Description:
A study in the literature of selfhood across time, this book analyzes how the Gnostics, the Romantics, Kierkegaard, Beckett, and Ashbery dramatize the self's struggle to fulfill an ideal of integrity and autonomy that will not let it go.
Review Quotes:
"This is a splendid, exacting study, tracking and probing the texture of the self inone acute reading after another. Ranging from the Romantics to poetry closer toour historical home, this book provides a superb account of the literary dynamicsand stakes of Gnosticism in its variegated aftermath. On this terrain, Quinneysurpasses Harold Bloom in clarity, precision, and often in explanatory power.An altogether first-rate achievement." --Ian Balfour, Professor Emeritus of English, York University, Canada.
"This book recognizes a homely and familiar paradox: that we postmodernists knowvery well the factitiousness of the "self," yet we continue to behave as though wehave one. Quinney's learned and brilliant exploration of the subject's experienceof its fragility deepens our sense of the lineages of the self's dis-ease, and accountsfor the "Romantic" effects that emanate from the coolest of post-modern texts."--Karen Swann, Morris Professor of Rhetoric, Emerita, Williams College, USA.
"The self is both a problem, and a paradox. I cannot escape myself; but at the sametime, I cannot grasp, or coincide with, or fulfill my own potentialities. In this beautifulbook, Laura Quinney richly and sensitively explores the paradoxes of selfhood througha wide variety of texts." --Steven Shaviro, Emeritus Professor of English, Wayne StateUniversity, USA."When Laura Quinney takes up the loss of the Subject in a range of ancient andmodern writers, she has in mind not primarily the death or disappearance habituallyheralded by literary theory, but rather the feeling of loss that arises within the self bythe light of these developments. Quinney's legendary concision makes this brief booka prolegomenon for a startling new synthesis of Deconstruction and Humanism."--Professor Jeff Nunokawa, Princeton University, USA.