Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism

Michel Foucault remains to this day a thinker who stands unchallenged as one of the most important of the 20th century. Among the characteristics that have made him influential is his insistent blurring of the border separating philosophy and literature and art, carried out on the basis of his confronting the problem of modernism, which he characterizes as a permanent task. To that end, even his most explicitly historical or strictly epistemological and methodological enquiries, which on their surface would seem not to have anything to do with literature, are full of allusions to modernist writers and artists like Mallarme, Baudelaire, Artaud, Klee, Borges, Broch-sometimes fleetingly, sometimes more extensively, as is the case with Foucault's life-long devotion to Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot, and de Sade.

Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism shows, on the one hand, that literature and the arts play a fundamental structural role in Foucault's works, while, on the other hand, it shifts to the foreground what it presumes to be motivating Foucault: the interrogation of the problem of modernism. It presents as many paths as possible, via a trandisciplinary approach, for establishing links between Foucault's thought to aesthetic problems related to those specific works, methods, and styles designated “modernist.” This volume is an invaluable resource for students and scholars in the field of literature and philosophy, and will also be of interest to those in film/media studies, art history, French intellectual history, and critical theory.

Introduction

Part 1. Conceptualizing Foucault
1. History of Madness
Janae Scholtz, Alvernia University, USA
2. The Birth of the Clinic and Raymond Roussel
David Scott, Coppin State University, USA
3. Order of Things
Samuel Talcott, University of the Sciences, USA
4. Archeology of Knowledge
Heath Massey, Beloit University, USA
5. Discipline and Punishment
Steve Tammelleo, San Diego State University, USA
6. History of Sexuality vol. 1-3
Chloe Taylor, University of Alberta, Canada

Part 2. Foucault and Aesthetics
7. What is Consistency after Modernism?
Leonard Lawlor, Penn State University, USA
8. The Spectre of Manet: A Contribution to the Archeology of Painting
Joseph Tanke, University of Hawaii, USA
9. The Biopolitical and Modernist Literature: Between Waugh to Stein
Sarah Posman, Ghent University, Belgium
10. Foucault, Musil and the Impersonal
Andreas Gailus, University of Michigan, USA
11. Foucault and African Aesthetics: Dumile Feni's African Guernica
Nicole Ridgway, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA
12. Foucault's Historicism and Dos Passos's USA Trilogy
Chris Breu, Illinois State University, USA
13. Foucault and Roussel
Ann Burlein, Hofstra University, USA

Part 3. Glossary

Index

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