Agonistics: Arenas Of Creative Contest (suny Series, Margins Of Literature) (suny Series, The Margins Of Literature)

Focuses on a very significant psycho-cultural concept (that of'agonistics'or'contestatory creativity') with ramifications in several areas of the postmodern debate: cultural philosophy, psychologies of race, gender and the body, and narratology.This book examines the ambiguities inherent in the concept of the agon as a motivating, conflictual force behind creative and social expression. The notion of agonistics extends far beyond the literary fame lent it by Harold Bloom to embrace all aspects of culture. The editors blend theoretical sophistication with an interdisciplinary approach and reposit the agon in a new, broad context for postmodern inquiry. Taking their inspiration from Friedrich Nietzsche's essay “Homer's Contest,” Lungstrum and Sauer trace the evolution of the agon: from its vital function in ancient Greece, through modernity, and onward.Janet Lungstrum is Assistant Professor of German Literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Elizabeth Sauer is Associate Professor of English Literature at Brock University. She is the author of Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton's Epics. Contents Creative Agonistics: An Introduction by Janet Lungstrum and Elizabeth Sauer PART I: Contests in Cultural Philosophy Homer's Contest by Friedrich Nietzsche Cultural Agonistics: Nietzsche, the Greeks, Eternal Recurrence by Benjamin C. Sax Closing the Eye: Hegel, Derrida,and the Closure of Philosophy by Arkady Plotnitsky Walter Benjamin: The Prophet's War against Prophecy by Marcus Paul Bullock PART II: Psychoanalytic and Racial Conflicts Interpretation Interminable: Agonistics in Psychoanalysis by Volney P. Gay The Institutionalization of Conflict as an Interpretative Strategy in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams by Lorna Martens The Jewish Genius: Freud and the Jewishness of the Creative by Sander L. Gilman Criminality and Poe's Orangutan: The Question of Race in Detection by Nancy A. Harrowitz PART III: Agonal Aesthetics and Narrative Theory "A Chain of Utmost Potency": On the Agon and the Creative Impulse by John A. McCarthy The Partial Song of Satanic Anti-Creation: Milton's Discourses of the Divided Self by Elizabeth Sauer The Penman and the Postal-Carrier: Preordained Rivalry in Joyce's Finnegans Wake by Andrew Schmitz The Gender of Fiction: Henry James's "Backward Glance" at the Agon of Composition by Cecile Mazzucco-Than PART IV: Agons of Gender and the Body The Muse Abused by Lisabeth During The Sportive Agon in Ancient and Modern Times by John Haberman Baudrillard, After Hours and the Postmodern Suppression of Socio-Sexual Conflict by Cynthia Willett Agonal Politics in Space and Time: Arendt and Le Guin on World Creation by George A. Trey