Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization

Wilner, Professor Joshua

ISBN 10: 0801863244 / ISBN 13: 9780801863240

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press, New Brunswick NJ, 2000

About this Item

First edition 2000, first printing, number line starts with 1. Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Hardcover with DJ. Condition new, square tight and crisp book, no edgewear, sharp corners, no markings of any kind, no names, no underlinings no highlights, no bent page corners, not a reminder. DJ new, bright and shiny, no tears no chips, no edgewear, not clipped. 8vo, 176 pages, bibliography, index.

Seller Inventory # 012018

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, New Brunswick NJ
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801863244
• ISBN 13: 9780801863240
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

"Although defining Romanticism is a standing problem for literary history, some notion of internalization at the level of cultural tradition has recurrently been proposed as the solution to that problem... In this debate the notion of internalization tends to be handled... as a known quantity, whereas I am arguing that the notion itself remains obscure and thus that the problem of internalization and the problem of Romanticism may indeed, with respect to the discourse of literary history, be closely intertwined"--from Feeding on Infinity

Notions of "internalization" play an important role in many contemporary fields of discourse, including literary history and theory, psychoanalysis, ideological critique, and learning theory in the social sciences. Indeed, the term "internalization" is pervasive and seems to answer a shared need of expression to such an extent that it is one of those technical words that has found its way into everyday use. But the meaning of this term and the continuities and discontinuities at work in its varied deployment have, for the most part, gone unanalyzed.

In Feeding on Infinity, Joshua Wilner explores the power and limits of the discourse of internalization through the close reading of a variety of texts drawn from the Romantic tradition, a tradition which is both source for and oftentimes object of this discourse. Through the study of writers including Rousseau, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Baudelaire, Freud, Benjamin, and Sedgwick, he seeks to deepen our understanding of the problem of internalization, while situating its more or less explicit emergence as a problem in relation to the history of, in Gertrude Stein's phrase, "patriarchal poetics."

Through patient attention to the transformations of rhetorical structures of representation and address performed by these works and to the frequent condensation of these transformations in figures of eating and drinking, Feeding on Infinity makes available to inquiry a surprisingly rich and largely unexplored network of connections within the "long" Romantic tradition. At the same time, it forges new links between deconstructive reading practices, psychoanalysis, and recent work in gender studies.

About the Author

Joshua Wilner teaches English and comparative literature at City College and the CUNY Graduate Center, New York.