Reading Unruly - Interpretation and Its Ethical Demands

"Drawing on literary theory and canonical French literature, Reading Unruly examines unruliness as both an aesthetic category and a mode of reading conceived as ethical response. Zahi Zalloua argues that when faced with an unruly work of art, readers confront an ethical double bind, hesitating then between the two conflicting injunctions of either thematizing (making sense) of the literary work, or attending to its aesthetic alterity or unreadability. Creatively hesitating between incommensurable demands(to interpret but not to translate back into familiar terms), ethical readers are invited to cultivate an appreciation for the unruly, to curb the desire for hermeneutic mastery without simultaneously renouncing meaning or the interpretive endeavor as such. Examining French texts from Montaigne's sixteenth-century Essays to Diderot's fictional dialogue Rameau's Nephew and Baudelaire's prose poems The Spleen of Paris, to the more recent works of Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, Alain Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, and Marguerite Duras's The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Reading Unruly demonstrates that in such an approach to literature and theory, reading itself becomes a desire for more, an ethical and aesthetic desire to prolong rather than to arrest the act of interpretation. "--

List of contents

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: An Ethics of the Unruly

1. Montaigne: The Accidental Theorist

2. Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew: Allegory and the Mind-and-Body Problem

3. Translating Modernité: Narrative, Violence, and Aesthetics in Baudelaire’s Spleen of Paris

4. Living with Nausea: Sartre and Roquentin

5. Intoxicating Meaning: Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy

6. Fidelity to Sexual Difference: Marguerite Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein

Conclusion: Unruly Theory

Notes

Works Cited

Index

About the author

Zahi Zalloua is an associate professor of French and interdisciplinary studies at Whitman College. He is the coeditor of Torture: Power, Democracy, and the Human Body and the author of Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism.

Product details

Authors	Zahi Zalloua
Publisher	University of Nebraska Press
Languages	English
Product format	Paperback / Softback
Released	01.05.2014
EAN	9780803246270
ISBN	978-0-8032-4627-0
No. of pages	232
Series	Symploke Studies in Contemporary Theory; Symploke Studies in Contemporary Theory; Symploke Studies in Contempora
Subject	Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies

Product details

• Authors: Zahi Zalloua
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.05.2014
• EAN: 9780803246270
• ISBN: 978-0-8032-4627-0
• No. of pages: 232
• Series: Symploke Studies in Contemporary Theory; Symploke Studies in Contemporary Theory; Symploke Studies in Contempora
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies