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Zusatztext I have to confess to liking this book a lot. It is a literary! theoretical and autobiographical tour de force. Docherty's acute critical sense ranges across the philosophical and cultural landscape to read Paul de Man! Giorgio Agamben! Hannah Arendt and the Lisbon Lions. A few more books like this and the humanities might be worth fighting for after all. Informationen zum Autor Thomas Docherty is Professor of English at Warwick University. He has published on most areas of English and comparative literature from the Renaissance to the present day. He specializes in the philosophy of literary criticism, in critical theory, and in cultural history in relation primarily to European philosophy and literatures. Some of his previous publications include John Donne Undone (Methuen/Routledge, 1986), Postmodernism (Harvester/Columbia UP, 1993), Aesthetic Democracy (Stanford UP, 2006) and The English Question (Sussex Academic, 2008). Klappentext This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. This book explores what is at stake in our confessional culture. Thomas Docherty examines confessional writings from Augustine to Montaigne and from Sylvia Plath to Derrida, arguing that through all this work runs a philosophical substratum - the conditions under which it is possible to assert a confessional mode - that needs exploration and explication. Docherty outlines a philosophy of confession that has pertinence for a contemporary political culture based on the notion of 'transparency'. In a postmodern 'transparent society', the self coincides with its self-representations. Such a position is central to the idea of authenticity and truth-telling in confessional writing: it is the basis of saying, truthfully, 'here I take my stand'. The question is: what other consequences might there be of an assumption of the primacy of transparency? Two areas are examined in detail: the religious and the judicial. Docherty shows that despite the tendency to regard transparency as a general social and ethical good, our contemporary culture of transparency has engendered a society in which autonomy (or the very authority of the subject that proclaims 'I confess') is grounded in guilt, reparation and victimhood. Zusammenfassung This book explores what is at stake in the confessional culture. Thomas Docherty examines confessional writings from Augustine to Derrida, arguing that through all this work runs a philosophical substratum - the conditions under which it is possible to assert a confessional mode - that needs exploration and explication. Inhaltsverzeichnis Part One: Now 'This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine' Official Identity and Clandestine Experience Part Two: Dilatory Time The Ecology of Anguish Down to Zero Part Three: The Political Condition of Confession | My Language ...
