Overview

Failure and Ethics in Contemporary American Literature contends that failure is both a response to the social and economic conditions of neoliberalism and a site of ethical imagining where alternative modes of being and being together are proposed. Daniel Dufournaud capaciously construes failure to include performing badly, unhappiness and dysphoria, family dysfunction, and formal discontinuity. He contends that the function of failure in contemporary American literature resonates with the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas, the self emerges as a conscious subject only through the imposition of the Other, a preconscious sequence that installs responsibility for others at the heart of selfhood. Levinas frames the suspension of egoism and the self's concomitant awareness of its constitutive responsibility as an ethical interruption. Similarly, this study's primary texts treat failure as an interruption that forces the self to acknowledge its foundational sociality, an acknowledgement that contests neoliberalism's individualist protocols.

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9781399554466

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Reviews

For the first time the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, too often reduced to the foregrounding of ethics, offers original and comprehensive strategies for literary criticism. Daniel Dufournaud blends illuminating close readings with a theoretical apparatus that constructs a ‘grammar of interruption’ applied to contemporary American literature. In it, failure appears as a paradoxical praxis that works at many levels to rupture the complacencies of neo-liberalism and open new dialogues with politics, economics and aesthetics. -- Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania and American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Author Information

Daniel Dufournaud is an Assistant Professor at the University of Macau. He is the editor of ReFocus: The Films of John Singleton (EUP, 2024). His work appears in such journals as Poetics Today, College Literature, Studies in the Novel, Journal of Modern Literature and Journal of American Studies.

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