Deleuze and American Literature : Affect and Virtuality in Faulkner, Wharton, Ellison, and McCarthy

Deleuze and American Literature re-examines authors like Wharton, Ellison, Faulkner, and McCarthy by opening their work to the problematic and ever-evolving philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. This book questions how the idea of the human in the American novel is surrounded, penetrated, and recreated by a philosophy of the nonhuman. This groundbreaking scholarship offers a challenge to the conventional methodology of cultural studies and engages American literature with its own defining problematic. This is an encounter from which both Deleuze and American literature are sure to emerge transformed. Contents 8 Preface 10 One: Literature, Character, and the Human 12 Two: Wharton’s Aesthetics and the Ethics of Affect 52 Three: Invisible Man: Affect, History, Race 70 Four: Cormac McCarthy and the Event of the Human 86 Five: The Moral Singularity: Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and McCarthy’s Blood Meridian 128 Six: Absalom, Absalom! Time and the Virtual 148 Seven: Riders of the Virtual Sage: Zane Grey, Cormac McCarthy, and the Transformation of the Popular Western 180 Eight: Conclusion: The Ethic of the Nonhuman 204 Works Cited 212 Index 216 A 216 B 217 C 217 D 217 E 218 F 218 G 218 H 218 I 219 J 219 K 219 L 219 M 219 N 219 O 219 P 220 R 220 S 220 T 220 U 220 V 220 W 221 Z 221 0230616569,9780230616561,PS374.C43B68,2009,813,.50935—dc22 Palgrave MacMillan Bourassa demonstrates what happens when the set of concepts developed by Deleuze come into contact with the complex and philosophically problematic worlds of William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Edith Wharton and Ralph Ellison.