Series: Theory and History of Literature

This book is not only a major twentieth-century contribution to Dostoevsky's studies, but also one of the most important theories of the novel produced in our century. As a modern reinterpretation of poetics, it bears comparison with Aristotle. Bakhtin's statement on the dialogical nature of artistic creation, and his differentiation of this from a history of monological commentary, is profoundly...

Published in France as La jeune nee in 1975, and found here in its first English translation, The Newly Born Woman is a landmark text of the modern feminist movement. In it, Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement put forward the concept of ecriture feminine, exploring the ways women's sexuality and unconscious shape their imaginary, their language, and their writing. Through...

Many definitions of postmodernism focus on its nature as the aftermath of the modern industrial age when technology developed dynamically. In The Postmodern Condition, Jean-Francois Lyotard extends that analysis to postmodernism by looking at the status of science, technology, and the arts, the significance of technocracy, and the way the flow of information and knowledge are controlled in the Western...

In this classic of critical thought, Deleuze and Guattari challenge conventional interpretations of Kafka's work. Instead of exploring preexisting categories or literary genres, they propose a concept of minor literature—the use of a major language that subverts it from within. Writing as a Jew in Prague, they contend, Kafka made German "take flight on a line of escape" and joyfully...

Noise is a model of cultural historiography. In its general theoretical argument on the relations of culture to economy, but also in its specialised concentration, Noise has much that is of importance to critical theory today. SubStance For Attali, music is not simply a reflection of culture, but a harbinger of change, an anticipatory abstraction of the shape of things...

In 1983, two centuries after the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, another philosophical treatise—polemical in nature, with a title that consciously and disrespectfully alludes to the earlier work—appeared in West Germany. Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason stirred both critical acclaim and consternation and attracted a wide readership, especially among those who had come of age in the...