Fusing speculative realism, analytical and linguistic philosophy this book theorises the fundamental impact the experience of reading has on us. In reading, language provides us with a world and meaning becomes perceptible. We can connect with another subjectivity, another place, another time. At its most extreme, reading changes our understanding of the world around us. Metanoia- meaning literally a change of mind or a conversion-refers to this kind of new way of seeing. To see the world in a new light is to accept that our thinking has been irrevocably transformed. How is that possible? And is it merely an intellectual process without any impact on the world outside our brains? Innovatively tackling these questions, this book mobilizes discussions from linguistics, literary theory, philosophy of language, and cognitive science. It re-articulates linguistic consciousness by underlining the poetic, creative moment of language and sheds light on the ability of language to transform not only our thinking but the world around us as well.

Genealogies of Speculation looks to break the impasse between the innovations of speculative thought and the dominant strands of 20th century anti-foundationalist philosophy. Challenging emerging paradigms of philosophical history, this text re-evaluates different theoretical and political traditions such as feminism, literary theory, social geography and political theory after the speculative turn in philosophy. With contributions from leading writers in contemporary thought this book is a crucial resource for studying cultural and art-theory and continental philosophy.

The invention of the present-tense novel is a literary event whose importance is on par with the discovery of perspective in painting. From the first novels shaped by interior monologues and the use of the present tense in the tradition of modernism, the present tense has, over the course of its century-long evolution, changed the conditions of fictional narration, along with our conceptions of time in a philosophical and linguistic framework. Indeed, to understand the work of an increasing number of contemporary writers - J.M. Coetzee, Tom McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, to name only a few - it is necessary to both understand the distinct linguistic and literary qualities of the present tense as well as its historical transformation into a genuine tense of contemporary storytelling. For the first time in literary scholarship, Present Tense: A Poetics offers an account of a profound development in 20th- and 21st-century fiction.

The logic of modernity is an ironical logic. Modern irony, a flash of genius produced by Romantic theorists, is first discussed, e.g. in Hegel and Kierkegaard, as an ethical problem personified in figures such as the aesthete, the seducer, the flaneur, or the dandy. It fully develops in the novel, the modern genre par excellence: in novels of the early 19th century no less than in those of postmodernity or in those of the masters of citation, parody, and pastiche of classical modernism (Musil, Joyce, and Proust). This book, however, goes one step further. Looking at how such different authors as Schmitt, Kafka, and Rorty identify the political conflicts, contradictions, and paradoxes of the 20th century as ironical and offers a comprehensive account of the constitutive irony of modernity's ethical, poetical, and political logic.

This minutely detailed examination of a supposedly small grammatical detail, the use of the present tense, opens up new perspectives on a founding myth of the aesthetics of modernity: the longing for presence. This collection approaches the issue by documenting how the present tense became dominant in the 20th century novel. The authors draw on perspectives in fiction theory and narratology to delineate facets of this fundamental shift in literary aesthetics from the past tense to the present.

Genealogies of Speculation looks to break the impasse between the innovations of speculative thought and the dominant strands of 20th century anti-foundationalist philosophy. Challenging emerging paradigms of philosophical history, this text re-evaluates different theoretical and political traditions such as feminism, literary theory, social geography and political theory after the speculative turn in philosophy. With contributions from leading writers in contemporary thought this book is a crucial resource for studying cultural and art-theory and continental philosophy.

Soren Kierkegaards radical protestant philosophy of the individual -- in which a persons leap of faith is favoured over general ethics -- has become a model for many contemporary political theorists. Thinkers such as Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou have drawn on its revolutionary spirit to position truth above the constraints of political systems. In Kierkegaard and Political Theory, contributors from a wide range of disciplines -- including theology, sociology, philosophy, and aesthetics -- examine just how crucial Kierkegaards anti-institutional thinking has been to such efforts and to modernity as a whole. The contributors convincingly position Kierkegaards radical philosophy as the starting point for contemporary political theory. They show how he pioneered a modernity defined as an argument -- an experience -- of the impossibility of rationally comprehending a system of thinking. They show how religious and aesthetic experiences function as a response to this impossibility, how their coherence in politics must always be questioned, especially in historys extreme example: totalitarianism. Engaging this and many other subjects, they provide a compelling new line in Kierkegaard studies that illuminates new contours of our political thought.

The invention of the present-tense novel is a literary event whose importance is on par with the discovery of perspective in painting. From the first novels shaped by interior monologues and the use of the present tense in the tradition of modernism, the present tense has, over the course of its century-long evolution, changed the conditions of fictional narration, along with our conceptions of time in a philosophical and linguistic framework. Indeed, to understand the work of an increasing number of contemporary writers - J.M. Coetzee, Tom McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, to name only a few - it is necessary to both understand the distinct linguistic and literary qualities of the present tense as well as its historical transformation into a genuine tense of contemporary storytelling. For the first time in literary scholarship, Present Tense: A Poetics offers an account of a profound development in 20th- and 21st-century fiction.