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William
Egginton, A Wrinkle in History:
Essays in Literature and Philosophy
Contemporary European Cultural Studies
Series Editors,
Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala
The essays collected in this volume, although written on
subjects as historically and thematically disparate as
medieval theology and contemporary neopragmatism,
nevertheless share a common focus or question: what is the
relevance of philosophy for thinking about politics,
literature, or, more generally, history? This last is
perhaps the most fundamental in that it encompasses all the
others. On the one hand, all discourse, be it philosophical,
political, or literary, has its history and is thus, perhaps
irremediably, limited or constrained by that history. On the
other, politics, literature and, most obviously, philosophy
all strive to articulate visions that transcend the
historical constraints of their production. The paradox that
these contravening forces engender finds a particularly
persistent expression in the fields of the humanities, and
perhaps most clearly in the study of literature, in which
scholars have increasingly felt the obligation to define
themselves as being primarily either historians or
theorists. The acceptance of this divide leads to a pitched
battle of styles, between those who deride theoretically
minded scholars as presentists whose contamination of the
past with faddish theories deprive their conclusions of any
plausible claim to truth, and an opposing camp that
criticizes in historicists a lack of theoretical
sophistication that relegates their conclusions to the
irrelevant torpor of mere academic book keeping.
Contents
Forward: Between History and Theory
1. A Wrinkle in Historical Time
2. On Dante, Hyperspheres, and the Curvature of the Medieval
Cosmos
3. Mimesis and Theatricality
4. On Relativism, Rights and Differends, or, Ethics and the
American Holocaust
5. Cervantes, Romantic Irony, and the Making of Reality
6. Psychoanalysis and the Comedia: Skepticism and the
Paternal Function in La vida es sueño
7. Intimacy and Anonymity, or How the Audience Became a
Crowd
8. Reality is Bleeding: A Brief History of Film from the
Sixteenth Century
9. Keeping Pragmatism Pure: Rorty with Lacan
Notes
Author
William Egginton is Professor of German and Romance
Languages and Literature at the Johns Hopkins University,
where he teaches courses on Spanish and Latin American
literature, literary theory, and the relation between
literature and philosophy. He is the author of How the World Became a
Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), and
The Philosopher's Desire (forthcoming 2007). He is
also co-editor with Mike Sandbothe of The Pragmatic Turn
in Philosophy (2004), and translator of Lisa Block de
Behar's Borges, the Passion of an Endless Quotation
(2003). His current research focuses on the ideology of
baroque and neobaroque aesthetics.
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