Mute Speech
Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics
Jacques Rancière, James Swenson
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
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Mute Speech
Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics
Jacques Rancière, James Swenson
About This Book
Jacques Rancière has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly through his questioning of aesthetic "distributions of the sensible," which configure the limits of what can be seen and said. Widely recognized as a seminal work in Rancière's corpus, the translation of which is long overdue, Mute Speech is an intellectual tour de force proposing a new framework for thinking about the history of art and literature. Rancière argues that our current notion of "literature" is a relatively recent creation, having first appeared in the wake of the French Revolution and with the rise of Romanticism. In its rejection of the system of representational hierarchies that had constituted belles-letters, "literature" is founded upon a radical equivalence in which all things are possible expressions of the life of a people. With an analysis reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, the German Romantics, Vico, and Cervantes and concluding with brilliant readings of Flaubert, Mallarmé, and Proust, Rancière demonstrates the uncontrollable democratic impulse lying at the heart of literature's still-vital capacity for reinvention.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Half title
- Series Page
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Introduction: Through the Looking Glass—The Subversion of the Modernist Doxa
- Introduction: From One Literature to Another
- Part I: From Restricted to General Poetics
- Part II: From Generalized Poetics to the Mute Letter
- Part III: The Contraxsdictions of the Work of Literature
- Conclusion: A Skeptical Art
- Notes