Geschlecht Complex : Addressing Untranslatable Aspects of Gender, Genre, and Ontology

Jansson, Oscar (EDT); LaRocca, David (EDT)

ISBN 10: 1501381962 / ISBN 13: 9781501381966

Published by Bloomsbury Academic, 2024

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Geschlecht Complex : Addressing Untranslatable Aspects of Gender, Genre, and Ontology
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501381962
• ISBN 13: 9781501381966
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: As New

About this title

Synopsis

The polysemous German word Geschlecht -- denoting gender, genre, kind, kinship, species, race, and somehow also more -- exemplifies the most pertinent questions of the translational, transdisciplinary, transhistorical, and transnational structures of the contemporary humanities: What happens when texts, objects, practices, and concepts are transferred or displaced from one language, tradition, temporality, or form to another? What is readily transposed, what resists relocation, and what precipitate emerges as distorted or new?

Drawing on Barbara Cassin's transformative remarks on untranslatability, and the activity of “philosophizing in languages,” scholars contributing to The Geschlecht Complex examine these and other durable queries concerning the ontological powers of naming, and do so in the light of recent artistic practices, theoretical innovations, and philosophical incitements. Combining detailed case studies of concrete “category problems” in literature, philosophy, media, cinema, politics, painting, theatre, and the performing arts with a range of indispensable excerpts from canonical texts -- by notable, field-defining thinkers such as Apter, Cassin, Cavell, Derrida, Irigaray, Malabou, and Nancy, among others -- the volume presents “the Geschlecht complex” as a condition to become aware of, and in turn, to companionably underwrite any interpretive endeavor.

Historically grounded, yet attuned to the particularities of the present, the Geschlecht complex becomes an invaluable mode for thinking and theorizing while ensconced in the urgent immediacy of pressing concerns, and poised for the inevitable complexities of categorial naming and genre discernment that await in the so often inscrutable, translation-resistant twenty-first century.

About the Authors

Oscar Jansson teaches Comparative Literature at Lund University. He is the author of Graham Greene and the Conditions of 20th Century Literature and editor of Translating Sex & Gender. His work on literature and media, ranging from the aesthetics of national romanticism to affective modes of satire in contemporary fiction, regularly appears in publications such as Tidskrift för Litteraturvetenskap, Passage, and Canadian Review of Comparative Literature.

David LaRocca, Ph.D., is the author or contributing editor of twenty books, including several from Bloomsbury. He edited Stanley Cavell's Emerson's Transcendental Etudes (2003) and Metacinema (2021). Earlier edited volumes are devoted to the philosophy of documentary film, war films, and the cinema of Charlie Kaufman. He has taught philosophy, rhetoric, and cinema and held visiting research or teaching positions in the United States at Binghamton University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Ithaca College, the New York Public Library, the School of Visual Arts, the State University of New York at Cortland, and Vanderbilt University. He served as Harvard University's Sinclair Kennedy Fellow in the United Kingdom and, like Cavell before him, was honored with the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society. www.DavidLaRocca.org