In his pioneering study The Philosophical Baroque: On Autopoietic Modernities, Erik S. Roraback argues that modern culture, contemplated over its four-century history, resembles nothing so much as the pearl famously described, by periodizers of old, as irregular, barroco. Reframing modernity as a multi-century baroque, Roraback steeps texts by Shakespeare, Henry James, Joyce, and Pynchon in systems theory and the ideas of philosophers of language and culture from Leibniz to such dynamic contemporaries as Luhmann, Benjamin, Blanchot, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, and Žižek. The resulting brew, high in intellectual caffeine, will interest all who take an interest in cultural modernity—indeed, all who recognize that “modernity” was (and remains) a congeries of competing aesthetic, economic, historical, ideological, philosophical, and political energies.
Readership:
All interested in the baroque and neobaroque, the philosophical baroque, cultural and historical modernities, systems theory, continental philosophy, literature, literary and cultural theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis.
REVIEWS:
“Erik Roraback’s The Philosophical Baroque: On Autopoietic Modernities is a great book that will engage an energetic and important subfield of scholarship.”
– William Egginton, The Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities,The Johns Hopkins University, author of The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo) Baroque Aesthetics (Stanford University Press).
April 2017, Hardback (Approx. 265 pp. 3 ill.)
ISBN: 9789004323278
Language: English
Literary Modernism, 2
Imprint: BRIL