The Matter of High Words: Naturalism, Normativity, and the Postwar Sage

Author:   Robert Chodat (Associate Professor of English, Associate Professor of English, Boston University)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press Inc
ISBN:  

9780190682156


Pages:   354
Publication Date:   12 October 2017
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   To order   Availability explained
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The Matter of High Words: Naturalism, Normativity, and the Postwar Sage


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Full Product Details

Author:   Robert Chodat (Associate Professor of English, Associate Professor of English, Boston University)
Publisher:   Oxford University Press Inc
Imprint:   Oxford University Press Inc
Dimensions:   Width: 23.60cm , Height: 3.10cm , Length: 15.50cm
Weight:   0.612kg
ISBN:  

9780190682156


ISBN 10:   0190682159
Pages:   354
Publication Date:   12 October 2017
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order   Availability explained
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

Table of Contents

Introduction Part One: Words and Flesh Chapter 1: Minds, Machines, and Giving a Damn Chapter 2: That Horeb, That Kansas Part Two: We Solemnly Publish and Declare Chapter 3: Sociology to the Scientists Chapter 4: Puzzles, Pawnshops, and Improvisation Chapter 5: The Advanced US Citizenship of David Foster Wallace Afterward Bibliography

Reviews

Robert Chodat's new book is an intellectual feast of multi-disciplinary learning and engagement that offers a powerful challenge to the still most prestigious current of modernist aesthetics-the primacy of experience and sensuous particularity-which celebrates mute showing over discursive telling. He brings to the fore a vital counter-tradition of the post-war 'sage, ' offering fresh configurations, scrupulous analysis, and passion for bringing philosophy and literature into conversation. The result is a much-needed, stirring, and important book. --Ross Posnock, Columbia University Chodat's book is both enormously erudite and original. Offering a brilliant new view of some of the best American literature following the Second World War, it makes wonted notions regarding high- and postmodernism alike utterly obsolete.... This book is a must read for anyone interested in understanding contemporary philosophy and literature. --Amir Eshel, Stanford University Robert Chodat's new book tracks the twinned impulses of five major post-War American writers to reclaim such high terms of self-responsibility as duty, honor, justice, courage, and love but also to register the disruptive particulars that haunt such reclaimings. In this way he shows compellingly how the novel and philosophy in their modulating mutual inflections both enact and register the continuing vicissitudes of modern reflective thought. --Richard Eldridge, Swarthmore College For those working in the humanities and social sciences who have felt compelled to question the pervasive consensus that 'high ideas' - abstract concepts and values - can only distort and injure; that beings and environments to which we apply such ideas are fundamentally unrepresentable much less knowable; and that such ideas are therefore illegitimate bases for human action, both individual and collective, Robert Chodat's new book should offer a welcome tonic.... This book delivers a powerful challenge to the prevailing theoretical commitments of nearly six decades of literary scholarship. --Jennifer Ashton, University of Illinois at Chicago


Author Information

Robert Chodat is an Associate Professor of English at Boston University, where he specializes in post-WWII American fiction and the relationship between literature and philosophy. He is the author of Worldly Acts and Sentient Things: The Persistence of Agency from Stein to DeLillo (2008).

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