Rethinking Postmodern Subjectivity

Know about the book -

Rethinking Postmodern Subjectivity is written by Zuzanna Ladyga and published by Peter Lang. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 3631591098 (ISBN 10) and 9783631591093 (ISBN 13).

What is postmodern literary subjectivity? How to talk about it without falling in the trap of negative hyper-essentialism or being seduced by exuberant lit speak? One way out of this dilemma, as this book suggests, is via a redefinition of the concept in the context of Emmanuel Levinas and his radical ethics. By defining subjectivity as an ethically charged act of language, Levinas provides a fresh perspective on the often trivialized aspects of postmodern poetics such as referentiality and affect construction strategies. The foregrounding of the ethical dimension of those poetic elements has far-reaching consequences for how we read postmodern texts and understand postmodernism in general. Thus, to prove the benefits of the Levinasian approach, the author applies it to the work of the canonical American postmodernist, Donald Barthelme, and explains the distinctly ethical character of his apparently surfictional experiments.