Mood and Trope: The Rhetoric and Poetics of Affect - Softcover

Brenkman, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022667326X ISBN 13: 9780226673264

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2020

Synopsis

In Mood and Trope, John Brenkman introduces two provocative propositions to affect theory: that human emotion is intimately connected to persuasion and figurative language; and that literature, especially poetry, lends precision to studying affect because it resides there not in speaking about feelings, but in the way of speaking itself.

Engaging a quartet of modern philosophers—Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Deleuze—Brenkman explores how they all approach the question of affect primarily through literature and art. He draws on the differences and dialogues among them, arguing that the vocation of criticism is incapable of systematicity and instead must be attuned to the singularity and plurality of literary and artistic creations. In addition, he confronts these four philosophers and their essential concepts with a wide array of authors and artists, including Pinter and Poe, Baudelaire, Jorie Graham and Li-Young Lee, Shakespeare, Tino Sehgal, and Francis Bacon. Filled with surprising insights, Mood and Trope provides a rich archive for rethinking the nature of affect and its aesthetic and rhetorical stakes.

About this title

About the Author

John Brenkman is distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center and director of the US-Europe Seminar at Baruch College. He is the author of three books, most recently, The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy: Political Thought since September 11.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022667326X
• ISBN 13: 9780226673264
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 292