Thinking in Literature Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov [Hardcover]

Thinking in Literature examines how the Modernist novel might be understood as a machine for thinking, and how it offers means of coming to terms with what it means to think. It begins with a theoretical analysis, via Deleuze, Spinoza and Leibniz, of the concept of thinking in literature, and sets out three principle elements which continually announce themselves as crucial to the process of developing an aesthetic expression: relation; sensation; and composition. Uhlmann then examines the aesthetic practice of three major Modernist writers: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov. Each can be understood as working with relation, sensation and composition, yet each emphasize the interrelations between them in differing ways in expressing the potentials for thinking in literature.

IntroductionPart 1: Literature and Thought1. Spinoza and Relation 2. Leibniz's perception': the Incompossible, the Viewpoint, and the Composition of Sensation3. Composition as the Externalised Expression of SensationPart 2: Thought in Modernist Fiction4. James Joyce: the art of Relation5. Virginia Woolf: the art of Sensation6. Vladimir Nabokov: the art of CompositionConclusionBibliography

Anthony Uhlmann is Professor of English in the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge University Press, 1999), Samuel Beckett and the Philosophical Image (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and co-editor of The Ethics of Arnold Geulincx (Brill, 2006). He is chief editor of The Journal of Beckett Studies.