Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock (Literature, Culture, Theory)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: First Edition, 9/7/1990
EAN 9780521465847, ISBN10: 0521465842
Paperback, 282 pages, 21.6 x 14 x 1.6 cm
Language: English
The material elements of writing have long been undervalued, and have been dismissed by recent historicising trends of criticism; but analysis of these elements - sound, signature, letters - can transform our understanding of literary texts. In this 1994 book Tom Cohen shows how, in an era of representational criticism and cultural studies, the role of close reading has been overlooked. Arguing that much recent criticism has been caught in potentially regressive models of representation, Professor Cohen undertakes to counter this by rethinking the 'materiality' of the text itself. Through a series of revealing new readings of the work of writers including Plato, Bakhtin, Poe, Whitman and Conrad, Professor Cohen exposes the limitations of new historicism and neo-pragmatism, and demonstrates how 'the materiality of language' operates to undo the representational models of meaning imposed by the literary canon.
Introduction
the legs of sense
Part I. Dialogue and Inscription
1. Othello, Bakhtin and the death(s) of dialogue
2. P.s.
Plato's scene of reading in the Protagoras
Part II. Parables of Exteriority - Materality in 'Classic' American Texts
3. Too legit to quit
the dubious genealogies of pragmatism
4. Poe's Foot d'Or
ruinous rhyme and Nietzschean recurrence (sound)
5. Only the dead know Brooklyn ferry (voice)
6. The letters of the law
'Bartleby' as hypogrammatic romance (letters)
Part III. Pre-Posterous Modernisms
7. Conrad's fault (signature)
8. Miss Emily, c'est moi
the defacement of modernism in Faulkner (inscription and social form)
9. Hitchcock and the death of (Mr.) Memory (technology of the visible)
Coda
post-humanist reading.