Description: The placein the title of Claudia Brodsky's remarkable new book is the intersection of language with building-the marking, for future reference, of material constructions in the world. The referentBrodsky describes is not something first found in nature and then named but a thing whose own origin joins language with materiality, a thing marked as it is made to begin with. In the Place of Language develops a theory of the referent that is thus also a theory of the possibility of historical knowledge, one that undermines the conventional opposition of language to the real in theories of nominalism and materialism alike, no less than it confronts the mystical conflation of language with matter, whether under the aegis of the infinite reproducibility of the image or the identification of language with Being.The principal texts on which Brodsky bases her analyses are Goethe's Elective Affinities and Faust.
Brief description: Claudia Brodsky is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She is the author of The Imposition of Form: Studies in Narrative Representation and Knowledge, Lines of Thought: Discourse, Archetonics, and the Origin of Modern Philosophy and the editor, with Toni Morrison, of Birth of a Nation 'hood.
Review Quotes: Beyond its stunning synthesis of philosophy and literature this book offers fresh readings of Goethe's two currently most discussed works.-- "--Modern Language Quarterly"