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Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism

Cosmin Toma editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:9th Feb '23

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism cover

Explores and articulates Jean-Luc Nancy's profound impact on our understanding of artistic and literary modernism.

Over the past three decades, Jean-Luc Nancy has become one of the most celebrated contemporary philosophers. His remarkably diverse body of work, which deals with such topics as post-Heideggerian ontology, Christian painting, the experience of drunkenness, heart transplants, contemporary cinema and the problem of freedom, is entirely "immersed" in modernity, as he puts it. Within this plural framework, art – which he explicitly defines as a modern construct – plays a singular role in that it is the very prism through which he explores the problems of sense and feeling in general, particularly as they relate to “our” experience of modernity. The contributors to Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism fully delve into the heretofore under-acknowledged and under-explored modernism of Nancy’s writings on philosophy and the arts through close readings of his key works as well as broader essays on the relationship between his thought and aesthetic modernity. In addition to an interview with Nancy himself, a final section consists of an extended glossary of Nancy’s signature terms, which will be a valuable resource for students and experts alike.

[Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism] features illuminating meditations on some of Nancy’s recurring philosophical motifs... as well as critical commentaries on some of Nancy’s interlocutors. * Corey Cribb, French Studies *
This is a stunning collection that will be a priceless resource for readers of Nancy’s work. The essays are deeply knowledgeable and together they chart remarkably clear paths through all the major features of Nancy’s world and his thinking of 'world.' * Peggy Kamuf, Professor Emerita of French and Italian and Comparative Literature, University of Southern California, USA *
The texts included here demonstrate in incisive ways not only how Nancy's writings open onto understanding modernity but also how questions of modernity offer new and compelling paths for reading Nancy. It is a wonderfully impressive volume. * Philip Armstrong, Professor of Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University, USA *
This volume is a timely and much-needed contribution to scholarship specifically on the critical pertinence of Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking to modernism. What makes this volume additionally delightful is that it brings together experts on Nancy’s thought alongside up-and-coming scholars committed to advancing his thinking further into the future. * Irving Goh, Associate Professor of Literature, National University of Singapore, and author of The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject (2014), L’Existence Prépositionnelle (2019), and The Deconstruction of Sex (2021, with Jean-Luc Nancy) *
Where monographs on [Jean-Luc] Nancy have tended to undertake more of an introductory or guiding approach to his thinking, one of the merits of Understanding Nancy is its broadening of disciplinary engagement and pedagogical approaches to this thinker's complex systems of thought. The achievements of this collection are twofold: its important contextualising of Nancy within the modernist continuum, and its opening up of a multidisciplinary dialogue with Nancy's specific relationship with modernist studies. -- Dr Jamie Stephenson, University of Leeds, UK * The Modernist Review *

ISBN: 9781501370120

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

312 pages