Bard College Berlin Library

Normal view MARC view ISBD view

The ghosts of modernity / Jean-Michel Rabaté.

By: Rabaté, Jean-Michel 1949-.
Material type: materialTypeLabelBookSeries: Crosscurrents (Gainesville, Fla.): Publisher: Gainesville, FL : University Press of Florida, c1996Description: xxii, 258 p. ; 23 cm.ISBN: 9780813035642.Subject(s): Modernism (Literature) | CriticismDDC classification: 809/.91
Contents:
Introduction: "The Penultimate ... is dead" -- The Master of Colors That Know -- Andre Breton's Ghostly Stance -- Roland Barthes, Ghostwriter of Modernity -- Mallarmes's Crypts -- Verlaine and Mallarme between the Angels and the Ghosts of Languages -- Broch's Modernity as Crime, or the Sleepwalking of Theory -- Beckett and the Ghosts of Departed Quantities -- Shades of the Color Gray -- Uncoupling Modernism -- Conclusion: The "Moderns" and Their Ghosts.
Summary: Jean-Michel Rabate, the eminent French Joycean, combines psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts in rereading the history of modernity to give a more precise meaning to the term modernism.Summary: Rabate focuses throughout on a single theme, the ghostly nature of modernity. In writing a history of the concept of modernity with the awareness that the radically new has often been subject to the effects of the return of the repressed. Rabate analyzes the notion of loss in various fields: in Freudian aesthetics of color, in literary history, and in philosophy. The postmodernist fascination with a lost object allows a reconsideration of the boundaries of such terms as modernism and postmodernism.Summary: The conclusion ties together all these motifs, from Joyce to Barthes, and shows their theoretical basis in Marx's criticism of ideology and in Freud's consideration of mourning. From the analysis of "color" as an unthinkable object of discourse to an aesthetics of the unpresentable, Rabate points to the possibility of an "ethics of mourning," which would seem capable of overcoming the dead end of history whose ending condemns it to eternal repetition.
Tags from this library: No tags from this library for this title.
Item type Current location Call number Status Date due
Non Fiction Non Fiction BardBerlinLibrary
809.91 Rab 1996 (Browse shelf) Available

Includes index.

Introduction: "The Penultimate ... is dead" -- 1. The Master of Colors That Know -- 2. Andre Breton's Ghostly Stance -- 3. Roland Barthes, Ghostwriter of Modernity -- 4. Mallarmes's Crypts -- 5. Verlaine and Mallarme between the Angels and the Ghosts of Languages -- 6. Broch's Modernity as Crime, or the Sleepwalking of Theory -- 7. Beckett and the Ghosts of Departed Quantities -- 8. Shades of the Color Gray -- 9. Uncoupling Modernism -- Conclusion: The "Moderns" and Their Ghosts.

Jean-Michel Rabate, the eminent French Joycean, combines psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts in rereading the history of modernity to give a more precise meaning to the term modernism.

Rabate focuses throughout on a single theme, the ghostly nature of modernity. In writing a history of the concept of modernity with the awareness that the radically new has often been subject to the effects of the return of the repressed. Rabate analyzes the notion of loss in various fields: in Freudian aesthetics of color, in literary history, and in philosophy. The postmodernist fascination with a lost object allows a reconsideration of the boundaries of such terms as modernism and postmodernism.

The conclusion ties together all these motifs, from Joyce to Barthes, and shows their theoretical basis in Marx's criticism of ideology and in Freud's consideration of mourning. From the analysis of "color" as an unthinkable object of discourse to an aesthetics of the unpresentable, Rabate points to the possibility of an "ethics of mourning," which would seem capable of overcoming the dead end of history whose ending condemns it to eternal repetition.

There are no comments for this item.

Log in to your account to post a comment.

Please contact [email protected] in case you encounter any problems with the OPAC.