Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock

This 2004 book contains revisionary readings of literary texts and theories through analysis of sound, signature, and letters.

Tom Cohen (Author)

9780521460132, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 8 September 1994

282 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.9 cm, 0.51 kg

"...an excellent book, well worth reading and rereading--in posthumanist or other ways." Cesare Casarino, American Literature

The material elements of writing have long been undervalued, and have been dismissed by recent historicising trends of criticism; but analysis of these elements - sound, signature, letters - can transform our understanding of literary texts. In this 1994 book Tom Cohen shows how, in an era of representational criticism and cultural studies, the role of close reading has been overlooked. Arguing that much recent criticism has been caught in potentially regressive models of representation, Professor Cohen undertakes to counter this by rethinking the 'materiality' of the text itself. Through a series of revealing new readings of the work of writers including Plato, Bakhtin, Poe, Whitman and Conrad, Professor Cohen exposes the limitations of new historicism and neo-pragmatism, and demonstrates how 'the materiality of language' operates to undo the representational models of meaning imposed by the literary canon.

Introduction: the legs of sense
Part I. Dialogue and Inscription: 1. Othello, Bakhtin and the death(s) of dialogue
2. P.s.: Plato's scene of reading in the Protagoras
Part II. Parables of Exteriority - Materality in 'Classic' American Texts: 3. Too legit to quit: the dubious genealogies of pragmatism
4. Poe's Foot d'Or: ruinous rhyme and Nietzschean recurrence (sound)
5. Only the dead know Brooklyn ferry (voice)
6. The letters of the law: 'Bartleby' as hypogrammatic romance (letters)
Part III. Pre-Posterous Modernisms: 7. Conrad's fault (signature)
8. Miss Emily, c'est moi: the defacement of modernism in Faulkner (inscription and social form)
9. Hitchcock and the death of (Mr.) Memory (technology of the visible)
Coda: post-humanist reading.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]