Earlier versions of all the essays were given at a colloquium at Assumption College, Sept. 21-22, 2007.

This collection of essays intends to challenge conventional notions of what constitutes an American national literature. The new reading of Hegel in recent philosophy and critical theory subjects history and language to a thorough critique. Yet the connection of Hegel to American discourse has largely gone unexplored, and literary theorists have scarcely begun to interrogate the priorities of Hegelianism implicit in American literary history. The essays collected in Theorizing American Literature thus organize their arguments around the necessity to rethink the (...) process of historicizing American literature and to redefine the terms of discussion of some of its most familiar authors. (shrink)

This collection of essays by five scholars whose views were mutually shaped in several years of association at Yale attempts to define deconstruction and its place in criticism from a philosophical standpoint. Though the definition is not easily got at, the volume does provide some important insights into the purpose and future of criticism. "Deconstruction" is a way of reading that holds in tension the contradictory evidence of a romantic criticism, which asserts the primacy of the author's mind over his (...) material, and of semiotics, which asserts the priority of linguistic codes over any rational or imaginative determination of meaning, thereby undermining claims to causality or intuitive truth. Thus, the authors here can remain in contact with the romantic mode even after having rigorously shown it to be untenable. Eschewing pure structuralism, these essays demonstrate a continuing commitment to the integrity of the literary text, not out of a misguided aestheticism but because of the manifest inability of analysis to resolve the contradictions that engender the text. (shrink)

The second in an important series of translations at MIT Press, with a helpful, detailed introduction by the translator, this volume presents Gadamer actively reconsidering the history of philosophy and the development of his own thought in the context of the present technocratic society, its outlook and its problems.

This study aims to conjoin recent insights in the poetics of the novel with an existential concern for human life. Medina sees his brief, provocative work as a contribution toward establishing "forms of human intending" as bases of literary expression, in the main through his attempt to correlate a hermeneutics of the symbol with the hermeneutics of existence. To this end he first reappraises the act of reflection, finding its most authentic form not in Western philosophical tradition--which, he claims, has (...) tended to see reflection as an almost mechanical operation deriving from insight--but in those forms of writing which present man in the process of reflecting on his own life, its intentions, directions, and misdirections. Here the self is not a given but is shown in the process of being formed; desire for fulfillment of one's path in life, not a detached desire for cognition, is the motive of reflection; and the referential direction of reflection is biographical rather than objective and ideational. (shrink)