The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form - Hardcover

Wasser, Audrey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 082327005X ISBN 13: 9780823270057

Publisher: Modern Language Initiative, 2016

Synopsis

The Work of Difference addresses a fundamental ontological question: What is literature? And at the heart of this question, it argues, is the problem of the new. How is it that new works or new forms are possible within the rule-governed orders of history, language use, or the social? How are new works in turn recognizable to already-existing institutions? Tracing the relationship between literature and the problem of newness back to a set of concerns first articulated in early German romanticism, this book goes on to mount a critique of romantic tendencies in contemporary criticism in order, ultimately, to develop an original theory of literary production. Along the way, it offers new readings of major modernist novels by Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, and Gertrude Stein.

About this title

About the Author

Audrey Wasser is Assistant Professor of French at Miami University, Ohio.

Review

...Wasser's achievement is a considerable one, and this book deserves a wide readership. In a literary-critical landscape too often cowed by the imperatives of context to ignore the immanent productivities of literary form, we have in this book a work of great theoretical depth and superlative imagination that captures better thanmost the sources and consequences of that energy. (Novel: A Forum on Fiction)

As philosophically rich as it is provocative, Audrey Wasser's The Work of Difference is a book about many things: the rhetoric of modernist fiction, the lingering presence of romantic ideals in twentieth-century criticism, and the relevance of Deleuze's ontology to thinking about the production of literary works. (Syndicate)

The Work of Difference is an engaging, accessible, and insightful study... its focus on the brief but rich moment in romantic history is an important contribution to scholarly debate and will provide a welcome new paradigm for the rethinking of modernism's relationship to modernity. (Studies in the Novel)

Lucid and beautifully written, The Work of Difference gives us an ontology of literature that is at once theoretical and practical. Audrey Wasser not only teaches us what literature can be but also what it can do and how it works in its most groundbreaking operations. Combining profound new readings of major modernist writers (Proust, Beckett, Stein) with a sophisticated philosophical understanding of Deleuze, The Work of Difference develops an innovative theory of literary production. Equally at home in conceptual thinking and rhetorical close reading, Wasser is an important new critic to reckon with. (―Martin Hägglund Yale University)

Wasser's book... stands as a testament to the current relevance of rethinking modernism and the new along the lines of a literary ontology of difference and offers a renewed understanding of form that challenges romantic conceptions of literature and subjectivity. (Twentieth-Century Literature)

Wasser's expansion of the repertoire of critical questions typically asked of the work of literature succeeds in opening up ways of reading focused less on what a particular work or genre of literature might mean, and more on its production―through its rhetorical capacities―of what is continuously and innovatively new in the world. (Modernism/Modernity)

Edition details

• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 082327005X
• ISBN 13: 9780823270057
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 216