The Claims of Literature: A Shoshana Felman Reader
Shoshana Felman
Shoshana Felman ranks as one of the most influential literary critics of the past five decades. Her work has inspired and shaped such divergent fields as psychoanalytic criticism, deconstruction, speech-act theory and performance studies, feminist and gender studies, trauma studies, and critical legal studies. Shoshana Felman has not only influenced these fields: her work has opened channels of communication between them. In all of her work Felman charts a way for literary critics to address the ways in which texts have real effects in the world and how our quest for meaning is transformed in the encounter with the texts that hold such a promise.
The present collection gathers the most exemplary and influential essays from Felman’s oeuvre, including articles previously untranslated into English. The Claims of Literature also includes responses to Felman’s work by leading contemporary theorists, including Stanley Cavell, Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Cathy Caruth, Juliet Mitchell, Winfried Menninghaus, and Austin Sarat.
It concludes with a section on Felman as a teacher, giving transcripts of two of her classes, one at Yale in September 2001, the other at Emory in December 2004.
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About Shoshana Felman
Reviews for The Claims of Literature: A Shoshana Felman Reader
-Kenneth Reinhard University of California, Los Angeles "Shoshana Felman ranks as one of the most important and most influential thinkers of recent times. The essays selected for the reader are all widely viewed as "classics" and represent a coherent, well-chosen and thoughtful selection. All bear witness to the clarity of Felman's prose and her dedication to rigorous demonstration and lucid argumentation. Indeed, Felman's work derives its pathbreaking insights though its dedication to the clear expression of ideas and experiences that challenge the human capacity for clear expression. By engaging with this essential human paradox (the need to communicate that which defies communication), Felman's work addresses the most important questions of human experience and encourages her readers to open themselves up to new and exciting ways of thinking and reading."
-Elissa Marder Emory University "The Claims of Literature gathers some of the true "specimen" texts of the last three decades, texts from which proceeded several of the major theoretical breakthroughs of our era. That each essay retains its full power to re-excite thought is testament to Felman's spectacular ability to locate those moments when an argument begins to fend or feed off its own foreignness. To read-or reread-these brilliant essays is to experience that thrilling brush with the unknown that first led Felman to reconceive the relations between writing and madness; the body and speech; femininity and sexual difference; law and justice; trauma and witnessing."
-Joan Copjec author of Imagine There's No Woman or Director of the Center for the study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at University at Buffalo