Critical Voices – serie

This volume of conversation not only provides a succinct philosophical biography that highlights the wide range of Attridge's interests. It likewise foregrounds his energetic engagements with literary theory, poetics, and stylistics, as well as his reassessments of contemporary philosophy and literary ideas, specifically those pertaining to the work Jacques Derrida, James Joyce, and J. M. Coetzee. Readers will find in this book a wonderful balancing act as Attridge negotiates the dynamics between the orthodoxies of critical practice and the strategic interventions of deconstructive reading. This book, with an appendix of a chronological listing of Attridge's publications, is an accessible and provocative introduction to the ideas of one of the most brilliant critical voices and generous presences in literary studies in the Anglophone world.

This collection of interviews, reflections, and creative criticism presents Christopher Norris's vigorous polemics with Hayden White, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Thomas Kuhn, Emmanuel Levinas, Pierre Bourdieu, Richard Rorty, and Stanley Fish. Alongside Norris's uncompromising critiques there emerge passages of close and careful reading of Jacques Derrida's texts, as he cites and reiterates Derrida's philosophical contexts in the works of Immanuel Kant, Gaston Bachelard, and Georges Canguilhem, and in the current discursive fields of epistemology and philosophy of science. The book also offers a coda of essays on Frank Kermode, Terry Eagleton, and Terence Hawkes. This collection, prefaced with the author's own academic memoir, provides an accessible and provocative introduction to Norris's critical thought, and highlights the wide range of his interests and philosophical engagements.

This collection brings together eleven interviews with J Hillis Miller from 1987 to 2014 conducted by distinguished scholars and critics from China, England, Ireland, and the United States. The volume offers the readers a rich gallery of representations and interventions occasioned by a critic whose intellectual and moral presence has been instrumental in the dynamic (re)definitions of the discipline of literary studies for the past five decades. The interviews cover both his life and the development of his thought in poetics and pedagogics, in ethics and politics as well. Reading Inside Out is the perfect companion to Millers many books, a lucid introduction to his thought, and a comprehensive commentary on Millers critical themes.

This collection brings together eleven interviews with J Hillis Miller from 1987 to 2014 conducted by distinguished scholars and critics from China, England, Ireland, and the United States. The volume offers the readers a rich gallery of representations and interventions occasioned by a critic whose intellectual and moral presence has been instrumental in the dynamic (re)definitions of the discipline of literary studies for the past five decades. The interviews cover both his life and the development of his thought in poetics and pedagogics, in ethics and politics as well. Reading Inside Out is the perfect companion to Millers many books, a lucid introduction to his thought, and a comprehensive commentary on Millers critical themes.

In this latest collection of poems and verse-essays, Christopher Norris revisits many of the topics for which he is best known as a philosopher, literary theorist, and writer on music. Among them are the many-worlds metaphysics of Leibniz, the nature of subjective time-experience, the issue of poetic truth, the function of rhyme in poetry, the theory wars in literary studies, the augmented-fourth interval (or tritone), also known as the devil in music, and musical minimalism approached from a critical or cultural-diagnostic standpoint. There are also some shorter, more occasional pieces including an epithalamion (wedding-poem) for the poet's daughter, a semi-fictive double sestina about police infiltration of activist groups, a savagely bawdy polemic imagined as addressed by the ancient Greek satirist Archilochus to his ex-fiancee Neobule, and a number of shrewdly angled political poems with reference to events from the 1980s to the present. These pieces have the hallmark qualities of intellectual range, perceptive wit, and formal inventiveness that characterise Norris's verse-essays. They make a strong case for poetry as a vehicle for argument, dialogue, and open debate.

The poetry of ideas, a long neglected genre, has now found a vigorous and resourceful champion in Christopher Norris. Hitherto best known as philosopher and literary theorist, he has treated that genre to a full-scale modern revival of singular scope and ambition. His poems combine intellectual agility with a verse-music both keen-eared and frequently haunting. This latest collection sees Norris at the top of his bent as lyric poet, poet-philosopher, verse-essayist, political satirist, social commentator, and skilful re-worker of traditional verse-forms to suit contemporary contexts and concerns. It exhibits all the wit and erudition that readers will have come to expect, along with a marked broadening of purview and heightened stylistic virtuosity. These poems engage with topics ranging from the personal (though never private-confessional) to the deeply enquiring (though never abstruse) and the forcefully political (though never excluding issues that transcend the narrowly partisan). Above all they make the case for viewing rhyme, meter, and prosodic structure as intrinsically a part of verse-practice and a source of everything that is most distinctive and valuable in poetry.

Oscar Wilde's famous quip 'All art is quite useless' might not be as outrageous or demonstrably false as is often supposed. No-one denies that much art begins life with practical aims in mind: religious, moral, political, propagandistic, or the aggrandising of its subjects. But those works that survive the test of time will move into contexts where for new audiences any initial instrumental values recede and the works come to be valued for their own sake. The book explores this idea and its ramifications. The glorious Palaeolithic paintings on the walls of the Chauvet Cave present a stark example. In spite of total ignorance of their original purposes, we irresistibly describe the paintings as works of art and value them as such. Here we are at the very limits of what is meant by art and aesthetic appreciation. Are we misusing these terms in such an application? The question goes to the heart of the scope and ambition of aesthetics. Must aesthetics in its pursuit of art and beauty inevitably be culture-bound? Or can it transcend cultural differences and speak meaningfully of universal values: timelessly human not merely historically relative? The case of literature or film puts further pressure on the idea of art valued for its own sake. Characters in works of literature and film or finely-honed emotions in poetry often give pleasure precisely because they resonate with our own lives and seem (in the great works) to say something profound about human existence. Is not this kind of insight why we value such works? Yet the conclusion is not quite as clear-cut as it might seem and the idea of valuing something for its own sake never quite goes away.