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Why do philosophers read literature? How do they read it? And to what extent does their philosophy derive from their reading of literature? Anyone who has read contemporary European philosophers has had to ask such questions. This book is an attempt to answer them, by considering the ‘strong readings’ Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze impose on the texts they read. The author demonstrates that philosophers need literature as much as literary critics need philosophy: it is an exercise not in the philosophy of literature (where literature is a mere object of analysis), but in philosophy and literature, a heady and unusual mix.

American Terror interrogates the origins, contexts, and significance of the distinctive tone of terror within a major strain of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Contrary to critical tendencies to literary terror as a rejection or contrary reaction to Enlightenment thought, this book draws upon new work in affect theory and the refreshed interest in American intellectual history to argue that American authors sought through it to produce the peculiar affect of scientific objectivity: the feeling of thinking. As what counts as knowledge comes to be aligned with a set of abstract universal rules and processes—the scientific method, propositional logic, geometric models of analysis—literary terror does not reject such progress as unfeeling, but rather sets out to describe it in feeling. Employing close reading in concert with original historical research, this book threads the story of terror’s relation to philosophy through three American writers who not only write terror, but write about terror. It begins with Jonathan Edwards’s theoretical defense of terror as a sensation of truth, develops through Edgar Allan Poe’s refinement of terror’s sensation of truth within an aesthetics of analytical methodology, and culminates in Herman Melville’s dramatization of the consequences exacted by this terrific perspective: a radically unknowable universe that everywhere refuses to relax its demands to be known. Through this critical repositioning of literary terror, American Terror charts how the dark strain of American literature carves a previously unaccounted for affective curve in the route of philosophy from Enlightenment idealism to poststructuralism.

This book offers a new interpretation of the links between literature, ethics, and philosophy in Beckett’s works. It surveys the entire corpus with a focus on the post-war period, when Beckett found a wider audience and broke from his mentors Joyce and Proust. Beckett’s decision to write in French, and his subsequent bilingualism, were no accidents but followed a program placing him among post-war writers who rejected Sartre and developed a “writing degree zero” as offering a post-Holocaust literary expression. Two philosophers examined in this historical context are Adorno and Badiou. If they often contradict each other, they converge on many points: Adorno sees that one can be a poet after Auschwitz; Badiou grasps how one can combine beautiful forms and a reduction of life to its generic essentials. For both, Beckett offers a lesson in courage, showing that life is worth living in spite of innumerable reasons to despair. The theme of animals permits a further exploration of life reduced to survival. A red thread comes from Beckett’s friendship with Bataille and their fascination with the Marquis de Sade. Both debunk post-war humanism. Bataille’s philosophy of the Impossible, of excess and transgression, was rephrased in a muted manner by Beckett who preferred Dante, Descartes, Geulincx, Kant and Freud to sketch an ethics of humility. All the while, his works are marked by an inimitable sense of metaphysical comedy that creates an infectious and enduring laughter.

Henry David Thoreau's best-known book, Walden, has not been widely recognized as an important philosophical text. Indeed, most academic philosophers would be reluctant to grant Thoreau a place within the philosophical canon at all. The goal of this volume is to remedy this neglect, to explain Thoreau's philosophical significance, and to argue for the lasting value of his polemical conception of how philosophy ought to be lived, practiced, and written. Thoreau sought to establish philosophy as a way of life and to root our philosophical, conceptual affairs in more practical or existential concerns. His work provides us with a sustained meditation on the importance of leading our lives with integrity, avoiding what he calls “quiet desperation.” The contributors to this volume approach Thoreau's multifaceted writings from various angles. They explore his aesthetic views, his naturalism, his theory of self, his ethical principles, and his political stances. Most importantly, they show how Thoreau returns philosophy to its roots as the love of wisdom.

Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy combines close readings with cultural and intellectual history and biography to reconsider individualism and philosophical thought in the Aesthetic 'Movement'. Repositioning Walter Pater at the philosophical nexus of Aestheticism and Decadence, it argues that Pater redefines Romantic Individualism through his engagements with modern philosophical discourses in the context of emerging modernity in Britain. This study has two main aims: i) to argue that 'late-Romantic Individualism' and not art is at the heart of Paterian Aestheticism and ii) to illustrate how Aestheticism understands itself in philosophical history, engaging with Romantic, Idealist and empiricist philosophies to redefine what philosophical thought can be under the conditions of modernity and to renegotiate the relationship between philosophy and literature. The way in which these interwoven discussions are focused through Pater simultaneously serves to reposition him in literary history. This is the first book-length study of how Pater was influenced by, variously appropriated, and challenged modern philosophies in Victorian Oxford. It is also the first exploration of how late nineteenth-century individualism developed through the reappropriation of philosophical discourses. In order to makes its case it engages substantially with Pater's unpublished manuscripts, which contain some of his most daring philosophical statements, and which have been seriously neglected by scholars working to the agenda of 'Pater as stylist' or 'Pater as purveyor of male-male desire' which has defined Pater studies for some time.

This book argues that two ways of understanding the aesthetic organization of literary works have been inherited from the late 18th century and dominate discussions of European modernism today: the aesthetics of autonomy, associated with the self-sufficient work of art, and the aesthetics of fragmentation, practiced by the avant-gardes. Yet both of these models rest on assumptions about the nature of truth and existence that cannot be treated as exhaustive of modernist form. The present book accordingly traces an alternative aesthetics of dependency that provides a different formal structure, philosophical foundation, and historical condition for modernist texts. Taking Europe's Scandinavian periphery as its point of departure, the book examines how Søren Kierkegaard and Henrik Ibsen imagined a response to the changing conditions of modernity different from those at the European core, one that subsequently influenced Henry James, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, and James Joyce. Combining close readings with a broader revision of the nature and genealogy of modernism, Marginal Modernity challenges what we understand by modernist aesthetics, their origins, and their implications for how we conceive of our relation to the modern world.

Ambitious scientific accounts of human thought and behavior have been a mainstay of American intellectual culture since World War II. But if such theories are true, what is the status of our highest words, the vocabularies that orient and inspire our actions? What forms are available today for exploring and embodying such terms as “good,” “courage,” or “justice”? This book considers the rise of the “postwar sage,” a strand of post-1945 American writing that takes up these questions in distinctive and illuminating ways. Walker Percy’s clash with behaviorist and cognitivist theories; Marilynne Robinson’s encounter with evolutionary psychology; Ralph Ellison’s combat with sociology; the quarrel with analytic philosophy in Stanley Cavell and David Foster Wallace: at stake in such cases is the status of our normative concepts, and what it means to invoke them in a technological culture that divides “facts” from “values” and treats our high words with deep suspicion. Moving among literary fiction, memoir, essays, personal correspondence, moral philosophy, and contemporary theories of mind, the book examines not only what these philosophical and literary figures think about the relationship between nature and norms, but also how this thinking emerges: when they call upon art, when they call upon argument, and how these various modes can inflect, bolster, and—just as crucially—trouble one another.

Exorbitant Enlightenment offers new ways to think about eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and culture. It brings into focus a constellation of relatively unknown, pre-1790s Anglo-German relations in Britain, many of which are so radical—so exorbitant—that they ask us to fundamentally rethink the way we do literary and intellectual history, especially when it comes to Enlightenment and Romanticism. This polyglot book delivers two of the great, untold stories of the eighteenth century. The first story uncovers a forgotten Anglo-German network of thought and writing in Britain between 1700 and 1790. From this Anglo-German context emerges the second story: a set of radical figures and institutions that are exorbitant, they leave the specified tracks of literary history and present us with a literary history that explodes the difference between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. These figures and institutions include the Moravians in 1750s London, Henry Fuseli (1741–25), and Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801), but also the two most radical, notorious, and most exorbitant figures: William Blake (1757–1827) and Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88). Over eight comparative chapters, the book presents a constellation of case studies that show how these figures and institutions shake up our common understanding of British literary and European intellectual history. Exorbitant Enlightenment takes seriously, and pays particular attention to, the exorbitant dimensions of Blake and Hamann and how once we take them seriously, these exorbitant figures allow us to uncover and address some of our own critical orthodoxies.