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Cultural diagnostician Ian Fleishman trains his writing on the incomprehensible wounding of language. With an elegant sensibility for the disruptions of narrative injury and structural disintegration, he scans the agony of essential literary despair after Baudelaire and Kafka. Poignant and incisive, alert to disavowed aspects of social existence, An Aesthetics of Injury comes up against Freudian theories of castration and political deficiency. The work collects a dossier of texts that are befallen by the oversignifying tendencies of inbound catastrophe. Cixous, Genet, Tarantino, Jelinek, and others are scanned for the rhetorical lesions and narrative loopholes that constitute our modernity. --Avital Ronell In An Aesthetics of Injury, Ian Fleishman convincingly proposes wounding as a major narrative strategy in modernist aesthetics, one that seeks to compensate for literature's apparent powerlessness by insisting on its duty (in Kafka's words) to sting or stab . Fleishman's argument refreshingly sidesteps the discourse of trauma studies, focusing instead on the aesthetics and complicated enunciative status of narrative injury. --French Forum Fleishman's book is extremely successful at bringing together a wide array of media and artists to offer us an innovative and extremely useful theorization of aesthetic violence. --The German Quarterly Thoroughly researched with ready references to letters, interviews, and unpublished manuscripts; and written not without finesse, Fleishman's chapters are neatly connected by the authors' own elective affinities. Indeed, it is as a historian of literature and film that Fleishman excels, making plausible a partly new trajectory and taking up a couple auteurs behind whose contradictory commitments he reveals similar concerns. An Aesthetics of Injury is admirably comparative and unhindered by national limitations or generic constraints. --Comparative Literature Studies Ian Fleishman has produced a stimulating and wide-ranging book that examines a diverse set of works in terms of an aesthetics of injury . . . The great strength of this book is its attention to textual detail; in particular, his work on how the 'filmic cut' performatively reflects the images of cutting proposed in the films analysed is compelling. --French Studies An Aesthetics of Injury is insightful, beautifully written, and compelling. It will help shift many discussions in literary, film and feminist studies. --Kathleen Komar, author of Reclaiming Klytemnestra: Revenge or Reconciliation An incisive and provocative contribution to the history and theory of modern narrative since Baudelaire... Fleishman shows that the idea of an open wound as an allegoric dimension, or an 'aesthetics of injury, ' plays a vital and thus far neglected role in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature. --Johannes Turk, author of Die Immunitat der Literatur

Aesthetics of Injury is insightful, beautifully written, and compelling. It will help shift many discussions in literary, film and feminist studies. --Kathleen Komar, author of Reclaiming Klytemnestra: Revenge or Reconciliation An incisive and provocative contribution to the history and theory of modern narrative since Baudelaire... Fleishman shows that the idea of an open wound as an allegoric dimension, or an 'aesthetics of injury, ' plays a vital and thus far neglected role in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature. --Johannes Turk, author of Die Immunitat der Literatur

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Ian Fleishman is an assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

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