Literary Critique, Modernism and the Transformation of Theory

Sets out an innovative agenda for approaching literary critique While connecting to the 'post-critique' debate, this study draws on Italian Theory to provide an alternative critical method in literary studies, including the ethical underpinnings of critique. It proposes that critique is an attitude and stance towards others and a set of dispositions toward the object of study, such as indocility, receptiveness, openness to transformation, awareness of relationality, attention to language, attunement to the body, distance, displacement, externality and wonder. It deals with the link between modernism and theory as an important object of intellectual history and it elaborates on the potential of feminism and psychoanalysis to open up affirmative resources in language. Drawing on archival materials, the book includes sustained readings of Benjamin, Butler, Foucault, Jameson, Dimock, Esposito, Saussure, Virno, Hélène Cixous, Lacan, as well as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Clarice Lispector, the Digital Book Project by Airan Kang and the photography of George Platt Lynes. Mena Mitrano is Associate Professor of American literature and language in the Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. She is the author of Gertrude Stein: Woman Without Qualities (2005) and In the Archive of Longing: Susan Sontag's Critical Modernism (Edinburgh University Press 2016).