Overview
- Analyzes various ways pain is part of the experience of reading
- Develops a concept of "linguistic pain"
- Draws on continental philosophy & European literature of the late 19th and 20th centuries
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
The Violence of Reading: Literature and Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain expounds the scene of reading as one that produces an overwhelmed body exposed to uncontainable forms of violence. The book argues that the act of reading induces a representational instability that causes the referential function of language to collapse. This breakdown releases a type of “linguistic pain” (Scarry; Butler; Hamacher) that indicates a constitutive wounding of the reading body. The wound of language marks a rupture between linguistic reality and the phenomenal world. Exploring this rupture in various ways, the book brings together texts and genres from diverse traditions and offers close examinations of the rhetoric of masochism (Sacher-Masoch; Deleuze), the relation between reading and abuse (Nietzsche; Proust; Jelinek), the sublime experience of reading (Kant; Kafka; de Man), the “novel of the institution” (Musil; Campe), and literary suicide (Bachmann; Berryman; Okkervil River).
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Dominik Zechner served as the Artemis A.W. and Martha Joukowsky Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University’s Pembroke Center and is currently an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University.
Zechner is the co-editor of Forces of Education: Walter Benjamin and the Politics of Pedagogy (Bloomsbury, 2023) and Thresholds, Encounters: Paul Celan and the Claim of Philology (SUNY, 2023). He is also the co-editor of a special issue of parallax (“Initiations: The Pitfalls of Beginning,” vol. 28.3, 2022) and the editor of a special issue of Modern Language Notes (“What is a Prize?” vol. 131.5, 2016).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Violence of Reading
Book Subtitle: Literature and Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain
Authors: Dominik Zechner
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53192-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-53191-0Published: 27 April 2024
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-53194-1Due: 16 June 2024
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-53192-7Published: 26 April 2024
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 212
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Continental Philosophy, Literary Theory, Aesthetics