Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock

Revisionary readings of literary texts and theories through analysis of sound, signature, and letters.

List of contents

Introduction: the legs of sense; Part I. Dialogue and Inscription: 1. Othello, Bakhtin and the death(s) of dialogue; 2. P.s.: Plato's scene of reading in the Protagoras; Part II. Parables of Exteriority - Materality in 'Classic' American Texts: 3. Too legit to quit: the dubious genealogies of pragmatism; 4. Poe's Foot d'Or: ruinous rhyme and Nietzschean recurrence (sound); 5. Only the dead know Brooklyn ferry (voice); 6. The letters of the law: 'Bartleby' as hypogrammatic romance (letters); Part III. Pre-Posterous Modernisms: 7. Conrad's fault (signature); 8. Miss Emily, c'est moi: the defacement of modernism in Faulkner (inscription and social form); 9. Hitchcock and the death of (Mr.) Memory (technology of the visible); Coda: post-humanist reading.

Summary

This 2004 book contains a series of readings of the work of major writers. Tom Cohen shows how analysis of long-undervalued material elements of writing - sound, signature, letters - exposes the limitations of new historicism and neo-pragmatism, and transforms our understanding of literary texts.

Product details

• Authors: Tom Cohen
• Assisted by: Anthony Cascardi (Editor), Richard Macksey (Editor)
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 07.02.2012
• EAN: 9780521460132
• ISBN: 978-0-521-46013-2
• No. of pages: 282
• Dimensions: 145 mm x 222 mm x 20 mm
• Weight: 532 g
• Series: Literature, Culture, Theory
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative linguistics