Introduction / Claudia Brodsky -- Part One:Subjects -- I think, therefore I feel / Marshall Brown -- Some dark interiority: a brief conceptual history / Eduardo Lerro -- Unsexing subjects: Marie de Gournay's philosophy of sex eliminativism / Eloy LaBrada -- Part Two: Causalities -- Shadows on the wall of reason: Diderot before Fragonard / David Ferris -- Timely plot and unplotted time: action and experience before and after Hegel / John Park -- Unexpected yet connected: on Aristotle's Poetics and its heterodox reception/ Karen Feldman -- The causal economy of the subject in Kant, Hegel and Marx: being in time and externalization / Irina Simova -- The man within the breast: sympathy, deformity, and moral subjectivity in Adam Smith's The theory of moral sentiments / Paul Kelleher -- Judging, inevitably: aesthetic judgment and novelistic form in fielding's Joseph Andrews / Vivasvan Soni -- The linguistic condition of judgment: Kant's "common sense"/ Claudia Brodsky.
Summary:
"Inventing Agency addresses some of the most central and pressing concerns in criticism, theory, and philosophy today. As new metaphysics of the realia of power and independently animated objects have replaced ancient conceptualizations of substance, being, and causation, the question of the "subject" -- of the capability for just such conceptual change, for acting to any effect whatsoever -- has reemerged with fresh critical urgency. Writing on theories and fictions of the subject from Aristotle to Althusser and Fielding to Flaubert, the contributors to Inventing Agency explore the unprecedented productions of the subject as agent -- of cognition, aesthetic experience and judgment, imagination and representation, and moral and political action -- that together define the "revolution" in reflection that Kant called "the Age of Critique." Informed by expertise in such interrelated fields as continental and analytic philosophy and literary history, Marxian and utopian theory, poetics and cultural criticism, moral theory and theory of sensibility, and feminist and disability studies, Inventing Agency addresses the invention of subjecthood by philosophical and literary conceptions of the specifically human capacities that continue to reveal the prospect of social-individual and historical-agency in action. This collection on the productions of the subject is vital reading for anyone engaged in thinking about where the categories of contemporary theory come from, and where they might lead next"-- Provided by publisher. "A state-of-the-art overview and reappraisal of the literary and philosophical origins of theory and, in particular, of modern subjectivity"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.