Sara Crangle

Prosaic Desires (eBook, PDF)

Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

Exploring a variety of everyday human longings as they arise in modernist fiction, this book poses a direct challenge to psychoanalytic criticism that characterises desire as sexual or powerful in nature. Using continental philosophy as its framework, Prosaic Desires contends that human longings are as endless in kind as they are in manifestation. As philosophy moved into the twentieth century, there was a discernible shift in emphasis from individual wilfulness to the role of the other in desire. In examining this historical trajectory, Prosaic Desires considers Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, but relies primarily on the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas, who radically inverts the traditional philosophical pursuit of subjective autonomy by arguing that the self is defined by endless longing for the other. In an extension of Levinasian theory, Prosaic Desires claims that desire-driven shifts from self to other can be located in modernist literature. The banal longings examined here lie within the poles of sexuality and power, and include desires to know and escape boredom, as well as risibility and anticipation. Authors studied include Joyce, Woolf, Stein, and Beckett, all of whom evince a discernible movement away from self-absorbed, grand narratives of desire toward other-based, evanescent longings throughout their careers. Central to their modernist writings - and in turn, to Prosaic Desires - is the conflicted relationship between daily, finite experience and the limitlessness of human desire.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Edinburgh University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 5. Juli 2010
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780748642861
• Artikelnr.: 38220539

Autorenporträt

Sara Crangle is a lecturer at the University of Sussex and a former research fellow at Queens' College, Cambridge. She has published a number of academic articles on twentieth-century poetry and fiction. She is currently editing a volume of Mina Loy's unpublished and uncollected writing for Dalkey Archive Press, and is also co-editing, with Peter Nicholls, a collection of essays on bathos, which is forthcoming with Continuum.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction: Mortal Self, Infinite Longings
1. Dying To Know
2. Haunted By Boredom
3. Inclining Towards Laughter
4. In The Meantime
Conclusion: Endlessnessnessness
Notes
Bibliography
Index.