Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism

Patrick M. Bray is Associate Professor of French at the Ohio State University, USA. He is the author of The Novel Map: Space and Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction (2013) and co-editor of Building the Louvre: Architectures of Politics and Art (2014).

Patrick Bray’s collection Understanding Rancière, Understanding Modernism brings together some of the foremost scholars engaging with the work of Jacques Rancière today. What is perhaps most notable about it, however, is that reading it is akin to finding oneself in the ‘unpredictable’ library that Rancière laments the loss of in the volume’s concluding interview. If the old Bibliothèque Nationale’s ‘heterogeneous books…grouped together side by side,’ enabled Rancière to write as he does, crossing disciplinary borders and thinking around singular problems in the mode of discovery rather than mastery, the volume’s approach to Rancière operates on a similar principal (p. 277). Allowing the reader unfamiliar with Rancière’s work to find footholds in the definitions of key concepts found in the volume’s third section, the collection also offers unexpected new directions.

• Notes on ContributorsSeries PrefaceList of AbbreviationsIntroductionPatrick M. Bray, Ohio State University, USAPart I – Conceptualizing Rancière1. The Hatred of Democracy and “The Democratic Torrent”: Rancière’s MicropoliticsEmily Apter, New York University, USA2. Rancière’s Nineteenth Century: Equality and Recognition in Nights of LaborBettina Lerner, City College CUNY, USA3. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Intellectual Emancipation in Circular FormLeon Sachs, University of Kentucky, USA4. Literature as Rancièrian Film FableMargaret C. Flinn, Ohio State University, USA5. The Emancipated Spectator and ModernismCary Hollinshead-Strick, American University of Paris, France6. Mute Speech: The Silence of Literature in Rancière’s Aesthetic ParadigmGiuseppina Mecchia, University of Pittsburgh, USA7. Le Fil Perdu: The Music of the IndistinctDavid F. Bell, Duke University, USAPart II – Rancière and Aesthetics8. A Method of Equality: Rancière, Jokes, and their Relation to They Drive by NightTom Conley, Harvard University, USA9. Feminist Art: Disrupting and Consolidating the Police OrderTina Chanter, Kingston University London, UK10. Rancière and Proust: Two TemptationsSuzanne Guerlac, University of California, Berkeley, USA11. The Conception of the Will in Rancière’s Aesthetic Regime of the Arts: Pathos and Reverie in Stendhal, Ibsen and FreudAlison Ross, Monash University, Australia12. Dreaming Bourdieu Away: Rancière and the Reinvented HabitusMarina Van Zuylen, Bard College, USA13. Rethinking the Aesthetics/Politics Nexus in Latin AmericaSilvia L. López, Carleton College, USAPart III – Glossary of Key TermsDistribution of the SensibleDaniel Brant, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignFableAudrey Évrard, Fordham University, USAIntellectual EqualityZakir Paul, University of Chicago, USAMute SpeechAlison James, University of Chicago, USARegimes of ArtRobert St. Clair, Dartmouth College, USAPart IV - Interview with Jacques Rancière‘Understanding Modernism, Reconfiguring Disciplinarity,’ interview with Rancièretranslated by Patrick M. Bray, Ohio State University, USAIndex