Feeding on Infinity : Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization

English

ISBN: 0801863244

EAN: 9780801863240

Category: Mathematics / Infinity

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Release Date: 06/01/2000

Synopsis: Although defining Romanticism is a standing problem for literary history, some notion of internalization at the level of cultural tradition has recurrently been proposed as the solution to that problem... In this debate the notion of internalization tends to be handled... as a known quantity, whereas I am arguing that the notion itself remains obscure and thus that the problem of internalization and the problem of Romanticism may indeed, with respect to the discourse of literary history, be closely intertwined--from Feeding on Infinity Notions of internalization play an important role in many contemporary fields of discourse, including literary history and theory, psychoanalysis, ideological critique, and learning theory in the social sciences. Indeed, the term internalization is pervasive and seems to answer a shared need of expression to such an extent that it is one of those technical words that has found its way into everyday use. But the meaning of this term and the continuities and discontinuities at work in its varied deployment have, for the most part, gone unanalyzed. In Feeding on Infinity, Joshua Wilner explores the power and limits of the discourse of internalization through the close reading of a variety of texts drawn from the Romantic tradition, a tradition which is both source for and oftentimes object of this discourse. Through the study of writers including Rousseau, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Baudelaire, Freud, Benjamin, and Sedgwick, he seeks to deepen our understanding of the problem of internalization, while situating its more or less explicit emergence as a problem in relation to the history of, in Gertrude Steins phrase, patriarchal poetics. Through patient attention to the transformations of rhetorical structures of representation and address performed by these works and to the frequent condensation of these transformations in figures of eating and drinking, Feeding on Infinity makes available to inquiry a surprisingly rich and largely unexplored network of connections within the long Romantic tradition. At the same time, it forges new links between deconstructive reading practices, psychoanalysis, and recent work in gender studies.

Excerpt: Unknown Property Excerpt

Feeding on Infinity : Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization

Illustrated: No

Format: Hardcover

Height: 0.67 inches

Width: 6.0 inches

Length: 9.0 inches

Weight: 14.39 oz

Pages: 176