Literary Theories of Uncertainty PDF
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Literary Theories of Uncertainty Literary Theories of Uncertainty Edited by Mette Leonard Høeg BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Mette Leonard Høeg and contributors, 2021 Mette Leonard Høeg and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design: Eleanor Rose All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. 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For Thomas Selbst die kleinste Unsicherheit in der geringfügigsten Sache ist doch immer quälend. – Franz Kafka, Der Prozeß (1925) Contents List of figures viii List of contributors ix 1 Introduction: Towards a conception of ‘literary theory of uncertainty’ Mette Leonard Høeg 1 Part I Post-structuralist legacies of uncertainty 2 Suspended sentence: Experience of the undecidable Patrick ffrench 27 3 Poetry, formalism and undecidability: Some verse explorations Christopher Norris 45 Part II Life-writing and uncertainty 4 In an undecidable: An ethical and literary right Christopher Fynsk 75 5 Temporal undecidability: In retrospect and prospect Max Saunders 92 6 Ghosts of dead authors Mieke Bal 110 Part III Contemporary literary uncertainties 7 No-fault murder: Neoliberalism and Nordic noir Bruce Robbins 139 8 Collage forms and undecidability in the work of Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde Hannah Vinter 151 9 Interrogating twilight Nicholas Royle 178 Index 201 Figures 6.1 Ken Aptekar, Is that You? 1997 111 6.2 Thomas Germaine plays Descartes 117 6.3 Scene ‘Boredom Sets In’: Marja Skaffari enacting Emma’s boredom 121 6.4 A two-dimensional figuration of the traumatic state 128 8.1 Hamlet collage, by Emine Sevgi Özdamar 157 8.2 Hamlet collage, by Emine Sevgi Özdamar 160 Contributors Mieke Bal is a cultural theorist, critic, video artist and occasional curator who works in cultural analysis, literature and art, focusing on gender, migratory culture, psychoanalysis and the critique of capitalism. Her forty books include a trilogy on political art. Her video project, Madame B, with Michelle Williams Gamaker, is widely exhibited, in 2017 combined with paintings by Edvard Munch in the Munch Museum in Oslo. After Reasonable Doubt, on René Descartes and Queen Kristina (2016), she made a sixteen-channel video installation On Quijote: Sad Countenances, and the short essay film It’s About Time! Reflections on Urgency. Patrick ffrench is Professor of French at King’s College London, where he works on twentieth-century French literature, film and thought and on critical theory. He is the author of five books: The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel (1995); The Cut: Reading Georges Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil (2000); After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community (2007); Thinking Cinema with Proust (2018) and Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics (2019). He is also the co-editor (with Roland-François Lack) of The Tel Quel Reader (1998). His current work includes projects on Deleuze and Proust and on the legacies of Félix Guattari. Christopher Fynsk is Chief Academic Officer of the European Graduate School and Dean of the Division of Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought. His publica- tions include the following monographs: Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (1986) (Expanded Edition, 1996); Language and Relation: . . . that there is language, (1996); Infant Figures (2000); The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities, (2006); Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot’s Exilic Writing (2013); Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Phrase (2017). He is also the editor of Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe’s Typography: Philosophy, Mimesis, Politics (1989). His forthcoming work bears the working title, The Rhythmic Figure. Mette Leonard Høeg is Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. She wrote her PhD on the notion of undecidability in twentieth-century literary theory and literature, in particular in the works of Ford Madox Ford and Robert Musil. She studied at the University of Copenhagen, Humboldt University, UC Berkeley and King’s College London, and is a Fulbright scholar. Her research
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