|
Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism
|
Buy Now
Repetition and Identity - The Literary Agenda (Paperback)
Loot Price: R739
Discovery Miles 7 390
|
|
|
Repetition and Identity - The Literary Agenda (Paperback)
Series: Literary Agenda
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
|
The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about
the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and
about the state of literary education inside schools and
universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been
contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is
dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for
thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by
the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized
explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even
greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social
attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may
leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking
merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time
for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value
of literary reading. Repetition and Identity offers a theory of the
existing thing as such. A thing only has identity and consistency
when it has already been repeated, but repetition summons
difference and the shadow invocation of a connecting sign. In
contrast to the perspectives of Post-structuralism, Catherine
Pickstock proposes that signs are part of reality, and that they
truthfully express the real. She also proposes that non-identical
repetition involves analogy, rather than the Post-structuralist
combination of univocity and equivocity, or of rationalism with
scepticism. This proposal, which is happy for reality to make
sense, involves, however, a subjective decision which is to be
poetically performed. A wager is laid upon the possibility of a
consistency which sustains the subject, in continuity with the
elusive consistency of nature. This wager is played out in terms of
a performative argument concerning the existential stances open to
human beings. It is concluded that the individual sustains this
quest within the context of an inter-subjective search for an
historical consistency of culture. But can ethical consistency, and
the harmonisation of this with an aesthetic surplus of an
'elsewhere', invoked by the sign, be achieved without a religious
gesture? And can this gesture avoid a tragic tension between
ethical commitment and religious renunciation? Pickstock suggests a
Kierkegaardian re-reading of the Patristic categories of
'recapitulation' and 'reconstitution' can reconcile this tension.
The quest for the identity and consistency of the thing leads us
from the subject through fiction and history and to sacred history,
to shape an ontology which is also a literary theory and a literary
artefaction.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
You might also like..
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
(2)
(1)
