Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov

Description

Thinking in Literature examines how the Modernist novel might be understood as a machine for thinking, and how it offers means of coming to terms with what it means to think. It begins with a theoretical analysis, via Deleuze, Spinoza and Leibniz, of the concept of thinking in literature, and sets out three principle elements which continually announce themselves as crucial to the process of developing an aesthetic expression: relation; sensation; and composition. Uhlmann then examines the aesthetic practice of three major Modernist writers: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov. Each can be understood as working with relation, sensation and composition, yet each emphasize the interrelations between them in differing ways in expressing the potentials for thinking in literature.

Anthony Uhlmann is Professor of English in the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and co-editor of The Ethics of Arnold Geulincx (Brill, 2006). He is chief editor of The Journal of Beckett Studies.

"Anthony Uhlmann offers an impressively original and compelling series of interpretations that will substantially alter accepted ideas not only of Joyce, Woolf and Nabokov, but also of the epistemology and aesthetics of modernism. Uhlmann's Deleuzian approach-post-expressionist and post-representationalist-seeks to move beyond the traditional conception of modernism as an "inward turn" centered in subjectivity and interiority. Thinking in Literature accomplishes its highly innovative readings with subtlety, intelligence and insight." -- Richard Begam, Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA "In this ambitious contribution to literary theory, Anthony Uhlmann shows how a work of literature can be said to think, and thus in what sense literature helps us to understand the world. On the way he provides exemplary analyses of Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov at work, as well as useful unfoldings of difficult material from Spinoza and Leibniz." -- J M Coetzee His book enriches our understanding of the mental work that modernist fiction captures and elucidates...His study also refines one's understanding of how thinking reflects and distorts the real and how artistic work enables one to confront this experience at a remove. * James Joyce Literary Supplement * At a time when the humanities are increasingly under attack, Uhlmann's slender volume about Thinking in Literature is a much-needed study, as it intelligently defines the value of literature and literary studies...Uhlmann's expanded but rigorous concept of thinking is an essential contribution to modernist studies in general and Woolf studies in particular, as it provides a clear pathway for going beyond those deconstructive approaches that strand authors and readers in the abyss of the textual gap. Uhlmann has established an excellent framework that will enable scholars to think in new and more rigorous ways about literature and educators to teach students how to use modernist literature to refine their capacity to think. -- Michael Lackey, University of Minnesota, Morris * Journal of Modern Fiction * Thinking in Literature does represent a rare and robust attempt to reformulate the aesthetic and cognitive characteristics of modernism. -- David Winters * Textual Practice *