Lost Thread - The Democracy of Modern Fiction

In The Lost Thread, Rancière debunks the notion of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Conrad, Woolf and Keats as reactionary producers of bourgeois mythologies, and instead foregrounds the egalitarian and democratic impulses of modernist literature. Contrary to the canonical interpretation of the relation between modernism and capitalism via the commodification of everyday life, Rancière proposes a radical rethinking of our received ideas regarding the politics of aesthetics in the modern era.

Through a complex and original stitching together of form and content, modernists strove to depict by embodying new forms and regimes of material and everyday life. Rancière articulates this substantial change in the politics of representation by explaining the shattering of the sacrosanct hierarchies of the genres and life-forms of classical literature. In the midst of the 19th century, poets, novelists and playwrights challenged the narrative staples of noble means and moral ends, and introduced an entirely new "structure of feeling". In this work, Ranciere continues his project of outlining an egalitarian "distribution of the sensible" as the compelling linkage between politics and aesthetics in the modern age. The Lost Thread not only advances Rancière's commended work on aesthetics, it also offers the reader in depth analyses of the writers in question.

List of contents

Translator's Introduction
Foreword

I. The Lost Thread of the Novel
II. Marlow's Lie
III. The death of Prue Ramsay
IV. Republic of the poets
V. The infinite taste of the Republic
VI. The Theatre of Thoughts

Notes
Index

About the author

Steven Corcoran is a writer and translator living in Berlin. He has edited and/or translated several works by Jacques Rancière, including Dissensus (Continuum, 2010), two works by Alain Badiou, Polemics and Conditions, and Alienation and Freedom (Bloomsbury 2017) by Frantz Fanon.Jacques Rancière taught at the University of Paris VIII, France, from 1969 to 2000, occupying the Chair of Aesthetics and Politics from 1990 until his retirement.

Product details

• Authors: Jacques Ranciere, Jacques (University of Paris VIII Ranciere, Jacques Rancière
• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 15.12.2016
• EAN: 9781350025684
• ISBN: 978-1-350-02568-4
• No. of pages: 192
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Philosophy: general, reference works; PHILOSOPHY / Aesthetics, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, Philosophy: aesthetics, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Philosophical traditions and schools of thought, Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, LITERARY CRITICISM / Novel as Form