In 1972, the French theorists Deleuze and Guattari unleashed their collaborative project-which they termed schizoanalysis-upon the world. Today, few disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have been left untouched by its influence. Through a series of groundbreaking applications of Deleuze and Guattari's work to a diverse range of literary contexts, from Shakespeare to science fiction, this collection demonstrates how schizoanalysis has transformed and is transforming literary scholarship. Intended for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars with an interest in continental philosophy, literary theory and critical and cultural theory, Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature is a cutting edge volume, featuring some of the most original voices in the field, setting the agenda for future research.
Maria Scott's study of the operation of irony in Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris contends that the principal target of the collection's spleen is its own readership. Baudelaire, as one of the most perceptive cultural commentators of the nineteenth century, was naturally very keenly aware of the growing dominance of the bourgeoisie in France, not least as a market for art and literature. Despite being dependent on this market for his own writing, the poet was highly critical of bourgeois values and attitudes. Scott builds on existing criticism of the collection to argue that these are indirectly mocked in Le Spleen de Paris, often in the person of the poet's supposed textual alter ego. The contention is that the prose poems betray the trust of readers by way of an apparent transparency of meaning that functions to blind us to their embedded irony. Though focused on Le Spleen de Paris, Scott's study engages with the full range of Baudelaire's writings, including his art and literary criticism. Her book will be of interest not only to Baudelaire scholars but also to those engaged more generally with nineteenth-century French culture.
The aim of this book is to offer a new reading of Baudelaire's Petits Poemes en prose which demonstrates the significance of ironic otherness for the theory and functioning of the work and for the genre of the prose poem itself. The book considers Baudelaire's choice of this genre and the wayin which he seeks to define it, both paratextually and textually. It examines the ways in which the prose poem depends on dualities and deboublements as forms of lyrical and narrative difference which, in their turn, reveal ideological otherness and declare the oppositionality of the prose poem.Finally, the book demonstrates a relationship between these forms of otherness and Baudelaire's theory of the popular comic arts and, in doing so, proposes that the prose poems should be read as literary caricature.
Eugene W. Holland provides an excellent introduction to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus which is widely recognized as one of the most influential texts in philosophy to have appeared in the last thirty years. He lucidly presents the theoretical concerns behind Anti-Oedipus and explores with clarity the diverse influences of Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and Kant on the development of Deleuze & Guattari's thinking. He also examines the wider implications of their work in revitalizing Marxism, environmentalism, feminism and cultural studies.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.
Oscar Wilde is more than a name, more than an author. From precocious Oxford undergraduate to cause celebre of the West End of the 1890s, to infamous criminal, the proper name Wilde has become an event in the history of literature and culture. Taking Wilde seriously as a philosopher in his own right, Whiteley's groundbreaking book places his texts into their philosophical context in order to show how Wilde broke from his peers, and in particular from idealism, and challenges recent neo-historicist readings of Wilde which seem content to limit his irruptive power. Using the paradoxical concept of the simulacrum to resituate Wilde's work in relation to both his precursors and his contemporaries, Whiteley's study reads Wilde through Deleuze and postmodern philosophical commentary on the simulacrum. In a series of striking juxtapositions, Whiteley challenges us to rethink both Oscar Wilde's aesthetics and his philosophy, to take seriously both the man and the mask. His philosophy of masks is revealed to figure a truth of a different kind - the simulacra through which Wilde begins to develop and formulate a mature philosophy that constitutes an ethics of joy.
The fabric of the western literary tradition is not always predictable. In one wayward strand, waywardness itself is at work, delay becomes almost predictable, triviality is auspicious, and failure is cheerfully admired. This is loiterature. Loiterature is the first book to identify this strand, to follow its path through major works and genres, and to evaluate its literary significance. ø By offering subtle resistance to the laws of "good social order," loiterly literature blurs the distinctions between innocent pleasure and harmless relaxation on the one hand, and not-so-innocent intent on the other. The result is covert social criticism that casts doubt on the values good citizens hold dear?values like discipline, organization, productivity, and, above all, work. It levels this criticism, however, under the guise of innocent wit or harmless entertainment. Loiterature distracts attention the way a street conjurer diverts us with his sleight of hand.øøø If the pleasurable has critical potential, may not one of the functions of the critical be to produce pleasure? The ability to digress, Ross Chambers suggests, is at the heart of both, and loiterature?s digressive waywardness offers something to ponder for critics of culture as well as lovers of literature.