Writing Against Time (Hardcover)

Writing Against Time By Michael W. Clune Cover Image
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Description


For centuries, a central goal of art has been to make us see the world with new eyes. Thinkers from Edmund Burke to Elaine Scarry have understood this effort as the attempt to create new forms. But as anyone who has ever worn out a song by repeated listening knows, artistic form is hardly immune to sensation-killing habit. Some of our most ambitious writers--Keats, Proust, Nabokov, Ashbery--have been obsessed by this problem. Attempting to create an image that never gets old, they experiment with virtual, ideal forms. Poems and novels become workshops, as fragments of the real world are scrutinized for insights and the shape of an ideal artwork is pieced together. These writers, voracious in their appetite for any knowledge that will further their goal, find help in unlikely places. The logic of totalitarian regimes, the phenomenology of music, the pathology of addiction, and global commodity exchange furnish them with tools and models for arresting neurobiological time. Reading central works of the past two centuries in light of their shared ambition, Clune produces a revisionary understanding of some of our most important literature.

About the Author


Michael Clune is Assistant Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of a previous work of criticism, American Literature and the Free Market, and of a forthcoming memoir, White Out.

Praise For…


"What is striking about this book is the combination of enormous ambition and economical exposition. Its questions are big and its answers are provocative. Even better: we have the chance to see the world for a while through an enchanting mind. Thinking with Clune is sheer pleasure."—Amy Hungerford, Yale University

"Clune makes a powerful argument for how the literary critic, if properly aware of the literary subject's uniquely antagonistic relation to time and actuality, might contribute something new to other disciplines as opposed to remaining parasitic on their methods."—Sianne Ngai, Stanford University

Product Details
ISBN: 9780804770811
ISBN-10: 0804770816
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Publication Date: January 9th, 2013
Pages: 200
Language: English