The poetics of singularity
Subtitle: the counter-culturalist turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the later Gadamer
By: Timothy Clark.
Series: Frontiers of theory
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Edinburgh
Language: eng
Number of pages: 186
Subjects: Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976; Derrida, Jacques; Blanchot, Maurice; Gadamer, Hans Georg, 1900-; Particularity (Aesthetics); Criticism; Poetics
Description: "This polemical book reveals the basic tenets of what may be called a 'poetics of singularity' in Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and the strange late essays of Hans Georg Gadamer." "At issue is the at first simple, even familiar, idea that literary or poetic 'meaning' cannot be stated in terms other than its own, that a text strives towards the status of being an example, if of anything, only of itself, sole witness of what it alone projects. This issue opens a series of powerful questions concerning basic features of Western thought - about the nature of understanding, about Kierkegaard's 'singular individual' that is yet each human life in its exceptionally, the uniqueness of historical testimony, and the nature of community. The Poetics of Singularity forms an ethically compelling alternative to the currently dominant cultural/social studies paradigm in literary criticism, a neo-Darwinian understanding of art and life which is sometimes only a disguised version of American nationalism."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [161]-179) and index.