How are we to read the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall? Form and Instability brings notions of figuration and translation to bear on the post-1989 condition. ""Eastern Europe"" in this book is more than a territory. Marked by belatedness and untimely remainders, it is an unstable object that is continually misapprehended. From the intersection of comparative literature, area studies, and literary theory, Anita Starosta considers the epistemological and aesthetic consequences of the disappearance of the Second World. Literature here becomes a critical lens in its own right-both object and method, it confronts us with the rhetorical dimension of language and undermines the ideological and hermeneutic coherence of established categories. In original readings of Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz, among other twentieth-century writers, Form and Instability unsettles cultural boundaries as we know them.

About the Author
Anita Starosta has taught at Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, Bryant University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. She is currently a lecturer of English at RISD.


Book Information
ISBN 9780810132597
Author Anita Starosta
Format Hardback
Page Count 200
Imprint Northwestern University Press
Publisher Northwestern University Press
Weight(grams) 464g