philosophy, theory, literature - sup.org · philosophy, theory, literature. ... first anticolonial...

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2015NEW & FORTHCOMING 20% DISCOUNT on all titles

PHILOSOPHY,THEORY, LITERATURE

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Philosophy and Social Theory............................ 2-9

Literature, Criticism, and Literary Theory ............. 9-16

Art and Film ............................ 17-18

Ordering Information .................2

Examination Copy Policy .......18

Most SUP titles are

available as e-books

via our website or your

favorite e-reading platform.

Visit www.sup.org/ebooks

for a complete list of

offerings, as well as e-book

rental and bundle options.

ORDERINGReceive a 20% discount on all titles listed in this catalog. Use the following code to redeem this offer on hardcover and pa-perback editions: S15LIT.

Please order by phone or online. Call 800-621-2736 or visit www.sup.org.

Phone orders are accepted Monday–Fri-day, 8:00 am to 5:00 pm CT.

Orders must be prepaid or charged on VISA, MasterCard, Discover Card, or American Express (libraries excepted). Books not yet published or temporarily out of stock will be charged to your cred-it card when they become available and are in the process of being shipped. Stan-ford University Press books are distrib-uted by the University of Chicago Press Distribution Center. Shipping & Handling $5.00; outside the United States $9.50; add $1.00 for each additional book.

Borrowed LightVico, Hegel, and the ColoniesTIMOTHY BRENNAN

A critical revaluation of the humanist tradition, Borrowed Light makes the case that the 20th century is the

“anti-colonial century.” The sparks of concerted resistance to colonial oppres-sion were ignited in the gathering of intellectual malcontents from all over the world in interwar Europe. Many of this era’s principal figures were formed by the experience of revolution on Europe’s semi-developed Eastern periphery, making their ideas especially pertinent to current ideas about au-tonomy and sovereignty. Moreover, the debates most prominent then—human vs. inhuman, religions of the book vs. oral cultures, the authoritarian state vs. the representative state and, above all, scientific rationality vs. humanist reason—remain central today.

Timothy Brennan returns to the scientific Enlightenment of the 17th century and its legacies. In readings of the showdown between Spinoza and Vico, Hegel’s critique of liberalism, and Nietzsche’s antipathy towards the colonies and social democracy, Bren-nan identifies the divergent lines of the first anticolonial theory—a literary and philosophical project with strong ties to what we now call Marxism. Along the way, he assesses prospects for a renewal of the study of imperial culture.

304 pages, 20149780804790543 Paper $24.95 $19.96 sale9780804788328 Cloth $85.00 $68.00 sale

Pilate and JesusGIORGIO AGAMBEN TRANSLATED BY ADAM KOTSKO

Pontius Pilate is one of the most enigmatic figures in Christian the-ology. The only non-Christian to be named in the Nicene Creed, he is presented as a cruel colonial overseer in secular accounts, as a conflicted judge convinced of Jesus’s innocence in the Gospels, and as either a pious Christian or a virtual demon in later Christian writings. This book takes Pilate’s role in the trial of Jesus as a starting point for investigating the function of legal judgment in Western society and the ways that such judgment requires us to adjudicate the competing claims of the eternal and the historical. Coming just as Agamben is bringing his decades-long Homo Sacer project to an end, Pilate and Jesus sheds considerable light on what is at stake in that series as a whole. At the same time, it stands on its own, perhaps more than any of the author’s recent works. It thus serves as a perfect starting place for readers who are curious about Agamben’s approach but do not know where to begin.

MERIDIAN: CROSSING AESTHETICS


Stanford Briefs—

an imprint of

Stanford Univer-

sity Press—pres-

ents an innovative

collection of new books. Published across our various

disciplines, these books address the essence of a topic.

Briefs are essay-length works freed from the technical

requirements of the scholarly journal article and the

elaborate documentation of the full-length research

monograph.

Short and

incisive, Briefs

should appeal

to specialists

and nonspe-

cialists alike

by reducing for-

malization and

focusing on de-

bates of broad-

er interest.

All Briefs are peer-re-

viewed, and the criteria

that we use to select and

approve each manu-

script match the rigor

and high quality of our

traditional monographs.

Without sacrificing the

quality of carefully edited

and produced content,

these books are pub-

lished on four-month

schedules, allowing for

time-sensitive dialogue.

The National Park to ComeMARGRET GREBOWICZ

with illustrations by Jacqueline Schlossman

Historians of wilder-ness have shown that nature reserves are used ideologically in the construction of American national identity. But the contemporary prob-lem of wilderness

demands examination of how profoundly nature-in-reserve influences something more fundamental, namely what counts as being well, having a life, and having a future. What is wellness for the citizens to whom the parks are said to democrati-cally belong? And how does the presence of foreigners threaten this wellness? Recent critiques of the Wilderness Act focus exclusively on its ecological effects, ignoring the extent to which wilderness policy affects our contemporary collec-tive experience and political imagination. Tracing the challenges that migration and indigenousness currently pose to the national park system and the Wilderness Act, Grebowicz foregrounds concerns with social justice against the ecological and aesthetic ones that have created and continue to shape these environments.88 pages, 20 illustrations, 20159780804789622 Paper $12.99 $10.39 sale

StanfordBRIEFS

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY 3

Our Word Is Our BondHow Legal Speech ActsMARIANNE CONSTABLE

Words can be misspoken, misheard, misunderstood, or misappropriated; they can be inappropriate, inaccurate, dangerous, or wrong. When speech goes wrong, law often steps in as itself a speech act or series of speech acts. Marianne Constable argues that, as language, modern law makes claims and hears claims of justice and injustice, which can admittedly go wrong. She proposes an alternative to understanding law as a system of rules, or as fundamentally a policy-making and problem-solving tool. Constable introduces and develops insights from Austin, Cavell, Reinach, Nietzsche, Derrida and Heidegger to show how claims of law are performative and passionate utterances or social acts that appeal implicitly to justice.

Our Word Is Our Bond explains that neither law nor justice are what lawyers and judges say, nor what officials and scholars claim they are. However inadequate our law and language may be to the world, Constable argues that we know our world and name our ways of living and being in it through law and language

THE CULTURAL LIVES OF LAW


PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY4

New DemonsRethinking Power and Evil TodaySIMONA FORTI TRANSLATED BY ZAKIYA HANAFI

As long as we care about suffering in the world, says political philosopher Simona Forti, we are compelled to inquire into the question of evil. But is the concept of evil still useful in a postmodern landscape where absolute values have been leveled and relativ-ized by a historicist perspective? Given our current unwillingness to judge others, what signposts remain to guide our ethical behavior?

Surveying the nineteenth- and twen-tieth-century Western philosophical debates on evil, Forti concludes that it is time to leave behind what she calls “the Dostoevsky paradigm”: the dualistic vision of an omnipotent monster pitted against absolute, help-less victims. In its place, she offers a different genealogy of the relationship between evil and power. At the center of contemporary evil she posits the passive attitude towards rule-following, the need for normalcy, and the desire for obedience nurtured by our contemporary mass democracies. In our times, she contends, evil must be explored in tandem with our stubborn desire to stay alive at all costs as much as with our deep need for recognition: the new modern absolutes.

CULTURAL MEMORY IN THE PRESENT


The Other Adam SmithMIKE HILL AND WARREN MONTAG

The Other Adam Smith repre-sents the next wave of critical thinking about the still under-examined work of this paradig-matic Enlightenment thinker. Not simply another book about Adam Smith, it allows and even necessitates his inclusion in the realm of theory in the broadest sense. Moving beyond his usual economic and moral philosophical texts, Mike Hill

and Warren Montag take seriously Smith’s entire corpus, his writing on knowledge, affect, sociability and government, and political economy, as constituting a comprehensive—though highly contestable—system of thought. We meet not just Smith the economist, but Smith the philosopher, Smith the literary critic, Smith the historian, and Smith the anthropologist. Placed in relation to key thinkers such as Hume, Lord Kames, Fielding, Hayek, Von Mises, and Agamben, this other Adam Smith, far from being localized in the history of eighteenth-century economic thought or ideas, stands at the center of the most vibrant and contentious debates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

“This outstanding interdisciplinary achievement spans English literature, social theory, history of philosophy, history of the book, social theory, and political history in what is a socially important and largely original re-evaluation of the argument for a market society and Liberal political economy more generally.”

—Eric Schliesser, Ghent University


5

The Far ReachesPhenomenology, Ethics, and Social Renewal in Central EuropeMICHAEL D. GUBSER

The phenomenological movement not only produced systematic reflection on common moral concerns such as distinguishing right from wrong and explaining the status of values; it also called on philosophy to renew Euro-pean societies facing crisis, an aim that inspired thinkers in interwar Europe as well as later communist bloc dissidents.

Despite this legacy, phenomenology continues to be largely discounted as esoteric and solipsistic, the last gasp of a Cartesian dream to base knowledge on the isolated rational mind. Intellectual histories tend to cite Husserl’s episte-mological influence on philosophies like existentialism and deconstruction without considering his social or ethical imprint. And while a few recent schol-ars have begun to note phenomenol-ogy’s wider ethical resonance, its image as stubbornly academic continues to hold sway. The Far Reaches challenges that image by tracing the first history of phenomenological ethics and social thought in Central Europe, from its founders Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl through its reception in East Central Europe by dissident thinkers such as Jan Patočka, Karol Wojtyła (Pope John Paul II), and Václav Havel.



PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY

Convulsing BodiesReligion and Resistance in FoucaultMARK D. JORDAN

By using religion to get at the core concepts of Michel Foucault’s thinking, this book offers a strong alternative to the way that the philosopher’s work is read across the humanities. Foucault was famously interested in Chris-tianity as both the rival to ancient ethics and the parent of modern discipline and was

always alert to the hypocrisy and the violence in churches. Yet many readers have ignored how central religion is to his thought, particularly with regard to human bodies and how they are shaped. The point is not to turn Foucault into some sort of believer or to extract from him a fixed thesis about religion as such. Rather, it is to see how Foucault engages religious rhetoric page after page—even when religion is not his main topic. When readers follow his allusions, they can see why he finds in religion not only an object of critique, but a perennial provocation to think about how speech works on bodies—and how bodies resist.

Arguing that Foucault conducts experiments in writing to frustrate academic expectations about history and theory, Mark Jordan gives equal weight to the performative and theatrical aspects of Foucault’s writing or lecturing. How does Foucault stage possibilities of self-transformation? How are his books or lectures akin to the rituals and liturgies that he dissects in them? Convulsing Bodies follows its own game of hide-and-seek with the agents of totalizing systems (not least in the academy) and gives us a Foucault who plays with his audiences as he plays for them—or teaches them.272 pages, 20149780804792769 Paper $24.95 $19.96 sale9780804789028 Cloth $85.00 $68.00 sale

6 PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY

Radical EqualityAmbedkar, Gandhi, and the Risk of DemocracyAISHWARY KUMAR

B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of India’s constitution, and Indian nationalist M.K. Gandhi, the two figures whose policies and legacies have most contributed to Indian democracy, are typically consid-ered antagonists who held irreconcilable views of empire and political and social reform. As such, they are rarely studied together. This book reassesses their complex relationship, focusing on what it identifies as a mutual commitment to unconditional equality as inseparable from the struggle for sovereignty.

It traces the philosophical foundations of their thought in Indian and Western traditions, both religious and secular, and explores the paradoxes and risks of democracy in modern political thought. It is particularly attentive to slippages whereby their militant demands for egalitarian justice are compromised or contradicted by their own moral practices, and where the language of nonviolence lapses into that of force or sacrifice. Excavating the intellec-tual kinship of Ambedkar and Gandhi, Aishwary Kumar allows them to shed light on each other, and the story of their struggle against inequality, violence, and empire thus transcends national boundaries and unfolds within a broader twentieth-century history of ideas.


416 pages, 20159780804791953 Cloth $65.00 $52.00 sale

The Manhattan ProjectA Theory of a CityDAVID KISHIK

In The Manhattan Project, David Kishik dares to imagine a Walter Benjamin who did not commit suicide in 1940, but managed instead to escape the Nazis to begin a long, solitary life in New York. During his anonymous, post-humous existence, while he was haunting and haunted by his new city, Benjamin com-

posed a sequel to his Arcades Project. Just as his incomplete masterpiece revolved around Paris, capital of the nineteenth century, this spectral text was dedicated to New York, capital of the twentieth. Kishik’s sui generis work of experimental scholarship or fictional philosophy is thus presented as a study of a manuscript that was never written.

The fictitious prolongation of Benjamin’s life will raise more than one eyebrow, but the wit, breadth, and incisiveness of Kishik’s own writing is bound to impress. Kishik reveals a world of secret affinities between New York City and Paris, the flâneur and the homeless person, the collector and the hoarder, the covered arcade and the bare street, but also be-tween photography and graffiti, pragmatism and minimalism, Andy Warhol and Robert Moses, Hannah Arendt and Jane Jacobs. A critical celebration of New York City, The Manhat-tan Project reshapes our perception of urban life, and rethinks our very conception of modernity.

“The Manhattan Project channels Walter Benjamin in a quest to under-stand twentieth-century New York. Deftly blending history and fiction in order to capture the city’s delirious yet weighty reality, David Kishik offers astute observations of phenomena as diverse as photography, the character of the street, Andy Warhol, dance, and the New York Public Library. Turning the pages of this fascinating book is like turning a New York street corner only to find some new and unexpected pleasure.”

—Todd May, Clemson University

288 pages, 30 illustrations, 20159780804786034 Cloth $35.00 $28.00 sale

7

The World of FreedomHeidegger, Foucault, and the Politics of Historical OntologyROBERT NICHOLS

Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault are two of the most important and influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Each has spawned volumes of secondary literature and sparked fierce, polarizing debates, particularly about the relationship between philosophy and politics. And yet, to date there exists almost no work that presents a systematic and comprehensive engagement of the two in relation to one another. The World of Freedom addresses this lacuna.

Robert Nichols demonstrates that it is not merely interesting but necessary to read Heidegger and Foucault alongside one another if we are to properly understand the shape of twentieth-century Continental thought. Through close, scholarly engagement with primary texts, he develops original and demanding insights into the relation-ship between fundamental and histori-cal ontology, modes of objectification and subjectification, and an ethopoetic conception of freedom. He also reveals the role that Heidegger’s reception in France played in Foucault’s intellectual development—the first major work to do so while taking full advantage of the recent publication of Foucault’s last Collège de France lectures of the 1980s.


PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY

The Emotional Logic of CapitalismWhat Progressives Have MissedMARTIJN KONINGS

The capitalist market, pro-gressives bemoan, is a cold monster: it disrupts social bonds, erodes emotional attachments, and imposes an abstract utilitarian rationality. But what if such hallowed critiques are completely misleading? This book argues that the production of new

sources of faith and enchantment is crucial to the dynamics of the capitalist economy. Distinctively secular patterns of attraction and attachment give modern institutions a binding force that was not available to more traditional forms of rule. Elaborating his alternative approach through an engagement with the semiotics of money and the genealogy of economy, Martijn Konings uncovers capitalism’s emotional and theological content in order to understand the paradoxical sources of cohesion and legitimacy that it commands. In developing this perspective, he draws on pragmatist thought to rework and revitalize the Marxist critique of capitalism.

“This extraordinarily incisive and provocative book goes a long way toward explaining the tenacious grip of money on the American moral imagination.”

—Eugene McCarraher, Villanova University


8 PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY

Spinoza Contra PhenomenologyFrench Rationalism from Cavaillès to DeleuzeKNOX PEDEN

Spinoza Contra Phenomenology funda-mentally recasts the history of postwar French thought, typically presumed to have been driven by a critique of reason indebted to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Although the reception of phenom-enology gave rise to many innovative developments in French philosophy, from existentialism to deconstruction, not everyone in France was pleased with this German import. This book recounts how a series of French philosophers used Spinoza to erect a bulwark against the nominally irrationalist tendencies of phenomenology. From its beginnings in the interwar years, this rationalism would prove foundational for Althusser’s rethinking of Marxism and Deleuze’s ambitious metaphysics. There has been a renewed enthusiasm for Spinozism of late by those who see his work as a kind of neo-vitalism or philosophy of life and affect. Peden counters this trend by tracking a decisive and neglected aspect of Spinoza’s philosophy—his rationalism—in a body of thought too often presumed to have rejected reason. In the process, he demonstrates that the virtues of Spinoza’s rationalism have yet to be exhausted.


384 pages, 1 figure, 20149780804791342 Paper $25.95 $20.76 sale9780804787413 Cloth $85.00 $68.00 sale

The Specter of CapitalJOSEPH VOGL

In his brilliant interdisciplin-ary analysis of the global financial crisis, Joseph Vogl aims to demystify finance capitalism—with its bewil-dering array of new instru-ments—by tracing the histori-cal stages through which the financial market achieved its current autonomy. Classical and neoclassical economic theorists have played a deci-

sive role here. Ignoring early warnings about the instability of speculative finance markets, they have persisted in their belief in the inherent equilibrium of the market, describing even major crises as mere aberrations or adjustments and rationalizing dubious financial practices that escalate risk while seeking to manage it.

“The market knows best”: this is a secular version of Adam Smith’s faith in the market’s “invisible hand,” his economic interpretation of eighteenth-century providentialist theo-dicy, which subsequently hardened into an “oikodicy,” an unquestioning belief in the self-regulating beneficence of market forces. Vogl shows that financial theory, assisted by mathematical modeling and digital technology, itself operates as a “hidden hand,” pushing economic reality into unknown territory. He challenges economic theorists to move beyond the neoclassical paradigm to discern the true contours of the current epoch of financial convulsions.

“To understand what capitalism means today, we must ask about eco-nomics and culture, for capital is central to each. It takes on spectral form: shadowy, fleeting, but omnipresent. This is finance capitalism. It has existed before but is of newly dramatic power now. Vogl’s book is full of insights into what is going on and what it all means.”

—Craig Calhoun, Director, London School of Economics and Political Science



9LITERATURE, CRITICISM, AND LITERARY THEORY

Ethics in EconomicsAn Introduction to Moral FrameworksJONATHAN B. WIGHT

In Ethics in Economics , Jonathan B. Wight provides an overview of the role that ethical considerations play in economic debates. Whereas much of the field tends to focus on welfare outcomes, Wight calls for a deeper examination of the origin and evolution of our moral norms. He argues that economic life relies on three inter-related ethical systems: outcome-based, duty- and rule-based, and virtue-based. Wight provides a thorough and accessible outline of all three schools, explaining how they fit or contrast with the economic welfare model, and then uses these conceptual underpinnings to examine a range of contemporary top-ics, such as the 2008 financial crisis, the moral limits to markets, the findings of experimental economics, and the nature of economic justice. His analysis is guided by the innovative concept of ethical pluralism—the recognition that each system has appropriate applications, and that no one prevails. This book is ideal for undergraduates or uninitiated readers who seek an introduction to this topic.

STANFORD ECONOMICS AND FINANCE

280 pages, 12 figures9780804794534 Paper $27.95 $22.36 sale9780804793258 Cloth $85.00 $68.00 sale

What Money WantsAn Economy of DesireNOAM YURAN WITH A PREFACE BY KEITH HART

One thing all mainstream economists agree upon is that money has nothing whatsoever to do with desire. This strange blindness of the profession to what is otherwise considered to be a basic feature of economic life serves as the starting point for this provocative new theory of money. Through the works of Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, and Max Weber, What Money Wants argues that money is first and foremost an object of desire. Noam Yuran explores the theoretical consequences of the possibility that an ordinary object fulfills money’s function insofar as it is desired as money. Rich in color-ful and accessible examples, from the work of Charles Dickens to Reality TV and commercials, this book convinces us that we must return to Marx and Veblen if we are to understand how brand names, broadcast television, and celebrity culture work. Analyzing both classical and contemporary economic theory, it reveals the philosophical dimensions of the controversy between orthodox and heterodox economics.


Literature and the Creative Economy

SARAH BROUILLETTE

For nearly twenty years, social scientists and policy makers have been highly interested in the idea of the creative economy. This book contends that mainstream considerations of the economic and social force of culture, including theories of the creative class and of cognitive and immaterial labor, are indebted to historic conceptions of the art of literary authorship. What’s more, it shows how contemporary literature has been involved in and has responded to creative-economy phe-nomena, including the presentation of artists as models of contentedly flexible and self-managed work, the treatment of training in and exposure to art as a pathway to social inclusion, the use of culture and cultural institutions to increase property values, and support for cultural diversity as a means of growing cultural markets.

Taking a sociological approach to literary criticism, Brouillette interprets major works of contemporary fiction by Monica Ali, Aravind Adiga, Daljit Nagra, and Ian McEwan alongside government policy, social science, and theoretical explorations of creative work and immaterial labor.

248 pages, 20149780804789486 Cloth $45.00 $36.00 sale

Mother FollyA TaleFRANÇOISE DAVOINETRANSLATED BY JUDITH G. MILLER WITH A PREFACE BY MIEKE BAL

If your mentally ill patient dies, are you to blame? For Dr. Françoise Davoine, a Parisian psychoanalyst, this question becomes disturbingly real as one of her patients commits suicide. She herself has a crisis, and questions whether she should ever return to the hospital. But return she does,

and she conjures up an interconnected world, where apiculture, wondrous rituals, theater, and language games illuminate her therapeutic practice as well as her personal history. Patients, fools, and the actors of medieval farces rise up from the past along with great thinkers who represent the author’s own philo-sophical and literary sources: the humanist Erasmus, mathema-tician René Thom, writer Antonin Artaud, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and physicist Edwin Schrödinger, to name a few. Mother Folly is an important intervention in the debate about how to treat the mentally ill, particularly those with psycho-sis. A practicing analyst and a skilled reader of literary and philosophical texts, Davoine provides a humane antidote to our increasingly mechanized and drug-reliant system of dealing with “fools and madmen.”

“Luminous, erudite, diabolically ironic, and wonderfully wild, Francoise Davoine’s Mother Folly turns psychiatry on its head. Taking her lead from that great satirical work by Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, Davoine has created a hybrid text, which combines elements of fiction, theatrical production, philosophical meditation, and narrative history to expose the absurdities of contemporary platitudes about mental illness and its treatment and to reveal the hidden truths of trauma and madness.”

—Siri Hustvedt



10

NOW IN PAPER!

Better Left UnsaidVictorian Novels, Hays Code Films, and the Benefits of CensorshipNORA GILBERT

Better Left Unsaid is in the unseemly position of defending censorship from the central allegations that are traditionally leveled against it. Taking two genres generally presumed to have been stymied by the censor’s knife—the Victorian novel and classi-cal Hollywood film—this book reveals the varied ways in which censorship, for all its blustery self-righteousness, can actually be good for sex, politics, feminism, and art.

As much as Victorianism is equated with such cultural impulses as repres-sion and prudery, few scholars have explored the Victorian novel as a

“censored” commodity—thanks, in large part, to the indirectness and in-tangibility of England’s literary censor-ship process. This indirection stands in sharp contrast to the explicit, detailed formality of Hollywood’s infamous Production Code of 1930. In compar-ing these two versions of censorship, Nora Gilbert explores the paradoxical effects of prohibitive practices. Rather than being ruined by censorship, Victorian novels and Hays Code films were stirred and stimulated by the very forces meant to restrain them.

THE CULTURAL LIVES OF LAW

200 pages, 13 illustrations, 20139780804795319 Paper $21.95 $17.56 sale

LITERATURE, CRITICISM, AND LITERARY THEORY


American TerrorThe Feeling of Thinking in Edwards, Poe, and MelvillePAUL HURH

If America is a nation founded upon Enlightenment ideals, then why are so many of its most celebrated pieces of literature so dark? American Terror returns to the question of American literature’s distinctive tone of ter-ror through a close study of three authors—Jonathan Edwards, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville—who not only wrote works of terror, but who defended, theorized, and championed it. Combining updated historical perspectives with close reading, Paul Hurh shows how these authors devel-oped terror as a special literary affect informed by the way the concept of thinking becomes, in the wake of Enlightenment empiricism, increasingly defined by a set of austere mechanic processes, such as the scientific method and the algebraic functions of analytical logic. Rather than trying to find a feeling that would transcend thinking by subtending reason to emotion, these writers found in terror the feeling of thinking, the peculiar feeling of reason’s authority over emotional schemes.


A Life with Mary ShelleyBARBARA JOHNSON

EDITED BY JUDITH BUTLER AND SHOSHANA FELMAN

In 1980, deconstructive and psychoanalytic literary theo-rist Barbara Johnson wrote an essay on Mary Shelley for a colloquium on the writings of Jacques Derrida. The essay marked the beginning of Johnson’s lifelong interest in Shelley as well as her first foray into the field of “wom-

en’s studies,” one of whose commitments was the rediscovery and analysis of works by women writers previously excluded from the academic canon. It is surprising to recall that when Johnson wrote her essay, only two of Shelley’s novels were in print, critics and scholars having mostly dismissed her writ-ing as inferior and her career as a side effect of her famous husband’s. Johnson came to pen yet more essays on Shelley over the course of a brilliant career, and much of what we know and think about Mary Shelley today is due to her work.

In this volume, Judith Butler and Shoshana Felman have united all of Johnson’s published and unpublished work on Shelley alongside their own new, insightful pieces of criticism and those of two other peers and fellow pioneers in feminist theory, Mary Wilson Carpenter and Cathy Caruth.

“This animated book brings to life the very thing Mary Shelley could herself hardly have imagined: the critical difference a supportive circle of women writers can make.”

— Diana Fuss, Los Angeles Review of Books


232 pages, 20149780804791250, Paper $22.95 $18.36 sale9780804790529, Cloth $70.00 $56.00 sale

12

Robinson JeffersPoet and ProphetJAMES KARMAN

The precipitous cliffs, rolling head-lands, and rocky inlets of the Cali-fornia coast come alive in the poetry of John Robinson Jeffers, an icon of the environmental movement. In this concise and accessible biography, Jeffers scholar James Karman reveals deep insights into this passionate and complex figure and establishes Jeffers as a leading American poet of prophetic vision.

At the height of his popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, Jeffers became one of the few poets ever featured on the cover of Time magazine, and posthumously put on a U.S. postage stamp. Writing by kerosene lamp in a granite tower that he had built himself, his vivid and descriptive poetry of the coast evoked the difficulty and beauty of the wild and inspired photographers such as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. Inspiring later artists from Charles Bukowski to Czesław Miłosz and even the Beach Boys, Robinson Jeffers’ contribution to American let-ters is skillfully brought back out of the shadows of history in this compelling biography of a complex man of poetic genius who wrote so powerfully of the astonishing beauty of nature.

192 pages, 19 illustrations, 20159780804789639 Paper $19.95 $15.96 sale

Tales of Futures PastAnticipation and the Ends of Literature in Contemporary ChinaPAOLA IOVENE

Most studies of Chinese literature conflate the category of the future with notions of progress and nation building, and with the utopian visions broadcast by the Maoist and post-Mao developmental state. The future is thus understood as a preconceived endpoint that is propagated, at times even imposed, by a center of power. By contrast, Tales of Futures Past intro-duces “anticipation”—the expectations that permeate life as it unfolds—as a lens through which to reexamine the textual, institutional, and experiential aspects of Chinese literary culture from the 1950s to 2011. In doing so, Paola Iovene connects the emergence of new literary genres with changing visions of the future in contemporary China.

She provides a nuanced and dynamic account of the relationship between state discourses, market pressures, and individual writers and texts, and stresses authors’ and editors’ efforts to redefine what constitutes literature un-der changing political and economic circumstances. Iovene mines Chinese science fiction and popular science, puts forward a new interpretation of familiar Chinese avant-garde fiction, and offers close readings of texts that have not yet received any attention in English-language scholarship

240 pages, 5 figures, 20149780804789370 Cloth $45.00 $36.00 sale

The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, with Selected Letters of Una JeffersVolume Three, 1940–1962EDITED BY JAMES KARMAN

This volume of correspondence, the last in a three-volume edition, spans a pivotal moment in American history: the mid-twentieth century, from the beginning of World War II, through the years of rebuilding and uneasy peace that followed, to the election of President John F. Kennedy. Robinson Jeffers published four important books during this period—Be Angry at the Sun (1941), Medea (1946), The Double Axe (1948), and Hungerfield (1954). He also faced changes to his hometown village of Carmel, experienced the rewards of being a successful dramatist in the United States and abroad, and endured the loss of his wife Una. Jeffers’ letters, and those of Una written in the decade prior to her death, offer a vivid chronicle of the life and times of a singular and visionary poet.


LITERATURE, CRITICISM, AND LITERARY THEORY

LITERATURE, CRITICISM, AND LITERARY THEORY 13

The Stranger and the Chinese Moral ImaginationHAIYAN LEE

In the last two decades, China has become a dramatically more urban society and hundreds of millions of people have changed residence. Fam-ily and communal bonds have been broken in a country once known as “a society of kith and kin.” There has been a pervasive sense of moral crisis in contemporary China, and the new market economy doesn’t seem to offer any solutions.

This book investigates how the Chinese have coped with the condition of mo-dernity in which strangers are routinely thrust together. Haiyan Lee dismisses the easy answers claiming that this

“moral crisis” is merely smoke and mirrors conjured up by paternalistic, overwrought leaders and scholars, or that it can be simply chalked up to the topsy-turvy of a market economy on steroids. Rather, Lee argues that the per-ception of crisis is itself symptomatic of a deeper problem that has roots in both the Confucian tradition of kinship and the modern state management of stranger sociality.

This ambitious work is the first to investigate the figure of the stranger—foreigner, peasant migrant, bourgeois intellectual, class enemy, unattached woman, animal—across literature, film, television, and museum culture.

376 pages, 13 illustrations, 3 figures, 20149780804785914 Cloth $50.00 $40.00 sale

Mark Twain in ChinaSELINA LAI-HENDERSON

Mark Twain (Samuel Lang-horne Clemens, 1835–1910) has had an intriguing relationship with China that is not as widely known as it should be. Although he never visited the country, he played a significant role in speaking for the Chinese people both at home and abroad. After his death, his Chinese adventures did not come to an end, for his body of works continued to travel through China in

translation throughout the twentieth century. Were Twain alive today, he would be elated to know that he is widely studied and admired there, and that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn alone has gone through no less than ninety different Chinese translations, traversing China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Look-ing at Twain in various Chinese contexts—his response to events involving the American Chinese community and to the Chinese across the Pacific, his posthumous journey through translation, and China’s reception of the author and his work, Mark Twain in China points to the repercussions of Twain in a global theater. It highlights the cultural specificity of concepts such as “race,” “nation,” and “empire,” and helps us rethink their alternative legacies in countries with dramatically different racial and cultural dynamics from the United States.

“A fresh contribution to Mark Twain studies and to American literary studies, as well as to transnational American Studies, and cultural stud-ies more broadly, this groundbreaking book will pave the way for future investigations of the many approaches that the author opens up for us.”

—Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University


14 LITERATURE, CRITICISM, AND LITERARY THEORY

Poetic ForcePoetry after KantKEVIN MCLAUGHLIN

This book argues that the theory of force elaborated in Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics (and in particular, his theorization of the dynamic sublime) is of decisive importance to poetry in the nineteenth century and to the connection between poetry and philosophy over the last two centuries. Inspired by his deep engagement with the critical theory of Walter Benjamin, who especially developed this Kantian strain of thinking, Kevin McLaughlin uses this theory of force to illuminate the work of three of the most influ-ential nineteenth-century writers in their respective national traditions: Friedrich Hölderlin, Charles Baude-laire, and Matthew Arnold. The result is a fine elucidation of Kantian theory and a fresh account of poetic language and its aesthetic, ethical, and political possibilities.


216 pages, 20149780804791007 Cloth $55.00 $44.00 sale

The Practice of MisuseRugged Consumerism in Contemporary American CultureRAYMOND MALEWITZ

In the age of Ikea Hackers and salvage-punks, this book charts the emergence of “rugged consumers” who creatively misuse, reuse, and repurpose the objects within their environments to suit their idiosyncratic needs and desires. Figures of both literary and material culture whose behavior evokes an American can-do ethic, rugged consumers mediate between older mythic models of self-sufficiency and the consumption-driven realities of our passive, post-industrial economy. Through their unorthodox encounters with the material world, rug-ged consumers show that using objects

‘properly’ is a conventional behavior that must be renewed and reinforced rather than a naturalized process that persists untroubled through time and space.

At the same time, this Utopian ideal is rarely met: most examples of rugged consumerism conceal rather than fore-ground the ideological problems to which they respond and thus support or ignore rather than challenge the structures of late capitalist consumerism. By analyzing convergences and divergences between subjective material practices and collec-tivist politics, Raymond Malewitz shows how rugged consumerism both recodes and reflects the dynamic social history of objects in the United States from the 1960s to the present.240 pages, 5 illustrations, 20149780804791960 Cloth $55.00 $44.00 sale

The Case of Mistress Mary HampsonHer Story of Marital Abuse and Defiance in Seventeenth-Century EnglandJESSICA L. MALAY

The centerpiece of The Case of Mistress Mary Hampson is the autobiographical narrative of a 17th-century woman in an abusive and violent marriage. Composed at a time when marital dis-harmony was in vogue with readers and publishers, it stands out from compara-ble works, usually single broadsheets. In her own words, Mary recounts various dramatic and stressful episodes from her decades-long marriage to Robert Hampson and her strategies for dealing with it. The harrowing tale contains scenes of physical abuse, mob violence, abandonment, flight, and destitution. Mary wrote her story to come to terms with her situation, to justify her actions, and to cast herself in a virtuous light. The accompanying discussion of her life, drawn from other sources, provides chilling evidence of the vulnerability of seventeenth-century women and the flawed legal mechanisms that were sup-posed to protect them. Malay’s archival efforts have rescued a compelling and complicated voice from the past.

176 pages, 7 figures, 20149780804790550 Paper $19.95 $15.96 sale9780804786287 Cloth $65.00 $52.00 sale


Out of CharacterModernism, Vitalism, Psychic LifeOMRI MOSES

“Characters” are those fictive beings in novels whose coherent patterns of behavior make them credible as people.

“Character” is also used to refer to the capacity—or incapacity—of individuals to sustain core principles. When char-acters are inconsistent, they risk coming across as dangerous or immoral, not to mention unconvincing. But what is behind our culture’s esteem for unwaver-ing consistency? Out of Character examines literary characters who defy our culture’s models of personal integrity. It argues that modernist writers Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot drew inspiration from vitalism as a way of reinventing the means of depicting people in fiction and poetry. Rather than regarding a rigid character as something that inoculates us against the shifting tides of circumstance, these writers insist on the ethical necessity of forming improvisational, dynamic social relationships. Charting the liter-ary impact of William James, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and, in particular, Henri Bergson, this book contends that vitalist understandings of psychology, affect, and perception led to new situational and relational definitions of selfhood. As Moses demonstrates, the modernists stirred by these vital life lessons give us a sense of what psychic life looks like at its most intricate, complex, and unpredictable.

296 pages, 20149780804789141 Cloth $65.00 $52.00 sale

NOW IN PAPER!

What Is a Classic?Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the CanonANKHI MUKHERJEE

What Is a Classic? revisits the famous question posed by critics from Sainte-Beuve and T. S. Eliot to J. M. Coetzee to ask how classics emanate from postcolonial histories and societies. Exploring definitive trends in twentieth- and twenty-first century English and Anglophone literature, Ankhi Mukherjee demonstrates the relevance of the question of the classic for the global politics of identifying and perpetuating so-called core texts. Emergent canons are scrutinized in the context of the wider cultural phe-nomena of book prizes, the translation and distribution of world literatures, and multimedia adaptations of world classics. Throughout, Mukherjee attunes traditional literary critical concerns to the value contestations mobilizing postcolonial and world literature. The breadth of debates and topics she addresses, as well as the book’s ambitious historical schema, which includes South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and North America, set this study apart from related titles on the bookshelf today.


296 pages, 20139780804795258 Paper $24.95 $19.96 sale

NOW IN PAPER!

Why Literary Periods MatteredHistorical Contrast and the Prestige of English StudiesTED UNDERWOOD

In the mid-nineteenth century, the study of English literature began to be divided into courses that surveyed discrete “periods.” Since that time, scholars’ definitions of literature and their rationales for teaching it have changed radically. But the periodized structure of the curriculum has remained oddly unshaken, as if the exercise of contrasting one literary period with another has an impor-tance that transcends the content of any individual course.

Why Literary Periods Mattered explains how historical contrast became central to literary study, and why it remained institutionally central in spite of criti-cal controversy about literature itself. Organizing literary history around contrast rather than causal continuity helped literature departments separate themselves from departments of history. But critics’ long reliance on a rhetoric of contrasted movements and fateful turns has produced important blind spots in the discipline. In the twenty-first century, Underwood argues, literary study may need digital technology in particular to develop new methods of reasoning about gradual, continuous change.

216 pages, 2 illustrations 20139780804795265, paper $24.95 $19.96 sale

16 LITERATURE, CRITICISM, AND LITERARY THEORY

Jewish Pasts, German FictionsHistory, Memory, and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955JONATHAN SKOLNIK

Jewish Pasts, German Fictions is the first comprehensive study of how German-Jewish writers used images from the Spanish-Jewish past to define their place in German culture and society. Jonathan Skolnik argues that Jewish historical fiction was a form of cultural memory that functioned as a parallel to the modern, demythologizing project of secular Jewish history writing.

What did it imply for a minority to imagine its history in the majority language? Skolnik makes the case that the answer lies in the creation of a German-Jewish minority culture in which historical fiction played a central role. After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Jewish writers and artists, both in Nazi Germany and in exile, employed images from the Sephardic past to grapple with the nature of fas-cism, the predicament of exile, and the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust. Ultimately, Skolnik posi-tions the Jewish embrace of German culture not as an act of assimilation but rather a reinvention of Jewish identity and historical memory.

STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE


Flaubert PostsecularModernity Crossed OutBARBARA VINKEN

By his national affiliation and choice of genre, French novelist Gustave Flaubert can be considered emblematic of modernity. This book show-cases his specific and highly refined imaginary as at once unique and symptomatic of an era. In particular, it con-tributes to the controversial discussion of modernity’s relation to religion. At a time

when new religious fundamentalisms throughout the world are on the rise, this has only become a more pressing issue.

Through this single acclaimed author, we realize that modernity can only be understood in terms of its critical rewriting of religious dogma. Strikingly, already in Flaubert, this rewriting emerges in conjunction with questions of the Orient and Orientalism. Flaubert’s Orient is an Other that is always already within Western society. By highlighting the complexity of the relation between religion, modernity, and the Oriental, Barbara Vinken’s discussion of these issues goes beyond simple binaries. Her Flaubert Postsecular is a model of scholarly research with far-reaching political implications.

“This book is not only one of a handful of the best works to have come out on Flaubert in a very long time; it is also, and in so many ways, paradigmatic for literary studies today.”

—Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University

“Flaubert Postsecular opens up an entirely new perspective not only onto Flaubert as an emblematic figure of literary modernity, but also onto modernity itself. After Vinken’s book, we will have to renegotiate what it means to be ‘absolutely modern.’”

—Susanne Lüdemann, author of Politics of Deconstruction: A New Introduction to

Jacques Derrida (2014)


552 pages, 20159780804780643 Cloth $90.00 $72.00 sale9780804780650 Paper $29.95 $23.96 sale


Sentimental MemorialsWomen and the Novel in Literary HistoryMELISSA SODEMAN

During the later eighteenth century, changes in the meaning and status of literature left popular sentimental novels stranded on the margins of literary his-tory. While critics no longer dismiss or ignore these works, recent reassessments have emphasized their interventions in various political and cultural debates rather than their literary significance. Sentimental Memorials, by contrast, argues that sentimental novels gave the women who wrote them a means of clarifying, protesting, and finally memo-rializing the historical conditions under which they wrote. As women writers successfully navigated the professional marketplace but struggled to position their works among more lasting literary monuments, their novels reflect on what the elevation of literature would mean for women’s literary reputations.

Drawing together the history of the novel, women’s literary history, and book history, Melissa Sodeman revisits the critical frameworks through which we have understood the history of literature. Novels by Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Robinson, she argues, offer ways of rethinking some of the signal literary developments of this period, from emerging notions of genius and originality to the rise of an English canon.

200 pages, 2 illustrations, 20149780804780650 Paper $29.95 $23.96 sale9780804791328 Cloth $50.00 $40.00 sale

NOW IN PAPER!

Thinking Its PresenceForm, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American PoetryDOROTHY J. WANG

When will American poetry and poet-ics stop viewing poetry by racialized persons as a secondary subject within the field? Dorothy J. Wang makes an impassioned case that now is the time. Thinking Its Presence calls for a radical rethinking of how American poetry is being read today, offering its own reading as a roadmap.

While focusing on the work of five contemporary Asian American poets—Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, John Yau, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Pamela Lu—the book contends that aes-thetic forms are inseparable from social, political, and historical contexts in the writing and reception of all poetry. This is the first sustained study of the formal properties in Asian American poetry across a range of aesthetic styles, from traditional lyric to avant-garde. Wang argues with conviction that critics should read minority poetry with the same attention to language and form that they bring to their analyses of writing by white poets.

ASIAN AMERICA

416 pages, 20139780804795272 Paper $27.95 $22.36 sale

An Early SelfJewish Belonging in Romance Literature, 1499–1627SUSANNE ZEPP

What role has Jewish intellectual culture played in the development of modern Romance literature? Susanne Zepp seeks to answer this question through an examination of five influential early modern texts written between 1499 and 1627: Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina, Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore, the anonymous tale Lazarillo de Tormes (the first picaresque novel), Montaigne’s Essais, and the poetical renditions of the Bible by João Pinto Delgado. Forced to straddle two cultures and religions, these Iberian conversos (Jews who converted to Catholicism) prefigured the subjectivity which would come to characterize modernity.

As “New Christians” in an intolerant world, these thinkers worked within the tensions of their historical context to question norms and dogmas. Zepp interprets the changes that took place in various literary genres and works of the period within the broader historical context of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, demonstrating the extent to which the development of early modern subjective consciousness and its expression in literary works can be explained in part as a universalization of originally Jewish experiences.

STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE


EXAMINATION COPY POLICY

NOW AVAILABLE: e-COPY

To order a digital ex-amination copy, go to the book's page on www.sup.org and click “Request Examination Copy.”

This service is free and no invoice will accompany your order.

If you wish to receive a hard copy of a book, please mail or fax your request on your department’s letter-head, specifying the title of your course, your expected enrollment, the semester or quarter in which the course will be offered, the course level (undergradu-ate or graduate), and the titles of any textbooks that you currently use.

We allow instructors 90 days to consider any title for potential course adop-tion. Your examination copy will be followed by an invoice, offering a 20% academic discount (plus shipping charges) that is payable within 90 days. If an adoption notification is received within that 90 day period, your invoice will be cancelled. Otherwise, you may return the copy to our warehouse, or pur-chase it for your own use.

MAIL TOExamination CopyStanford University Press425 BroadwayRedwood City, CA 94063

FAX TO:

(650) 725-3457

18 ART AND FILM

The Miracle of Analogyor The History of Photography, Part 1KAJA SILVERMAN

The Miracle of Analogy is the first of a two-volume recon-ceptualization of photography. It argues that photography originates in what is seen, rather than in the human eye or the camera lens, and that it is the world’s primary way of revealing itself to us.

Neither an index, representation, nor copy, as conventional studies would have it, the photographic image is an analogy. This principle obtains at every level of its being: a photograph analogizes its referent, the negative from which it is generated, every other print that is struck from that negative, and all of its digital “offspring.”

Photography is also unstoppably developmental, both at the level of the individual image and of medium. The photograph moves through time, in search of other “kin,” some of which may be visual, but others of which may be literary, architec-tural, philosophical, or literary. Finally, photography develops with us, and in response to us. It assumes historically legible forms, but when we divest them of their saving power, as we always seem to do, it goes elsewhere.

The present volume focuses on the nineteenth century and some of its contemporary progeny. It begins with the camera obscura, which morphed into chemical photography and lives on in digital form, and ends with Walter Benjamin. Key figures discussed along the way include Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, William Fox-Talbot, Jeff Wall, and Joan Fontcuberta.

“This is a lovely, intriguing book, powerfully argued, compellingly illus-trated—a major provocation. Challenging all the ways we’re so used to thinking about photography, its richly textured counter-history invites us to rethink the very meaning of the “analogue” in the contemporary digital age. “

— Rebecca Comay, University of Toronto

240 pages, 95 illustrations, 20159780804793995 Paper $21.95 $17.56 sale9780804793278 Cloth $65.00 $52.00 sale

19ART AND FILM

Concerning the Spiritual—and the Concrete—in Kandinsky’s ArtLISA FLORMAN

This book examines the art and writings of Wassily Kandinsky, who is widely regarded as one of the first artists to produce non-representational paintings. Crucial to an understanding of Kandinsky’s intentions is On the Spiritual in Art, the celebrated essay he published in 1911. Where most scholars have taken its repeated references to “spirit” as signaling quasi-religious or mystical concerns, Florman argues instead that Kandinsky’s primary frame of reference was G.W.F. Hegel’s Aesthetics, in which art had similarly been presented as a vehicle for the developing self-consciousness of spirit (or Geist, in German). In addition to close readings of Kandinsky’s writings, the book also includes a discussion of a 1936 essay on the artist’s paintings written by his own nephew, philosopher Alexandre Kojève, the foremost Hegel scholar in France at that time. It also provides detailed analyses of individual paintings by Kandinsky, demonstrating how the development of his oeuvre challenges Hegel’s views on modern art, yet operates in much the same manner as does Hegel’s philosophical system.

280 pages, 48 illustrations, 24 color images, 1 figure, 3 tables, 20149780804784849 Paper $25.95 $20.76 sale9780804784832 Cloth $90.00 $72.00 sale

The Studios after the StudiosNeoclassical Hollywood (1970–2010)J.D. CONNOR

Modern Hollywood is dominated by a handful of studios: Columbia, Disney, Fox, Paramount, Universal, and Warner Bros. Threatened by independents in the 1970s, they returned to power in the 1980s, ruled unquestioned in the 1990s, and in the new

millennium are again beseiged. But in the heyday of this new classical era, the major studios movies — their stories and styles — were astonishingly precise biographies of the studios that made them. Movies became product placements for their studios, advertising them to the industry, to their employees, and to the public at large. If we want to know how studios work—how studios think—we need to watch their films closely. How closely? Maniacally so. In a wide range of examples, The Studios after the Studios explores the gaps between story and backstory in order to excavate the hidden history of Hollywood’s second great studio era.

“Connor offers interpretations of key films from the 1970s and 80s that are often highly original and unexpected, making sure that The Studios After the Studios has many thrilling moments of discovery (and surprise). As an important contribution to film studies, it will be especially productive in re-opening the debate on Hollywood and authorship.”

—Thomas Elsaesser, University of Amsterdam

POST*45


FOLL

OW

US

ON

TW

ITTE

R

@st

anfo

rdp

ress

LIK

E U

S O

N F

AC

EBO

OK

ww

w.s

up.o

rg/f

aceb

oo

k

VIS

IT O

UR

E-B

OO

KST

OR

E w

ww

.sup

.org

/eb

oo

ks

REA

D O

UR

PR

ESS

BLO

Ght

tp://

stan

ford

pre

ss.ty

pep

ad.c

om

20%

DIS

CO

UN

T o

n al

l tit

les

e

425

Bro

adw

ay S

t., R

edw

oo

d C

ity,

CA

94

06

3

ST

AN

FO

RD

U

NIV

ER

SIT

Y

PR

ES

S

philosophy, theory, literature - sup.org · philosophy, theory, literature. ... first anticolonial...

Documents