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Neil Hertz, The End of the Line
First published in 1985, as
part of the revival of interest of the notion of the
sublime, The End of
the Line takes Longinus’s inaugural treatise as its
point of departure, examining its passages of verbal
intensity for what they may reveal of literary procedures
more generally.
The earliest essays are readings of classic instances of the
eighteenth-century and Romantic sublime, where one would
expect to find condensed and high-powered moments,
entanglings of a writer’s thematic concerns with issues of
epistemology and rhetoric.
The interpretative procedures brought to bear on such
passages in Longinus, Milton, Kant and Wordsworth are then
tried out on less obvious instances of the sublime—on the
nominally Realist fiction of Flaubert and George Eliot, on
the political rhetoric associated with fears of violent
revolution, on some texts of Freud’s (his account of the
uncanny, his case history of “Dora”), and on contemporary
academic anxieties about plagiarism.
In this augmented edition, Neil Hertz has added two more
recent essays, one on questions of memory and inscription in
Descartes and Samuel Johnson, the other on the development
of an idiosyncratic notion of sacrifice in the writings of
Paul de Man, from his wartime Belgian journalism to his
post-war interest in the criticism of William Empson.
Contents
Preface
1.
A Reading of Longinus
2.
Wordsworth and the Tears
of Adam
3.
The Notion of Blockage
in the Literature of the Sublime
4.
Flaubert’s Conversion
5.
Dr. Johnson’s
Forgetfulness, Descartes’ Piece of Wax
6.
Recognizing Casaubon
7.
Freud and the Sandman
8.
Dora’s Secrets, Freud’s
Techniques
9.
Two Extravagant
Teachings
10.
More Lurid Figures:
De Man and Empson
11.
Medusa’s Head:
Male Hysteria under
Political Pressure
Postscripts, 1985,
1990
Response
from Catherine Gallagher
Response
from Joel Fineman
In
Reply
12.
Afterword:
The End of the Line
Notes
Index
The Author
Neil Hertz taught in the Cornell English Department
(1961–82) before joining the Humanities Center at Johns
Hopkins, where he taught from 1983 to his retirement in
2005. He is the
author of George
Eliot’s Pulse (Stanford University Press, 2003).
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