Critical Inventions – serie

Someone called Jacques Derrida, someone called him on the phone, someone who was dead -- this was August 22nd 1979. A mystery, he thought; but it is a mystery that began more than ten years earlier, in 1968, when Derrida, a philosopher, visits Oxford and there, before the very eyes of the Philosophy Sub-Faculty, he dies, several times. Murder, he thought. And so I shall investigate, and begin with a sign that the philosopher says he left within a book from the thirteenth century, a strange fortune-telling book that he had found in the oldest part of Oxford's Bodleian Library. In the book are a host of cryptic questions, but the philosopher directs us to one in particular, a peculiar question about a boy, and the question is this: Does the boy live? The philosopher will not, though, give the answer; he requires, instead, that we go to Oxford to open the book for ourselves.

Someone called Jacques Derrida, someone called him on the phone, someone who was dead -- this was August 22nd 1979. A mystery, he thought; but it is a mystery that began more than ten years earlier, in 1968, when Derrida, a philosopher, visits Oxford and there, before the very eyes of the Philosophy Sub-Faculty, he dies, several times. Murder, he thought. And so I shall investigate, and begin with a sign that the philosopher says he left within a book from the thirteenth century, a strange fortune-telling book that he had found in the oldest part of Oxford's Bodleian Library. In the book are a host of cryptic questions, but the philosopher directs us to one in particular, a peculiar question about a boy, and the question is this: Does the boy live? The philosopher will not, though, give the answer; he requires, instead, that we go to Oxford to open the book for ourselves.

Rapture': The act of seizing or carrying off as prey or plunder; the act of carrying or being carried; and the expression of ecstasy or euphoria in words. The concept of rapture in literature navigates along a specific trajectory, from rapine status through to being carried (away)'. This book identifies the apparent impossibility of recounting such rapturous states', and of fixing them in words or in time within cultural expectations, while questioning what we can do with those who are enrapt', and what we do inside ourselves with reading moments of rapture. "Rapture: Literature, Secrecy, Addiction" engages with the states of heightened awareness', and seeks to connect with the notion of addiction as an alternative to the moral law. Punter deals with notions of writing as itself a kind of seizure', writing as a fit', in the works of Blake, Hoelderlin, Novalis, Nietzsche, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Genet, and Ballard. Writing it down' -- the process of returning from states of exaltation to find oneself writing in often bleak locations, underlines the relationship between rapture and literature. The author concludes that the very possibility of communication and interpretation is radically open to doubt. The addict-writer becomes representative of the dialectic of writing as an act of communication; an act which is tragically doomed from the outset.

Investigates links between avant-garde art and the aesthetics of crime in order to bridge the gap between high modernism and mass culture, as emblematised by tabloid reports of unsolved crimes. Throughout Jean-Michel Rabate is concerned with two key questions: what is it that we enjoy when we read murder stories? and what has modern art to say about murder? Indeed, Rabate compels us to consider whether art itself is a form of murder. The book begins with Marcel Duchamp's fascination for trivia and found objects conjoined with his iconoclasm as an anti-artist. The visual parallels between the naked woman at the centre of his final work, 'Étant donnés', and a young woman who had been murdered in Los Angeles in January 1947, provides the specific point of departure. The text moves onward to Steven Hodel, the 'Black Dahlia' murder; Walter Benjamin's description of Eugene Atget's famous photographs of deserted Paris streets as presenting 'the scene of the crime'; and Ralph Roff's 1997 exhibition, which implied that modern art is indissociable from forensic gaze and a detective's outlook, a view first advanced by Edgar Allan Poe.

To be or not to be free, that is the question, the English question, the question of what is academic English at the beginning of the 21st century. So argues Thomas Docherty in this new and important new study, a study that begins with the claim that the fundamental idea governing the institution of the University is a will to freedom. Tracing a history of the modern European University from Vico onwards and including Hume, Rousseau, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Newman, Alain, Benda and Jaspers, the author argues the academy's will to freedom is grounded in study of the 'eloquence' that has shaped literate and humane values. He goes on to explore the current condition of English as a literary discipline, arguing that literary studies is (or should be) a search for the unknown; and that in only that search can the academy establish the real meaning -- or meanings -- of social, political and ethical freedom.

To be or not to be free, that is the question, the English question, the question of what is academic English at the beginning of the 21st century. So argues Thomas Docherty in this new and important new study, a study that begins with the claim that the fundamental idea governing the institution of the University is a will to freedom. Tracing a history of the modern European University from Vico onwards and including Hume, Rousseau, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Newman, Alain, Benda and Jaspers, the author argues the academy's will to freedom is grounded in study of the 'eloquence' that has shaped literate and humane values. He goes on to explore the current condition of English as a literary discipline, arguing that literary studies is (or should be) a search for the unknown; and that in only that search can the academy establish the real meaning -- or meanings -- of social, political and ethical freedom.

"The Prodigal Sign" sets out to characterise criticism as a set of prodigal practices that exceed the constraints of primary texts, history, and theory. This is not just because, as Derrida says, 'no practice is ever totally faithful to its principle', but also because critics are habitual runaways -- forever seeking to escape the jurisdiction of their forebears and of the academy. Always on the lookout for something new and distinctive to say about the same old texts or for texts that have escaped the professional attention of their peers, like the prodigal son, they live on their inheritance while trying to escape from their own disciplinary history. This work makes a case for celebrating the prodigal condition and for another escape -- breaking out of traditional constraints towards a hybrid form that combines the critical with the creative.

"The Prodigal Sign" sets out to characterise criticism as a set of prodigal practices that exceed the constraints of primary texts, history, and theory. This is not just because, as Derrida says, 'no practice is ever totally faithful to its principle', but also because critics are habitual runaways -- forever seeking to escape the jurisdiction of their forebears and of the academy. Always on the lookout for something new and distinctive to say about the same old texts or for texts that have escaped the professional attention of their peers, like the prodigal son, they live on their inheritance while trying to escape from their own disciplinary history. This work makes a case for celebrating the prodigal condition and for another escape -- breaking out of traditional constraints towards a hybrid form that combines the critical with the creative.

Starting with Walter Benjamin's idea of 'reception in a state of distraction' and looking briefly at some antecedents for Benjamin's thinking, this book develops a working model of distraction in interpretation. Examples are taken from film (Benjamin's test case), literature, music, painting and photography; the book closes with a 'distracted' reading of a classic work of concentration: Milton's Paradise Lost.

Starting with Walter Benjamin's idea of 'reception in a state of distraction' and looking briefly at some antecedents for Benjamin's thinking, this book develops a working model of distraction in interpretation. Examples are taken from film (Benjamin's test case), literature, music, painting and photography; the book closes with a 'distracted' reading of a classic work of concentration: Milton's Paradise Lost.

This book sets out to provide a new understanding of the nexus between the literary world and contemporary communication (iPhone et al.) in all its facets -- not Marshall McLuhan's "The medium is the message", but a new formula: "The medium is the maker". In this exploration of the medium -- traditional, modern, post-modern -- Miller engages with Browning, Freud, and Derrida to provide a platform of personal discovery and literary enlightenment (at times solemn, ironic, comic, and occasionally devastating).