Description: A study of novelty through analyses of the language of announcement in revolutionary texts.
Brief description: Kristina Mendico is Associate Professor of German Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Announcements: On Novelty, also published by SUNY Press, and Prophecies of Language: The Confusion of Tongues in German Romanticism.
Review Quotes:
"[The book's] scope is impressive, its style elegant. It is challenging yet ultimately rewarding." - CHOICE
"Impressive in scope and philosophically sophisticated, this erudite and elegantly written book is, quite simply, dazzling. Mendicino successfully tears down many of the tired clichés that too often subtend discussions about novelty and modernism and makes persuasive arguments for her own novel claims about why the appeal to novelty matters so much. In her capable hands, the question of novelty becomes a lever with which she powerfully pries open familiar texts, philosophical traditions, and concepts and transforms those recognizable topoi into resources for thinking differently about historical time, revolution, capital, wealth, theory, and practice." - Elissa Marder, author of Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert)