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University of California Press

On Pain of Speech

Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant

by Dina Al-Kassim (Author)
Price: $38.95 / £33.00
Publication Date: Feb 2010
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 304
ISBN: 9780520945791
Series:

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

The Politics of Address

Je veux bien qu'on n'entende plus rien, mais on parle, on crie: pourquoi ai-je peur d'entendre aussi ma propre voix? Et je ne parle pas de peur, mais de terreur, d'horreur. Qu'on me fasse taire (si l'on ose)! Qu'on couse mes lèvres comme celles d'une plaie!

Georges Bataille, L'Expérience intérieure

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About the Book

On Pain of Speech tracks the literary rant, an expression of provocation and resistance that imagines the power to speak in its own name where no such right is granted. Focusing on the “politics of address,” Dina Al-Kassim views the rant through the lens of Michel Foucault's notion of the biopolitical subject and finds that its abject address is an essential yet overlooked feature of modernism. Deftly approaching disparate fields—decadent modernism, queer studies, subjection, critical psychoanalysis, and postcolonial avant-garde—and encompassing both Euro-American and Francophone Arabic modernisms, she offers an ambitious theoretical perspective on the ongoing redefinition of modernism. She includes readings of Jane Bowles, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Oscar Wilde, and invokes a wide range of ideas, including those of Theodor Adorno, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, Jean Laplanche, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

About the Author

Dina Al-Kassim is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Politics of Address

1. On Being Stubborn
Oscar Wilde and the Modern Type

2. “The Bar Was Not Very Gay”
New Kinship and the Serious Writer’s Block

3. “A Long Tirade for a Direct Interjection”
Talismano Rebukes the Oriental Tale in Jacques Lacan’s Séminaires

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

“Al-Kassim’s analysis could profitably be applied to much modernist and avant-garde writing. . . . It is already remarkably portable across decades and nations and movements. . . . This wide portability and the refreshingly readable prose of the book make On Pain of Speech an ideal text for courses on post-colonialism, Modernism, and avant-garde literatures at the advanced undergraduate level and beyond.”
Inside Higher Ed