Inter alia: Steve Erickson, Rosmarie Waldrop, Lydia Davis and the lightening of meaning
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Duffy, Nikolai. 2005. Inter alia: Steve Erickson, Rosmarie Waldrop, Lydia Davis and the lightening of meaning. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]
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Text (Inter alia : Steve Erickson, Rosmarie Waldrop, Lydia Davis and the lightening of meaning)
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Abstract or Description
Inter Alia is structured principally around a cross-threaded sequence of analyses that consider the property of meaning in the work of Steve Erickson, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Lydia Davis. It aims at a sustained formal and thematic consideration of the critical disturbance with which their respective texts inflect grammatology. In each writer this critical disturbance is determinable commonly as what might be termed a rifting of language and thinking toward the a-grammatical. The primary formal and thematic modalities of writing become indivisible from an attempt to think language outside its accepted propensity to mean. They seek to put into question the governable self-sufficiency of meaning by thinking the possibility of another language and of another meaning; a language and a meaning, that is to say, of lightening. In so doing, the folds of their texts are indivisible from a set of inter-related reflections concerning, among other things, intelligibility, materiality, commonality, as well as their respective inverses: ambiguity, immateriality, and exceptionality. Where much Anglo-American postmodernism has been concerned with the dual crises of perception and representation, the internal logic of 'lightening' seeks to shift the consideration from an exigency of illumination to one of alleviation in which meaning is nothing other than an inter alia. Establishing a dialogue between these concepts and their modulation in the work of such thinkers as Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, the discretion of lightening is shown to emblematise the principle preoccupation of contemporary literary-philosophical reflections concerned with the discursive and social implications of disorder and ex-centricity.
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Item Type: |
Thesis (Doctoral) |
| Identification Number (DOI): |
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| Keywords: |
Steve Erickson, Rosmarie Waldrop, Lydia Davis, grammatology, language, ex-centricity |
| Date: |
2005 |
| Item ID: |
33749 |
| Date Deposited: |
11 Jul 2023 13:03 |
| Last Modified: |
08 Aug 2023 13:27 |
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URI: |
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