Negation, Critical Theory, and Postmodern Textuality

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Introduction: Negation, Critical Theory, and Postmodern Textuality

   1. Introduction: Negation, Critical Theory, and Postmodern Textuality

      • Daniel Fischlin

      Pages 1-37

3. Negative Meaning, Unrecognizability, Elenctic Negation, and Apocalypse

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 39-39

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   2. Deconstruction and Negative Meaning in Medieval Mysticism

      • David Thomson

      Pages 41-58

   3. “In No Recognizable Way” The Tempest

      • Mark Fortier

      Pages 59-87

   4. “My Real Smash”: Elenctic Negation in Henry James’s The Ambassadors

      • Andre Furlani

      Pages 89-109

   5. “Where Dream used to Collide with its Reality”: The Apocalyptic Space of Negation in García Lorca’s Poet in New York

      • Martha J. Nandorfy

      Pages 111-142

4. Nothing Doing and Nihilism

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 143-143

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   2. Nothing Doing: The Repudiation of Action in Beckett’s More Pricks Than Kicks

      • Harry Vandervlist

      Pages 145-156

   3. The Shadow Life: Negation, Nihilism, and Insanity in Thomas Bernhard’s Correction

      • Bruce Murphy

      Pages 157-171

5. Engendering Negation

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 173-173

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   2. Beyond Negation: Paradoxical Affirmation in Whitman’s Third Edition

      • Herbert J. Levine

      Pages 175-190

   3. Forster’s Ghosts: A Passage to India and the Emptying of Narrative

      • Judith Scherer Herz

      Pages 191-202

   4. Putting on the Feminine: Gender and Negativity in Frankenstein and the Handmaid’s Tale

      • Veronica Hollinger

      Pages 203-224

6. Theory, Practice, and Denegation

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 225-225

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   2. Negation and the Evil Eye: A Reading of Camera Lucida

      • Joann Blais

      Pages 227-239

   3. “Theres More Nothing to Say”: Unspeaking Douglas Barbour’s “Story for a Saskatchewan Night”

      • Charlene Diehl-Jones

      Pages 241-257

   4. Monstrosity, Illegibility, Denegation: de Man, Nichol, and the Resistance to Postmodernism

      • David L. Clark

      Pages 259-300

   5. Derrida and Dōgen: Denegation and the Liberation of Discriminating Thought

      • Toby Avard Foshay

      Pages 301-320

7. Back Matter

   Pages 321-331

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Negation, Critical Theory, and Postmodern Textuality features 14 new essays by leading specialists in critical theory, comparative literature, philosophy, and English literature. The essays, which present wide-ranging historical considerations of negation in light of recent developments in poststructuralism and postmodernism, range over many of the siginificant texts in which negation figures prominently. The book includes a wide-ranging introductory chapter that examines how attention to negation -- the inescapable nescience that is posited in any and every linguistic expression -- enhances the hermeneutic possibilities present in language. In addition, the four sections of the book bring together major critical interventions on, among others, negative meaning, unrecognizability, elenctic negation, apocalypse, nihilism, negation and gender, and denegation. All the essays involve close attention to key texts by major authors, including William Shakespeare, Henry James, Federico García Lorca, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Walt Whitman, E.M. Forster, Mary Shelley, Margaret Atwood, Roland Barthes, Douglas Barbour, Paul de Man, bp Nichol, Jacques Derrida, and Dogen Kigen. The volume opens up new areas in critical theory, comparative literature, and the philosophy of language, and defines a major new area of inquiry in relation to notions of postmodern textuality. Critical theorists, students of comparative literature, English literature, and the history of ideas, and those interested in the hermeneutic implications of postmodernism will find this volume of substantial interest. Its extensive bibliographical apparatus and index make the collection a valuable reference tool for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students as well as for those seeking a variety of interpretive approaches to the problem of negation in literature.

• English
• Jacques Derrida
• Paul de Man
• language
• philosophy of language

• Department of English, Bishop’s University, Lennoxville, Canada

  Daniel Fischlin

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