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Kant and Literary Studies

Kant and Literary Studies

Kant and Literary Studies

Claudia Brodsky, Princeton University, New Jersey
June 2025
Available
Hardback
9781316513026
£90.00
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    With original contributions from a wide range of scholars of literature and philosophy alike, Kant and Literary Studies is the first volume devoted to examining the premises and principles of Kant's explicitly interdisciplinary philosophy in its specific relation to the defining features, means and aims of literature. Its central explorations of the relations between experience and representation, feeling and judgment, thought and poetics, and language and freedom make the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant one of the most relevant to the understanding of literature. Organizing its analyses of Kant's relationship to literature along intersecting lines, the three sections of the book focus, first, on the relation of central literary problems and genres to the theoretical underpinnings of Kant's thought; second, on the epistemological, narrative and historiographic dimensions of Kant's critical conceptions; and third, on the formative relation of his Critique to specific literary works and of critical discourse to ethics.

    • Provides cogent original examples of inter-disciplinary thought and analysis in action, introducing scholars and students of different disciplines and historical periods to important critical approaches to which they would not ordinarily be exposed
    • Includes diverse step-by-step explorations of topics of theoretical interest that are at once specifically focused and interrelated, providing new avenues of approach into literary and interdisciplinary studies in general
    • Examines the ethical, epistemological, narrative and historiographic dimensions of Kant's critical conceptions

    Product details

    June 2025
    Hardback
    9781316513026
    346 pages
    229 × 152 × 24 mm
    0.614kg
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • Part I. Kant on Literature:
    • 1. 'Differing Only in Degree': Judging and Making in Kant and Wordsworth Paresh Chandra
    • 2. On Power in an Extra-Secular Sense: Kant's Analytic of the Sublime David Martyn
    • 3. Kant and the Problem of Tragedy Robert Pippin
    • Part II. Kant, Literary Theory, and the Critical Formation of the 'Human' Disciplines:
    • 4. 'A New Light Broke Upon the First Person ....': Transcendental Argument, History of Science, and Narrative Intervention in Kant's Critique and the Kleistian Novella Rüdiger Campe
    • 5. Modern Being in the World: Kant's Philosophical Anthropology and Wordsworth's Poetry Richard Eldridge
    • 6. Language Enjoined: Ethics as Form of Address in Kant and Levinas Gabriela Basterra
    • 7. Narrative Discontinuity: Kant's History of Religion(s) Karen Feldman
    • Part III. Kant and Literature:
    • 8. Kleist Reading Schiller After Kant: The Fate of 'Beautiful Souls' Tim Mehigan
    • 9. 'Critique:' Literary Form, Concept, Philosophical Project Willi Goetschel
    • 10. 'The Shapes My Brain Holds': Kantian Spontaneity and Woolf's The Waves Maya Kronfeld
    • 11. The Poetics of a Transcendental Deduction: The Self-Erasing 'I' in Kant Tawada, and Benveniste John Kim
    • 12. Ethically Speaking, or 'Freedom' in Context: Poetics, Critical Economy, and Kant's Invention of the 'Category' of the 'Possible' Claudia Brodsky.
      Contributors
    • Paresh Chandra, David Martyn, Robert Pippin, Rüdiger Campe, Richard Eldridge, Gabriela Basterra, Karen Feldman, Tim Mehigan, Willi Goetschel, Maya Kronfeld, John Kim, Claudia Brodsky

    • Editor
    • Claudia Brodsky , Princeton University, New Jersey

      Claudia Brodsky studied Comparative Literature at Harvard and Yale, where she taught German and Comparative Literature before joining the Comparative Literature Department at Princeton. From her early pathbreaking study of Kant and fiction, The Imposition of Form: Studies in Narrative Representation and Knowledge (1987) to The Linguistic Condition: Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Poetics of Action (2021), she has pioneered the investigation of Kant's importance to our critical understanding of literature.