The Violence of Reading : Literature and Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain

The Violence of Reading: Literature and Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain expounds the scene of reading as one that produces an overwhelmed body exposed to uncontainable forms of violence. The book argues that the act of reading induces a representational instability that causes the referential function of language to collapse. This breakdown releases a type of “linguistic pain” (Scarry; Butler; Hamacher) that indicates a constitutive wounding of the reading body. The wound of language marks a rupture between linguistic reality and the phenomenal world. Exploring this rupture in various ways, the book brings together texts and genres from diverse traditions and offers close examinations of the rhetoric of masochism (Sacher-Masoch; Deleuze), the relation between reading and abuse (Nietzsche; Proust; Jelinek), the sublime experience of reading (Kant; Kafka; de Man), the “novel of the institution” (Musil; Campe), and literary suicide (Bachmann; Berryman; Okkervil River). Acknowledgments Contents Chapter 1: Introduction: Allegories of Bleeding Chapter 2: Cry Me a Reader The Rampage of Reading Sobbing Hot Tears Abuser’s Manual The Thyestean Feast Chapter 3: The Promise of Oblivion An Impossible Contract First and Final Promises Promising Animals The Forgetting of Language Chapter 4: Transcendental Masochism Novels of the Institution Scenes of Reading Violence to the Letter Chapter 5: Sublime Sufferings Denunciations of Language The Lesson of the Sublime Thresholds of Pain Chapter 6: Sticks and Stones The Wound of Reading The Year of 1972 Prosopopoeic Impositions The Brightest Winter Sun Note on the Text Bibliography Index