Description
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.
About the Author
Carol Jacobs is Professor of Comparative Literature and German at Yale University. Her most recent work is In the Language of Walter Benjamin (1999). Henry Sussman is Professor of Comparative Literature at SUNY, Buffalo. He is the author, most recently, of The Aesthetic Contract: Statutes of Art and Intellectual Work in Modernity (Stanford, 1997).
Reviews
"Acts of Narrative explores different facets of narrative with historical and thematic breadth, and each of the essays is a remarkable narrative act in its own right. Taken as a whole, the collection is a powerful demonstration of how the intersections between psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and performative theory change our understanding of narrative and its function in cultural life." -Ewa Plonowska Ziarek,University of Notre Dame
Book Information
ISBN 9780804746519
Author Carol Jacobs
Format Paperback
Page Count 296
Imprint Stanford University Press
Publisher Stanford University Press
Weight(grams) 395g