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Author:   Professor Claudia Brodsky (Princeton University, USA) ,  Dr. Eloy LaBrada (University of Alberta, Canada)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic USA
Dimensions:   Width: 14.00cm , Height: 2.20cm , Length: 21.40cm
Weight:   0.360kg
ISBN:  

9781501317132

ISBN 10:   150131713
Pages:   272
Publication Date:   26 January 2017
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

Introduction Claudia Brodsky (Princeton University, USA) and Eloy LaBrada (Middlebury College, USA) PART ONE. SUBJECTS 1. I Think, Therefore I Feel Marshall J. Brown (University of Washington, Seattle, USA) 2. Some Dark Interiority. A Brief Conceptual History Eduardo Lerro (Princeton University, USA) 3. Unsexing Subjects: Marie de Gournay on the Ontology of “Sex” Eloy LaBrada (Middlebury College, USA) PART TWO. CAUSALITIES 4. Shadows on the Wall of Reason: Diderot before Fragonard David Ferris (University of Colorado at Boulder, USA /Sebald Chair, University of East Anglia, UK) 5. Timely Plot and Unplotted Time: Action and Experience Before and After Hegel John Park (Princeton University, USA) 6. Unexpected yet Connected: On Aristotle’s Poetics and its Heterodox Reception Karen Feldman (University of California at Berkeley, USA) 7. The Causal Economy of the Subject in Kant, Hegel and Marx: Being in Time an Externalization Irina Simova (Princeton University, USA) PART THREE. JUDGMENT 8. The Man Within the Breast: Sympathy, Deformity, and Moral Subjectivity in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments Paul Kelleher (Emory University, USA) 9. Judging, Inevitably: Aesthetic Judgment and Novelistic Form in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews Vivasvan Soni (Northwestern University, USA) 10. The Linguistic Condition of Judgment: Kant’s “Common Sense” Claudia Brodsky (Princeton University, USA) Index

Reviews

Inventing Agency, Essay on the Literary and Philosophical Production of the Modern Subject offers an admirable examination of the multiple ways the capacity to think and act, to reflect or negate have been both re-defined and questioned in the modern era. The authors gathered in this volume engage in a productive dialogue, focusing on distinctive works and critical perspectives. The question of agency is approached through a variety of texts that focus on aesthetics, philosophy, painting, narrative strategies and historical singularities. Knowledgeable and provocative, Inventing Agency goes far beyond the terms with which, from Descartes to Kant, the question of the authority and status of the subject have been framed, raising important questions regarding communicability and current forms of critical thought in its relationship to history. Marie-Helene Huet, M. Taylor Pyne Professor of French and Italian, Princeton University, USA This collection of essays proposes a provocative and original approach to the much debated nature of the subject with a simple yet far-reaching and creative move. Instead of describing or analyzing what the subject is, the essays consider what subjects do, in the world, in time, and in history. The 'inventing' of the subject's agency does not mean that the authors are discovering agency, but rather points to the underlying meaning of the word 'invention,' in that the authors uncover what theoretical approaches have overlooked: the subject as agent, as an actor who has been occulted by static, reductive, or deterministic theories. This dynamic approach does not result in a unified theory but yields multifaceted explorations of the subject's acts of speech in which agency works, carried out in close analyses of texts written by diverse philosophers and literary figures that include Descartes, Gournay, Diderot, Richardson, Flaubert, Aristotle, Fielding, Adam Smith, Hegel, and Kant. Sylvie Romanowski, Professor Emerita of French, Northwestern University, USA Inventing Agency presents a set of innovative and probing essays focused on the question of the subject. Each offers a new perspective on the imbrication of literature and philosophy, investigating topics such as feeling and judgment, temporality and sexuality. The essays have a wide disciplinary range, bringing in art history, disability studies, and more general questions of literary studies such as narrative, poetics and performative language. Many of the essays pose the question of the (post)enlightenment subject anew, seeking openings in the legacies of Diderot, Kant and Hegel to open up possibilities of de-essentialized subjectivity. The volume is a serious and engaging contribution to the study of literature and philosophy and the interrelation between language and thinking. The book culminates in Claudia Brodsky's magisterial essay on Kant's notions of common sense, language and judgment-a preview of what promises to be a challenging and illuminating book to come. Susan Bernstein, Professor of Comparative Literature, Brown University, USA

Inventing Agency, Essay on the Literary and Philosophical Production of the Modern Subject offers an admirable examination of the multiple ways the capacity to think and act, to reflect or negate have been both re-defined and questioned in the modern era. The authors gathered in this volume engage in a productive dialogue, focusing on distinctive works and critical perspectives. The question of agency is approached through a variety of texts that focus on aesthetics, philosophy, painting, narrative strategies and historical singularities. Knowledgeable and provocative, Inventing Agency goes far beyond the terms with which, from Descartes to Kant, the question of the authority and status of the subject have been framed, raising important questions regarding communicability and current forms of critical thought in its relationship to history. Marie-Helene Huet, M. Taylor Pyne Professor of French and Italian, Princeton University, USA This collection of essays proposes a provocative and original approach to the much debated nature of the subject with a simple yet far-reaching and creative move. Instead of describing or analyzing what the subject is, the essays consider what subjects do, in the world, in time, and in history. The 'inventing' of the subject's agency does not mean that the authors are discovering agency, but rather points to the underlying meaning of the word 'invention,' in that the authors uncover what theoretical approaches have overlooked: the subject as agent, as an actor who has been occulted by static, reductive, or deterministic theories. This dynamic approach does not result in a unified theory but yields multifaceted explorations of the subject's acts of speech in which agency works, carried out in close analyses of texts written by diverse philosophers and literary figures that include Descartes, Gournay, Diderot, Richardson, Flaubert, Aristotle, Fielding, Adam Smith, Hegel, and Kant. Sylvie Romanowski, Professor Emerita of French, Northwestern University, USA

Author Information

Claudia Brodsky is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, USA, and ancien directeur de programme of the Collège international de philosophie, Paris, France. Her previous publications include The Imposition of Form (1987), Lines of Thought (1996), In the Place of Language (2009), Why Philosophy, Intro., Ed. and Contributor, PMLA (2016), and, co-edited with Toni Morrison, Birth of a Nation’hood (1997), as well as many articles on 17th through 20th-century philosophy and literature. Eloy LaBrada is an instructor in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at the University of Alberta, Canada, where he specializes in the philosophy of gender and sexuality, social ontology, analytic feminism, and the history of modern philosophy and literature. His articles have appeared in PMLA (2016) and JNT (2016).

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