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Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics (New Directions in Critical Theory): 19

Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics (New Directions in Critical Theory): 19

by Gabriel Rockhill (Author), Gabriel Rockhill (Author), James Swenson (Author), Jacques Rancière (Author)

  • New

    Paperback 2011

    $31.66

  • New

    Hardcover 2011

    $94.10
Synopsis

Jacques Ranciere has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly through his questioning of aesthetic distributions of the sensible, which configure the limits of what can be seen and said. Widely recognized as a seminal work in Ranciere's corpus, the translation of which is long overdue, Mute Speech is an intellectual tour de force proposing a new framework for thinking about the history of art and literature. Ranciere argues that our current notion of literature is a relatively recent creation, having first appeared in the wake of the French Revolution and with the rise of Romanticism. In its rejection of the system of representational hierarchies that had constituted belles-letters, literature is founded upon a radical equivalence in which all things are possible expressions of the life of a people. With an analysis reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, the German Romantics, Vico, and Cervantes and concluding with brilliant readings of Flaubert, Mallarme, and Proust, Ranciere demonstrates the uncontrollable democratic impulse lying at the heart of literature's still-vital capacity for reinvention.

$31.66

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More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 208
 Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 01 Nov 2011
ISBN 10: 0231151039
ISBN 13: 9780231151030
Book Overview: Mute Speech counts among Jacques Ranciere's most intensive and compelling studies of the origins and consequences of modern literature. Taking German Romantic philosophy as a point of departure and setting his sights on Flaubert, Mallarme and Proust, Ranciere draws his readers through the many contradictions that give rise to the aesthetic turn of our age. Elegantly translated by James Swenson, Mute Speech invites us to think afresh the philosophical, aesthetic and political dilemmas that ground the modern canon. -- Tom Conley, Lowell Professor of Romance Languages and Visual & Environmental Studies, Harvard University

Media Reviews
Ranciere is refreshingly unorthdox in unearthing examples of 'mute speech' not from modernism, but from relatively prosaic realist and naturalist novels. Times Literary Supplement Although the text does not lend itself to quick, light-hearted reading, it does reward thoughtful consideration. The tensions, paradoxes, and contradictions that characterize poetics and aesthetics are given space to move in this text -- Jerilyn Sambrooke Church and Postmodern Culture An excellent English translation of Jacques Ranciere's study of literary style... -- Edmund Campion The European Legacy Ranciere offers us fresh ways to understand how we got from a system of poetics that organized a number of particular arts, to an aesthetic regime in which it is now possible to speak of art in the singular. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies One welcomes [an] ambitious, iconoclastic work like Gabriel Rockhill's Mute Speech Radical History, Radical Philosophy
Author Bio
Jacques Ranciere (b. 1940) is professor of philosophy emeritus at the University of Paris VIII. Among his major works translated into English are The Future of the Image, The Politics of Aesthetics, The Philosopher and His Poor, The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, Disagreement: Politics And Philosophy, and The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Gabriel Rockhill is assistant professor of philosophy at Villanova University and program director at the College International de Philosophie. He is the author of Logique de l'histoire and coeditor of the Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues, as well as Jacques Ranciere: History, Politics, Aesthetics. James Swenson is associate professor of French and dean of humanities at Rutgers University. He is the author of On Jean-Jacques Rousseau Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution and a well-known translator of Etienne Balibar and Jacques Ranciere.