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Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau
John Farrell
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Description for Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau
Hardback. Num Pages: 336 pages. BIC Classification: DSB; JFCX. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational; (U) Tertiary Education (US: College); (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly; (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 235 x 156 x 27. Weight in Grams: 645.
Don Quixote is the first great modern paranoid adventurer.... Grandiosity and persecution define the characters of Swift's Gulliver, Stendhal's Julien Sorel, Melville's Ahab, Dostoyevsky's Underground Man, Ibsen's Masterbuilder Solness, Strindberg's Captain (in The Father), Kafka's K., and Joyce's autobiographical hero Stephen Dedalus.... The all-encompassing conspiracy, very much in its original Rousseauvian cast, has become almost the normal way of representing society and its institutions since World War Two, giving impetus to heroic plots and counter-plots in a hundred films and in the novels of Burroughs, Heller, Ellison, Pynchon, Kesey, Mailer, DeLillo, and others. -from Paranoia and Modernity Paranoia, suspicion, and control have preoccupied key Western intellectuals since the sixteenth century. Paranoia is a dominant concern in modern literature, and its peculiar constellation of symptoms-grandiosity, suspicion, unfounded hostility, delusions of persecution and conspiracy-are nearly obligatory psychological components of the modern hero. How did paranoia come to the center of modern moral and intellectual consciousness? In Paranoia and Modernity, John Farrell brings literary criticism, psychology, and intellectual history to the attempt at an answer. He demonstrates the connection between paranoia and the long history of struggles over the question of agency-the extent to which we are free to act and responsible for our actions. He addresses a wide range of major authors from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, among them Luther, Bacon, Cervantes, Descartes, Hobbes, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Swift, and Rousseau. Farrell shows how differently paranoid psychology looks at different historical junctures with different models of agency, and in the epilogue, Paranoia and Postmodernism, he draws the implications for recent critical debates in the humanities.
Product Details
Publisher
Cornell University Press
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2005
Condition
New
Weight
644g
Number of Pages
352
Place of Publication
Ithaca, United States
ISBN
9780801444104
SKU
V9780801444104
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1
About John Farrell
John Farrell is Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author of Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau, from Cornell, and Freud's Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion.
Reviews for Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau
This ambitious book traces the workings of paranoia through a dizzying variety of texts, not only 'Cervantes to Rousseau,' but Sophocles to Pynchon, including detailed readings of the Gawain Poet, Luther, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Pascal, Leibniz, Locke, Pope, Swift, and Hemingway.
Renaissance Quarterly
The effect of John Farrell's intellectual historical overview is both bracing and convincing. I particularly enjoy (and endorse) his notion that the idealism and moral perfectionism exhibited not only by Luther's anxieties about the state of his immortal soul but also by Don Quixote's fantasies of chivalric excellence lie at the root of the anti-idealist sense of alienated human degradation that characterizes our post-Rousseauvian modernity. This book supplies a way out of the nihilist impasse in which so much contemporary cultural criticism seems trapped.
Christopher Braider, University of Colorado at Boulder Paranoia and Modernity is a dazzling and exhilarating genealogy of modern Western suspicion. With shrewd discernment and understated wit, John Farrell shows how misanthropic distrust, once an object of general satire, became the received wisdom of intellectuals. His book is itself a satire, though a very learned and scrupulous one, on the folly of religious and philosophical systems that pay no heed to our common humanity. Farrell combines psychological and critical acuity, historical breadth, and moral irony in a way that leaves this reader gasping with admiration. Paranoia and Modernity is nothing less than a masterpiece.
Frederick Crews In Paranoia and Modernity, paranoia represents the compulsive need to hold others responsible for one's failure to match ideality to reality. John Farrell's provocative readings of some heady and often-read texts establish paranoia as one way to explain the discrepancy between lofty cultural or personal ideals and the reality that brings them too often to earth.
Thomas DiPiero, University of Rochester
Renaissance Quarterly
The effect of John Farrell's intellectual historical overview is both bracing and convincing. I particularly enjoy (and endorse) his notion that the idealism and moral perfectionism exhibited not only by Luther's anxieties about the state of his immortal soul but also by Don Quixote's fantasies of chivalric excellence lie at the root of the anti-idealist sense of alienated human degradation that characterizes our post-Rousseauvian modernity. This book supplies a way out of the nihilist impasse in which so much contemporary cultural criticism seems trapped.
Christopher Braider, University of Colorado at Boulder Paranoia and Modernity is a dazzling and exhilarating genealogy of modern Western suspicion. With shrewd discernment and understated wit, John Farrell shows how misanthropic distrust, once an object of general satire, became the received wisdom of intellectuals. His book is itself a satire, though a very learned and scrupulous one, on the folly of religious and philosophical systems that pay no heed to our common humanity. Farrell combines psychological and critical acuity, historical breadth, and moral irony in a way that leaves this reader gasping with admiration. Paranoia and Modernity is nothing less than a masterpiece.
Frederick Crews In Paranoia and Modernity, paranoia represents the compulsive need to hold others responsible for one's failure to match ideality to reality. John Farrell's provocative readings of some heady and often-read texts establish paranoia as one way to explain the discrepancy between lofty cultural or personal ideals and the reality that brings them too often to earth.
Thomas DiPiero, University of Rochester