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An exploration of Jacques Rancière's contribution to literary scholarship
With the increasingly rapid translation of Rancière's writing into English, the question of what this philosopher has to offer to the study of literature has become pressing.
This collection of 12 original essays both engages with Rancière's accounts of literature from across his body of work and puts his conceptual apparatus to work in acts of literary criticism. From his archival investigations of the literary efforts of nineteenth-century workers to his engagements with specific novelists and poets, from his concept of 'literarity' to his central positioning of the novel in his account of the three 'regimes' of literary practice, this book seeks to unearth, to consolidate, to evaluate and to critique this influential thinker's work on and with literature.
Grace Hellyer has a PhD from the University of New South Wales and Julian Murphet is Scientia Professor in Modern Film and Literature also at the University of New South Wales.
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List of contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Rancière and Literature
Julian Murphet and Grace Hellyer
Section I: Coordinates
1. Fictions of Time
Jacques Rancière
2. Jacques Rancière in the Forest of Signs: Indiscipline, Figurality and Translation
Eric Méchoulan
3. Rancière and Tragedy
Oliver Feltham
4. Rancière Lost: On John Milton and Aesthetics
Justin Clemens
5. 'A New Mode of the Existence of Truth': Rancière and the Beginnings of Modernity 1780-1830
Andrew Gibson
Section II: Realisms
6. The Novelist and Her Poor: Nineteenth-Century Character Dynamics
Elaine Freedgood
7. 'Broiled in Hell-fire': Melville, Rancière and the Heresy of Literarity
Grace Hellyer
8. Why Maggie Tulliver Had To Be Killed
Emily Steinlight
9. The Meaning in the Detail: Literature and the Detritus of the Nineteenth Century in Jacques Rancière and Walter Benjamin
Alison Ross
Section III: Contemporaneities
10. Ineluctable Modality of the Sensible: Poverty and Form in Ulysses
Julian Murphet
11. The Politics of Realism in Rancière and Houellebecq
Arne De Boever
12. Literature, Politics and Action
Bert Olivier
Index
About the author
Grace Hellyer Grace Hellyer has a PhD from the University of New South Wales.Julian Murphet is Scientia Professor in English and Film Studies at UNSW Australia. He is the author of Literature and Race in Los Angeles (2001), Multimedia Modernism (2009), and the forthcoming Faulkner's Media Romance. He has co-edited a number of collections, including Rancière and Literature (2016), Faulkner in the Media Ecology (2015), and Modernism and Masculinity (2014), and co-edits the journal Affirmations: of the modern.
Summary
These 13 essays consolidate and critique Ranciere's work on literature, from his archival investigations of the literary efforts of 19th-century workers to his engagements with specific novelists and poets, and from his concept of 'literarity' to his central positioning of the novel in his account of the three 'regimes' of literary practice.
