Inventing Subjects Essays on the Literary and Philosophical Production of the Modern Subject

by Brodsky, Claudia; LaBrada, Eloy

• ISBN13: 9781501317132
• ISBN10: 150131713X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2016-10-06
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Inventing Subjects is a dynamic intervention into some of the central and most pressing matters in literary theory today. It addresses an increasing concern to understand the history of theory, and how theory relates to movements in culture and philosophy, and also explores the unprecedented conceptions of the subject-of the human being as an agent of experience, judgment, moral action, and history-that together defined the revolution in reflection called the Age of Critique. Informed by such diverse fields of expertise as literary history, philosophy and post-Marxist theory, utopian theory, poetics and cultural criticism, moral theory and theory of sensibility, theory of sexuality and disability studies, the contributors to this book offer readers revelatory new insights into the invention of modern subjecthood. Ranging from Aristole to Althusser and from Fielding to Flaubert, Inventing Subjects is vital reading for anyone engaged in thinking about where theory is now, where it came from, and where it might lead to.

Author Biography

Claudia Brodsky is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of Graduate Studies at Princeton University, USA. Her previous publications include The Imposition of Form (1987), Lines of Thought (1996), In the Place of Language (2009), and, co-edited with Toni Morrison, Birth of a Nation'hood (1997).

Eloy LaBrada is Assistant Professor of French at Middlebury College, USA, where he teaches feminist theory, comparative literature, and the philosophy of literature.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Claudia Brodsky (Princeton University, USA) and Eloy LaBrada (Middlebury College, USA)

I. Subjects
1. I Think, Therefore I Feel
Marshall J. Brown (University of Washington, Seattle, USA)
2. Interiority: A Brief Conceptual History
Eduardo Lerro (Princeton University, USA)
3. Subject Matters
Eloy LaBrada (Middlebury College, USA)

II. Modern Causalities
4. The Unbeheld: The Agency of Art
David Ferris (University of Colorado at Boulder, USA /Sebald Chair, University of East Anglia, UK)
5. Timely Plot and Unplotted Time
John Park (Princeton University, USA)
6. Unexpected Yet Connected
Karen Feldman (University of California at Berkeley, USA)
7. The Economy of the Subject
Irina Simova (Princeton University, USA)

III. What is Judgment?
8. 'The Man Within the Breast': Sympathy, Deformity, and Subjectivity
Paul Kelleher (Emory University, USA)
9. Ridiculous Judgment: Aesthetic Theory and Novelistic Form
Vivasvan Soni (Northwestern University, USA)
10. The Linguistic Condition of Judgment
Claudia Brodsky (Princeton University, USA)

Bibliography of Works Cited
Recommended Reading
Glossary
Index