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Author Khalip, Jacques, 1975- author.

Title Last things : disastrous form from Kant to Hujar / Jacques Khalip
Published New York : Fordham University Press, [2018]
©2018

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Description 1 online resource (139 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates) : illustrations
Series LIT Z
Lit z.
Contents Has-been -- Introduction : now no more -- The unfinished world -- Life is gone -- As if that look must be the last
Summary With the "arrival" of the so-called era of the Anthropocene, certain contemporary theoretical approaches have led us to think that we are only now properly beginning to speculate on an inhuman world that is not for us, as well as confronting our fears and anxieties around ecological, political, social, and philosophical extinction. Reflections on apocalypse and disaster, however, were not foreign to what we historically call romanticism, but in Last Things, Jacques Khalip begins with the "end of things" differently, treating lastness otherwise than either a privation or a conclusion. He emphasizes quieter and non-emphatic modes of thinking the end of the world of thought itself. Without fear, foreshadowing, or catastrophe, Khalip explores lastness as a form, structure, or unit that marks the limits of our life and world, and he reads the fate of romanticism (and romantic studies) within the key of the last. Although this is a reading one could never wish for, it is one, Khalip argues, that we urgently have to make today. The book is not an elegy to the human, or to romanticism; rather, it polemically argues that we should read romanticism as a negative force that exceeds theories, narratives, and figures of survival and sustainability. Each chapter explores a diverse range of romantic and contemporary materials: poetry by John Clare, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth; philosophical texts by William Godwin, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; paintings by Hubert Robert, Caspar David Friedrich, and Paterson Ewen; installations by Tatsuo Miyajima and James Turrell; and photography by John Dugdale, Peter Hujar, and Joanna Kane. Shuttling between different temporalities, Last Things undertakes an original reorganization of romantic thought for contemporary culture. It examines an "archive" that is on the side of disappearance, perishing, the inhuman, and lastness
"Amid contemporary anxieties about the destruction of the planet, Khalip's book shows how the question of disappearance and lastnesss haunts the cultural imagination across a range of periods and genres.A smart cultural studies book that serves as a newer companion to such classics as Edelman's 'No Future' and Said's 'Late Style.' Ranges from philosophy to literature to modern photography, such as the queer romanticism of Peter Hujar."-- Provided by publisher
Analysis Dugdale
Ewen
Hujar
Kant
Keats
Shelley
Wordsworth
extinction
lastness
life
photography
romanticism
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 105-134) and index
Notes In English
Print version record and online resource (JSTOR, viewed July 15, 2020)
Subject Romanticism -- History and criticism
Literature -- Philosophy.
LITERARY CRITICISM -- General.
Literature -- Philosophy
Romanticism
Genre/Form Electronic books
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780823279579
082327957X
0823281574
9780823281572
0823279561
9780823279562