This critical work explores written and visual texts in light of the writer's understanding of negative modernity and professed adherence to its dimension of literality. In his pursuit of literality, contemporary writer-poet Emmanuel Hocquard enacts a model of the "discontinuous organization of language," a poetic practice known to some as an "action poetique." This book gives special attention to essays, letters, poems, fictions, etc. and also pursues the poet's attraction to Deleuze, Wittgenstein, and Rousseau. Professor Fetzer presents features of Hocquard's writings that reflect the imprint of negative modernity and explores these dimensions through interpretive readings.

Drawing from five contemporary French poets—Jacques Roubaud, Emmanuel Hocquard, Danielle Collobert, Anne Portugal, and Jacques Jouet—Ann Smock juxtaposes them and provides a milieu suitable for philosophical reflection on identity, on not-being and being, on communication, and on secrets. Smock also includes thinkers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Giorgio Agamben, who contribute to the conversation, as do Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot. Though the poems considered here are often thought difficult, Smock maintains a light touch throughout. She writes in an accessible, even pleasurable style while contributing to the scholarly study of literature at the border shared by poetry and philosophy

Cinepoetry analyzes how French poets have remapped poetry through the lens of cinema for more than a century. In showing how poets have drawn on mass culture, technology, and material images to incorporate the idea, technique, and experience of cinema into writing, Wall-Romana documents the long history of cross-media concepts and practices often thought to emerge with the digital.In showing the cinematic consciousness of Mallarm? and Breton and calling for a reappraisal of the influential poetry theory of the early filmmaker Jean Epstein, Cinepoetry reevaluates the bases of literary modernism. The book also explores the crucial link between trauma and trans-medium experiments in the wake of two world wars and highlights the marginal identity of cinepoets who were often Jewish, gay, foreign-born, or on the margins.What results is a broad rethinking of the relationship between film and literature. The episteme of cinema, the book demonstates, reached the very core of its supposedly highbrow rival, while at the same time modern poetry cultivated the technocultural savvy that is found today in slams, e-poetry, and poetic-digital hybrids.

“There is no greater gift to man than to understand nothing of his fate”, declares poet-philosopher Paul Valery. And yet the searching human being seeks ceaselessly to disentangle the networks of experiences, desires, inward promptings, personal ambitions, and elevated strivings which directed his/her life-course within changing circumstances in order to discover his sense of life. Literature seeks in numerous channels of insight the dominant threads of “the sense of life”, “the inward quest”, “the frames of experience” in reaching the inward sources of what we call ‘destiny’ inspired by experience and temporality which carry it on. This unusual collection reveals the deeper generative elements which form sense of life stretching between destiny and doom. They escape attention in their metamorphic transformations of the inexorable, irreversibility of time which undergoes different interpretations in the phases examining our life. Our key to life has to be ever discovered anew.

How can we engage in a market relationship when the quality of the goods we want to acquire is unknown, invisible, or uncertain? For market exchange to be possible, purchasers and suppliers of goods must be able to assess the quality of a product in relation to other products. Only by recognizing qualities and perceiving quality differences can purchasers make non-random choices, and price differences between goods be justified. "Quality" is not a natural given, but the outcome of a social process in which products become seen as possessing certain traits, and occupying a specific position in relation to other products in the product space. While we normally take the quality of goods for granted, quality at a closer look is the outcome of a highly complex process of construction involving producers, consumers, and market intermediaries engaged in judgment, evaluation, categorization, and measurement. The authors in this volume investigate the processes through which the quality of goods is established. They also investigate how product qualities are contested and how they change over time. The empirical cases discussed cover a broad range of markets in which quality is especially difficult to assess. The cases include: halal food, funeral markets, wine, labor, school choice, financial products, antiques, and counterfeit goods. The book contributes to the sociology of markets. At the same time it connects to the larger issue of the constitution of social order through cognitive processes of classification.

This volume brings together an impressive range of established and emerging scholars to investigate the meaning of ‘life’ in Romantic poetry and poetics. This investigation involves sustained attention to a set of challenging questions at the heart of British Romantic poetic practice and theory. Is poetry alive for the Romantic poets? If so, how? Does ‘life’ always mean ‘life’? In a range of essays from a variety of complementary perspectives, a number of major Romantic poets are examined in detail. The fate of Romantic conceptions of ‘life’ in later poetry also receives attention. Through, for examples, a revision of Blake’s relationship to so-called rationalism, a renewed examination of Wordsworth’s fascination with country graveyards, an exploration of Shelley’s concept of survival, and a discussion of the notions of ‘life’ in Byron, Kierkegaard, and Mozart, this volume opens up new and exciting terrain in Romantic poetry’s relation to literary theory, the history of philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics.