This is a guide, in theory and in practice, to how current technological changes have impacted our interaction with texts and with each other. Henry Sussman rereads pivotal moments in literary, philosophical and cultural modernity as anticipating the cybernetic discourse that has increasingly defined theory since the computer revolution. Cognitive science, psychoanalysis and systems theory are paralleled to current trends in literary and philosophical theory. Chapters alternate between theory and readings of literary texts, resulting in a broad but rigorously grounded framework for the relation between literature and computer science. This book is a refreshing perspective on the analog-orientated tradition of theory in the humanities - and offers the first literary-textual genealogy of the digital.

This outstanding collection brings together essays that reflect on the nature of narrative, literary criticism, and history from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, ranging from deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and trauma theory, to narratology, technology, economics, and aesthetics. Acts of Narrative includes responses from renowned scholars across a wide range of disciplines: philosopher Jacques Derrida; the literary critic J. Hillis Miller; W. J. T. Mitchell, well-known for his reflections on the visual world; and Cathy Caruth, one of the founders of the field of trauma theory. These essays are brilliant in their readings of other texts, but are also striking in the manner in which each becomes itself a narrative performance. Moreover, what starts out as an exercise in theorizing and reading moves, more often than not, into a meditation on social and political issues crucial for our own sense of ourselves.

Ambitious in scope and innovative in concept, this book offers an overview and critique of the conventions surrounding artistic creativity and intellectual endeavor since the outset of "the broader modernity," which the author sees as beginning with the decline of feudalism and the Church.
As a work of intellectual history, it suggests that art and the conventions associated with the artistic constitute a secular institution that has supplanted pre-Reformation theology. From the perspective of the "subject," modernity has entailed a heightened sense of individuation, moral conflict, and pervasive loss and disaster. Yet the pitfalls that have earmarked personal experience have taken on positive value in an artistic enterprise that aspires to be a salutary replacement for externally imposed theological dogmas.
Beginning with Luther, Calvin, and Shakespeare and culminating with the Kantian notion of the artist as an "original genius," the author reconstructs the steps by which art and creative activity were installed as the redemptive values of a modernity in which human beings were forced to define knowledge and establish authority according to their own devices. In the process, the author reads passages from Plato, Proust, Donne, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kleist, Rousseau, Melville, Wittgenstein, as well as Benjamin, as well as the graphic works of Holbein, Durer, Mondrian, and Rothko.
As a work of critical theory, "The Aesthetic Contract" posits an alternative model to Kant's "original genius." The author explores an understanding of art powered by the notion of the aesthetic contract, in which artists and intellectuals choose to operate within the parameters of certain explicit experiments until the contractual clauses that delimit these endeavors lose their currency or validity. As an intellectual analog to Rousseau's social contract, the aesthetic contract has allowed the modern artist to address issues of knowledge, authority, and experience once thought to fall within the domain of arbitrary, remote, and inaccessible agencies.

Originally published in 1990, Psychoanalysis and... brings together essays by critics whose work demonstrates the lively interpenetration of psychoanalysis and other disciplines. Andrew Ross investigates psychoanalysis and Marxist thought; Joel Fineman reads the "sound of O" in Othello; Jane Gallop asks "Why does Freud giggle when the women leave the room?"; and Ellie Ragland-Sullivan examines Lacan's seminars on James Joyce. This stimulating collection of work should still be required reading, especially for students of literature. But Psychoanalysis and... demonstrates that psychoanalysis - and theoretical criticism, and feminism, and Lacanian theory, and semiotics, and Marxism, and deconstruction, and literary criticism - was, at the time, a rich and expanding terrain.

Originally published in 1990, Psychoanalysis and... brings together essays by critics whose work demonstrates the lively interpenetration of psychoanalysis and other disciplines. Andrew Ross investigates psychoanalysis and Marxist thought; Joel Fineman reads the "sound of O" in Othello; Jane Gallop asks "Why does Freud giggle when the women leave the room?"; and Ellie Ragland-Sullivan examines Lacan's seminars on James Joyce. This stimulating collection of work should still be required reading, especially for students of literature. But Psychoanalysis and... demonstrates that psychoanalysis - and theoretical criticism, and feminism, and Lacanian theory, and semiotics, and Marxism, and deconstruction, and literary criticism - was, at the time, a rich and expanding terrain.

New essays by leading scholars on the most perplexing of modern writers, Franz Kafka. No other 20th-century writer of German-language literature has been as fully accepted into the canon of world literature as Franz Kafka. The unsettlingly, enigmatically surreal world of Kafka's novels and stories continues to fascinate readers and critics of each new generation, who in turn continue to find new readings. One thing has become clear: although all theories attempt to appropriate Kafka, there is no one key to his work. The challenge to criticshas been to present a strong point of view while taking account of previous Kafka research, a challenge that has been met by the contributors to this volume. Contributors: James Rolleston, Clayton Koelb, Walter H. Sokel, Judith Ryan, Russel A. Berman, Ritchie Robertson, Henry Sussman, Stanley Corngold, Bianca Theisen, Rolf J. Goebel, Richard T. Gray, Ruth V. Gross, Sander L. Gilman, John Zilcosky, Mark Harman James Rolleston is Professor Emeritus of German at Duke University.

Ambitious in scope and innovative in concept, this book offers an overview and critique of the conventions surrounding artistic creativity and intellectual endeavor since the outset of "the broader modernity," which the author sees as beginning with the decline of feudalism and the Church.
As a work of intellectual history, it suggests that art and the conventions associated with the artistic constitute a secular institution that has supplanted pre-Reformation theology. From the perspective of the "subject," modernity has entailed a heightened sense of individuation, moral conflict, and pervasive loss and disaster. Yet the pitfalls that have earmarked personal experience have taken on positive value in an artistic enterprise that aspires to be a salutary replacement for externally imposed theological dogmas.
Beginning with Luther, Calvin, and Shakespeare and culminating with the Kantian notion of the artist as an "original genius," the author reconstructs the steps by which art and creative activity were installed as the redemptive values of a modernity in which human beings were forced to define knowledge and establish authority according to their own devices. In the process, the author reads passages from Plato, Proust, Donne, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kleist, Rousseau, Melville, Wittgenstein, as well as Benjamin, as well as the graphic works of Holbein, Durer, Mondrian, and Rothko.
As a work of critical theory, "The Aesthetic Contract" posits an alternative model to Kant's "original genius." The author explores an understanding of art powered by the notion of the aesthetic contract, in which artists and intellectuals choose to operate within the parameters of certain explicit experiments until the contractual clauses that delimit these endeavors lose their currency or validity. As an intellectual analog to Rousseau's social contract, the aesthetic contract has allowed the modern artist to address issues of knowledge, authority, and experience once thought to fall within the domain of arbitrary, remote, and inaccessible agencies.

Veteran scholar and critic Henry Sussman deploys anecdote, reportage, and memoir to lament and scrutinize the rise of anti-intellectualism in the past few decades. How are we to reckon with the decline of impartiality and sharp increase in self-interested interference in politic, legal, and cultural spheres; the normalization of pathological narcissism in public life; and the blanket dismissal of scientific findings and their counterparts in the humanities and social sciences? In retracing his own intellectual and experiential steps, Sussman revisits many of his lasting inspirations, including Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Immanuel Kant, and J. Hillis Miller. The result is an intellectual meditation on 'the great dismissal,' in public and political life, of venerable and vital humanistic traditions, ethics, and ways of thinking.

This outstanding collection brings together essays that reflect on the nature of narrative, literary criticism, and history from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, ranging from deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and trauma theory, to narratology, technology, economics, and aesthetics. Acts of Narrative includes responses from renowned scholars across a wide range of disciplines: philosopher Jacques Derrida; the literary critic J. Hillis Miller; W. J. T. Mitchell, well-known for his reflections on the visual world; and Cathy Caruth, one of the founders of the field of trauma theory. These essays are brilliant in their readings of other texts, but are also striking in the manner in which each becomes itself a narrative performance. Moreover, what starts out as an exercise in theorizing and reading moves, more often than not, into a meditation on social and political issues crucial for our own sense of ourselves.

Amid radical transformation and rapid mutation in the nature, transmission, and deployment of information and communications, Around the Book offers a status report and theoretically nuanced update on the traditions and medium of the book. What, it asks, are the book's current prospects? The study highlights the most radical experiments in the book's history as trials in what the author terms the "Prevailing Operating System" at play within the fields of knowledge, art, critique, and science. The investigations of modern systems theory, as exemplified by Gregory Bateson, Anthony Wilden, and Niklas Luhmann, turn out to be inseparable from theoretically astute inquiry into the nature of the book. Sussman's primary examples of such radical experiments with the history of the book are Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book (both the text and Peter Greenaway's screen adaptation), Stephane Mallarme's "Un coup de des," Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Jacques Derrida's Glas, Maurice Blanchot's Death Sentence, and Franz Kafka's enduring legacy within the world of the graphic novel. In the author's hands, close reading of these and related works renders definitive proof of the book's persistence and vitality. The book medium, with its inbuilt format and program, continues, he argues, to supply the tablet or screen for cultural notation. The perennial crisis in which the book seems to languish is in fact an occasion for readers to realize fully their role as textual producers, to experience the full range of liberty in expression and articulation embedded in the irreducibly bookish process of textual display.

This book is an extended inquiry into the dimension of exteriority constructed by philosophical systems and literary works. Literature has, since its inception, depended on a rogueas gallery of outsidersathe more outlandish the better, with human attributes optionalaas the impetus to its events and the motive for its developments. Philosophers have also vacillated between safeguarding the purity and consistency of their systematic projects and embracing contamination by alien and intransigent elements.The unsettling encounter between interiority and exteriority is a philosophical and literary sideshow not nearly as frivolous as it might seem. Building upon Nietzscheas fatal confrontation aThe Wanderer and His Shadowa and Jacques Derridaas initiation of the current era in critical theory with the formulation aThe outside is the inside, a the author pursues the vicussitudes of the dimensional frontier in a wide range of artifacts and authors. Among these are James Joyce, Walter Benjamin, James Baldwin, and William Faulkner. A welcome is further extended to the peculiar sublime introduced in the Zohar and in the texts of Georg BA1/4chner, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, and Paul Celan.

Amid radical transformation and rapid mutation in the nature, transmission, and deployment of information and communications, Around the Book offers a status report and theoretically nuanced update on the traditions and medium of the book. What, it asks, are the book's current prospects? The study highlights the most radical experiments in the book's history as trials in what the author terms the "Prevailing Operating System" at play within the fields of knowledge, art, critique, and science. The investigations of modern systems theory, as exemplified by Gregory Bateson, Anthony Wilden, and Niklas Luhmann, turn out to be inseparable from theoretically astute inquiry into the nature of the book. Sussman's primary examples of such radical experiments with the history of the book are Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book (both the text and Peter Greenaway's screen adaptation), Stephane Mallarme's "Un coup de des," Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Jacques Derrida's Glas, Maurice Blanchot's Death Sentence, and Franz Kafka's enduring legacy within the world of the graphic novel. In the author's hands, close reading of these and related works renders definitive proof of the book's persistence and vitality. The book medium, with its inbuilt format and program, continues, he argues, to supply the tablet or screen for cultural notation. The perennial crisis in which the book seems to languish is in fact an occasion for readers to realize fully their role as textual producers, to experience the full range of liberty in expression and articulation embedded in the irreducibly bookish process of textual display.

This is a guide, in theory and in practice, to how current technological changes have impacted our interaction with texts and with each other. Henry Sussman rereads pivotal moments in literary, philosophical and cultural modernity as anticipating the cybernetic discourse that has increasingly defined theory since the computer revolution. Cognitive science, psychoanalysis and systems theory are paralleled to current trends in literary and philosophical theory. Chapters alternate between theory and readings of literary texts, resulting in a broad but rigorously grounded framework for the relation between literature and computer science. This book is a refreshing perspective on the analog-orientated tradition of theory in the humanities - and offers the first literary-textual genealogy of the digital.

"Demarcating the Disciplines " was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

With publication of this volume, "Glyph " begins a new stage in its existence: the move from Johns Hopkins University Press to the University of Minnesota Press is accompanied by a change in focus. In its first incarnation "Glyph "provided a forum in which established notions of reading, writing, and criticism could be questioned and explored. Since then, the greater currency of such concerns has brought with it new problems and priorities. Setting aside the battles of the past, the new "Glyph "looks ahead - to confront historical issues and to address the institutional and pedagogical questions emerging from the contemporary critical landscape.

Each volume in the new "Glyph " series is organized around a specific issue. The essays in this first volume explore the relations between the practice of reading and writing and the operations of the institution. Though their approaches differ from one another, the authors of these essays all recognize that the questions of the institution - most notably the university - points toward a series of constraints that define, albeit negatively, the possibilities for change.The contributors: Samuel Weber, Jacques Derrida, Tom Conley, Malcolm Evans, Ruth Salvaggio, Robert Young, Henry Sussman, Peter Middleton, David Punter, and Donald Preziosi.

Veteran scholar and critic Henry Sussman deploys anecdote, reportage, and memoir to lament and scrutinize the rise of anti-intellectualism in the past few decades. How are we to reckon with the decline of impartiality and sharp increase in self-interested interference in politic, legal, and cultural spheres; the normalization of pathological narcissism in public life; and the blanket dismissal of scientific findings and their counterparts in the humanities and social sciences? In retracing his own intellectual and experiential steps, Sussman revisits many of his lasting inspirations, including Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Immanuel Kant, and J. Hillis Miller. The result is an intellectual meditation on 'the great dismissal,' in public and political life, of venerable and vital humanistic traditions, ethics, and ways of thinking.