Negation, Critical Theory, and Postmodern Textuality

This text features 14 essays by leading specialists in critical theory, comparative literature, philosophy, and English literature. The essays, which present wide-ranging historical considerations of negation in the light of recent developments in poststructuralism and postmodernism, range over many of the significant texts in which negation figures prominently. The book includes a wide-ranging introductory chapter that examines how attention to negation - the inescapable nescience that is posited in any and every linguistic expression - enhances the hermeneutic possibilities present in language. In addition, the four sections of the book bring together major critical interventions on, among others, negative meaning, unrecognizability, elenctic negation, apocalypse, nihilism, negation and gender, and denegation. All the essays involve close attention to key texts by major authors, including William Shakespeare, Henry James, Federico Garcia Lorca, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Walt Whitman, E.M. Forster, Mary Shelley, Margaret Atwood, Roland Barthes, Douglas Barbour, Paul de Man, Nichol, Jacques Derrida, and Domgen Kigen. The volume opens up areas in critical theory, comparative literature, and the philosophy of language, and defines a major area of inquiry in relation to notions of postmodern textuality. Critical theorists, students of comparative literature, English literature, and the history of ideas, and those interested in the hermeneutic implications of postmodernism, should find this volume of interest. The extensive bibliographical apparatus and index make the collection a reference tool for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students as well as for those seeking a variety of interpretive approaches to the problem of negation in literature.