclusion: When is a door not a door? Bibliography Index