Theory and History of Literature
Theory and History of Literature (1981-98) is a landmark event in twentieth-century critical thought. Intended to stimulate research and encourage interdisciplinary dialogue, as well as to introduce prominent European theorists to the American academy, this book series is internationally renowned for its foundational literary scholarship.
By making available English translations of essential work by Theodor Adorno, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Maurice Blanchot, Hélène Cixous, Giorgio Agamben, Paul de Man, Tzvetan Todorov, Jean-Luc Nancy, Georges Bataille, and many others, as well as publishing such influential American scholars as Fredric Jameson and Alice Kaplan, Theory and History of Literature became a staple resource in American higher education. This book series undeniably and indelibly changed the intellectual landscape of the late twentieth century and established the University of Minnesota Press as a premier publisher of literary and cultural theory and intellectual thought.
Books in this Series
Memory and Literature
Intertextuality in Russian Modernism
Combines literary theory with textual analysis in a consideration of some of the major works of Russian modernism. Reflecting on both better- and lesser-known Russian writers, Lachmann goes beyond formalist approaches to literature by developing insights from structuralist and poststructuralist theory.
Reading Proust
In Search of Wolf-Fish
Reading Proust focuses on the specificity of Proustian writing, revealing the patterns of thought and play of words peculiar to Proust's language, and showing how these metamorphose throughout La Recherche du temps perdu. Her work offers a new model for reading fictional prose, one that replaces the critical "why?" with the more practical and productive "how?"
The Subject of Philosophy
Presents a sustained examination of the relation between literature and philosophy with special emphasis on the problem of the subject and of representation. Lacoue-Labarthe spans the history of philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, and addresses such major moments in the history of literature as Greek tragedy and German romanticism.
The Infinite Conversation
“Blanchot waits for us still to come, to be read and reread. . . I would say that never as much as today have I pictured him so far ahead of us.” --Jacques Derrida
Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture
Inventing National Literature
Traces literature’s function in the formation of the nation-state through the “belated” emergence of a national aesthetic culture in Greece.
Border Writing
The Multidimensional Text
A paradigmatic contribution to literary theory and interpretation out of the writings of Latin America.
Making Sense in Life and Literature
“The translation of these essays by Gumbrecht on literary theory and history marks the appearance in English of one of Europe’s most learned, productive, and inventive scholars. Their range is extraordinary. They show that Gumbrecht is not only a sophisticated theorist and historian of literature, but a master practitioner of cultural studies.” --Hayden White, University of California, Santa Cruz
Language and Death
The Place of Negativity
Explores the symbiosis of philosophy and literature in understanding negativity
Readings
The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kakfa, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva
A leader in the feminist intellectual movement, Cixous presents this highly informative meditation on ethics and poetics which draws on philosophy and psychoanalysis.
Woman and Chinese Modernity
The Politics of Reading Between West and East
Examines the relationship of “woman” to issues of non-western culture.
Social Semiotics as Praxis
Text, Social Meaning Making, and Nabokov’s Ada
Focusing on Nabokov's Ada, the author rescues semiotics from terminal formalism by developing a conception of social semiotics that is a form of both social action and political praxis.
Reading with Clarice Lispector
The foremost French feminist literary critic pays homage to the premiere Latin American woman prose writer of this century.
Writings on Literature
An illuminating introduction to the literary writings of one of the most influential scholars in the history of linguistics.
Oral Poetry
An Introduction
A penetrating analytical study of the sources of orality and contemporary modes of poetic practice by a prominent literary theorist. Zumthor discusses the development of oral poetry from antiquity to the present.
Stanzas
Word and Phantasm in Western Culture
Through rereadings of Freud and Saussure, Agamben proposes a radical reconfiguration of the epistemological foundation of Western culture.
Critical Writings, 1953-1978
Twenty-five essays and reviews not previously collected, most of which were written before 1970, and eight of which are appearing in English for the first time.
Aesthetic Ideology
An important reconsideration of ideology by one of this century’s most eminent theorists.
Narrative as Communication
The first major treatise on narrative and narrative theory to make use of all the analytic tools developed in the last two decades.
Text and Culture
The Politics of Interpretation
An examination of the political aspects of contemporary disciplines of interpretation, which illustrates how interpretation may be turned into a more socially responsible practice. Includes an extensive analysis of Dickens's Great Expectations.
Kierkegaard
Construction of the Aesthetic
Adorno’s first major published work, which points the way to all of his subsequent writings.
The Emergence of Social Space
Rimbaud and the Paris Commune
Rimbaud’s poems feature in this re-creation of the Communard experience. "This engaging study does much to open up new areas of research. . . . Extremely well documented." --South Atlantic Review
Reading De Man Reading
Thirteen essays address de Man’s theory and practice of reading, including the nature of those readings and what they signify for reading in general, not just for literary texts. "Accomplishes the goal of insisting on the continuing importance of de Man's work for literary studies." --American Book Review
The Philosophy of Art
The first English translation of a classic text in aesthetics based on the precepts of German Idealism. Schelling systematically treats various forms of art-including music, painting, sculpture, narrative, and poetry-to present a philosophical disclosure of the idea or essence of art itself, an essence that transcends the actual work in history.
Thinker on Stage
Nietzsche’s Materialism
A study of Nietzsche’s first published work which offers an abundance of fresh insights into both Nietzsche and modernity.
The Barthes Effect
The Essay as Reflective Text
Acknowledges the essay as an eccentric phenomenon in literary history, one that has long resisted entry into the taxonomy of genres, as it concentrates on four works by Roland Barthes: The Pleasure of the Text, A Lover's Discourse, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, and Camera Lucida. Maintains that with Barthes the essay achieves a status of its own, as reflective text.
Theory and Practice of Sociocriticism
A leading French Hispanicist brings Spanish and Mexican texts into the current literary debates and shows that all discourse is irreducibly social in nature.
Pictorial Nominalism
On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade
Reveals the invention of the readymade as a critical point in contemporary art
Control of the Imaginary
Reason and Imagination in Modern Times
Draws on English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish literary traditions to examine the relationship between Western notions of reason and subjectivity from the Renaissance to the first decade of the twentieth century.
From Topic to Tale
Logic and Narrativity in the Middle Ages
Shows how a rhetorical tradition was transformed into a textual one and ends with a discussion of the relationship between discourse and society.
The Differend
Phrases in Dispute
“This work is of vital importance in a period when revisionism of all stripes attempts to rewrite, and often simply deny, the occurrence of historical and cultural events, i.e. in attempting to reconstruct ‘reality’ in the convenient names of ‘truth’ and ‘common sense.’” French Review
Social Figures
George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation
Centers on the discourse of the liberal intellectual as exemplified in the novels of George Eliot, whose awareness of her aesthetic and social task was keener than that of most Victorian writers.
Critique of Cynical Reason
A philosophical treatise which finds cynicism the dominant mode in contemporary culture.
Romantic Vision, Ethical Context
Novalis and Artistic Autonomy
Exploring the full range of Novalis's (the pen name of the German poet and philosopher Friedrich von Hardenberg) work, von Molnar shows how he dealt, in theory and practice, with a central issue in Romanticism-the emerging concept of the autonomous self and its relation.
The Unremarkable Wordsworth
Fifteen essays draw upon a wide range of contemporary theoretical approaches, from psychoanalysis to structuralism, from deconstruction to phenomenology. ". . . in teaching us to read Wordsworth it teaches us how to read." --The Wordsworth Circle
The Resistance to Theory
Explores reasons why the theoretical enterprise is blind to, or “resists,” the radical nature of reading, in six essays that offer a new level of critical and cultural understanding in reference to the works of Jauss, Riffaterre, Benjamin, and Bakhtin.
Questing Fictions
Latin America’s Family Romance
Analyzes 20th-century Latin American fiction in the light of contemporary literary theory and focuses on the predicament of writers caught between the cultural domination of Europe and the need to strive for cultural autonomy.
Kafka
Toward a Minor Literature
Instead of interpreting Kafka’s work according to pre-existing categories or literary genres, they propose a concept of “minor literature”—the use of a major language that subverts it from within.
Postmodernism and Politics
Eight essays on postmodernism with a focus on intellectual, artistic and social concerns.
Readings in Interpretation
Holderlin, Hegel, Heidegger
Institutes a rethinking of history, theory, philosophy, literature and the way they relate to one another in critical reading. "Meticulous and challenging . . . well worth reading." --Southern Humanities Review
The Newly Born Woman
Published in France as Le jeune née in 1975, and found here in its first English translation, The Newly Born Woman is a landmark text of the modern feminist movement. In it, Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément put forward the concept of écriture feminine, exploring the ways women’s sexuality and unconscious shape their imaginary, their language, and their writing. Through their readings of historical, literary, and psychoanalytic accounts, Cixous and Clément explore what is hidden and repressed in culture, revealing the unconscious of history.
Male Fantasies
Volume 2
These two volumes center upon the fantasies that preoccupied a group of men who played a crucial role in the rise of Nazism. Theweleit draws upon the novels, letters, and autobiographies of these proto-fascists and their contemporaries, seeking out and reconstructing their images of women. Heavily illustrated with cartoons, advertisements, engravings, and posters of the era.
The Colonial Harem
A collection of picture postcards of Algerian women exploited by the French, this “album” illustrates a powerful analysis of the distorting, denigrating effects of their presence on Algerian Society.
Framed Narratives
Diderot’s Genealogy of the Beholder
Focuses on the problem of framing in and of Diderot and proposes an interpretive model that draws upon the notion of dialogue developed by Bakhtin. “Written in an engaging, readable style, Caplan’s short book reopens fascinating questions on Diderot’s texts for both specialist and non-specialist readers.” --Modern Language Notes
The Poetics of Plot
The Case of English Renaissance Drama
A unique methodology for plot analysis focusing on an important body of English Renaissance dramas.
Heterologies
Discourse on the Other
Sixteen essays that illustrate the author’s work in the fields of history, literary studies and psychoanalysis.
Noise
The Political Economy of Music
Argues that music does not reflect society; it foreshadows new social formations.
Visions of Excess
Selected Writings, 1927-1939
Challenges the notion of a “closed economy” predicated on utility, production, and rational consumption, and develops an alternative theory that takes into account the human tendency to lose, destroy, and waste.
Story and Situation
Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction
Studies the relation between teller and listener in a set of French, English, and American short stories from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Postmodern Condition
A Report on Knowledge
This founding essay of the postmodern movement argues that knowledge-science, technology, and the arts-has undergone a change of status since the 19th century and especially since the late 1950s.
Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics
This important 20th-century theory of the novel focuses on “Dostoevskian discourse.”
Blindness and Insight
Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism
A new edition of a classic work in contemporary criticism.
The Yale Critics
Deconstruction in America
The ten essayists in this book consider the “Yale critics”—Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and J. Hillis Miller—in the context of American criticism and the critical tradition. The editors note in the preface that “The largest context that continually concerns us is that of the gap between Anglo-American and Continental criticism, resulting from a difference in social experience. … By selecting contributors who, in different ways, find themselves between these two traditions, we hope that we have made our volume interesting and accessible to the American reader.”
Theory and History of Folklore
A selection of seven essays and three book chapters from Russian folklorist Propp’s later work.
Theory of the Avant-Garde
This volume sets before English-language readers for the first time a fully elaborated theory of the “institution of art.” The author argues that it is the social status of art, its function and prestige in society, that provides the connection between the individual art work and history. Bürger’s concept of the institution of art establishes a framework within which a work of art is both produced and received.
Toward an Aesthetic of Reception
This volume presents for the first time in English the foundational writings of the leading proponent of the aesthetic of reception. Jauss here attempts to develop categories to channel conventional literary history into a history of aesthetic experience. These essays explore the relation of art history to social history, the nature of genres in the middle ages, and provide exemplary readings in the comparative analysis of literature.
