Literature and the encounter with immanence / / edited by Brynnar Swenson.

• TeilnehmendeR: Swenson, Brynnar.
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden ;, Boston : : Brill-Rodopi,, 2017.
• Year of Publication: 2017
• Language: English
• Series: Value Inquiry Book Series 298.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (192 pages).

In Literature and the Encounter with Immanence Brynnar Swenson collects nine original essays that approach the relationship between literature and immanence through methodologies grounded in the philosophy of Spinoza. One of Spinoza’s most provocative claims is a simple declaration of ignorance: “We do not know what a body can do.” A literary theory based on immanence privileges the ontological status of the text and the material act of reading. Rather than ask what a text means, the essays here ask what a text can do. Each essay documents a distinct literary and philosophical encounter with immanence and, as a result, opens up a space to read literature as one would read philosophy and vice versa .

Table of Contents

Reading the Encounter: An Introduction / Brynnar Swenson -- “We’ve been inside what we wanted all along”: David Foster Wallace’s Immanent Structures / Jeffrey Severs -- Suffering Immanence in Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable / Christopher Langlois -- Immanence with a (Negative) Difference: Spinoza, Borges, and Barth / Zachary Tavlin -- Explosions in the Family Theater: A Schizoanalytic Reading of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day / Emaline Friedman and Hans Skott-Myhre -- Immanent Realism: Time and the Corporate Form in William Gaddis’s jr / Brynnar Swenson -- Peace and Love (and Fuck) as the Foundation of the World; Spinoza’s Ethics in Samuel Delany’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders / Stephen Zepke -- The Wanderings of Displaced Memory: Immanence in the Essays of Czesław Miłosz / Ignas Kalpokas -- A Voyage in Immanence: Alberto Caeiro as an Expression of Spinoza’s Ethics / Bartholomew Ryan -- “One Kind of Knowledge”: Poetic Language, Human Being, and Immanent Truth / Johanna Skibsrud.