Books in the Lit Z series

This book proposes the "formless" as a way of thinking through the impasses of contemporary politics. The writing of the formless, as it can be traced in the work of Lezama Lima and the Cuban Revolution, is the point of departure in thinking through the relationship between politics and time.

Poetry is dead. Poetry is all around us. Both are trite truisms that this book exploits and challenges. By placing tropes and figures common to Romantic and Post-Romantic poems in conjunction with contemporary discourse, Look Round for Poetry identifies poetry's untimely echoes in discourses not always read as poetry or not always read poetically.

Techno-Magism: Media, Mediation, and the Cut of Romanticism explores how British Romantic literature abuts and is organized around both print and non-print media, both the print, pictorial art, and theater of that era as well as communicative technologies invented afterward, including photography, film, video, and digital screens.

Infectious Liberty traces the origins of our contemporary concerns about public health, world population, climate change, global trade, and government regulation to a series of Romantic-era debates and their literary consequences.

Working from the Bible to contemporary art, Shibboleth surveys the politics of border crossings, the policing of identities, and the linguistic performances on which such actions depend.

Lives of the Dead Poets explores the biographical interest that has marked the posthumous reception of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It argues that this fascination with the poetic life-a special case of the attachments we form to poetic figures-speaks to the mode of poetry's survival into modernity.

Last Things explores lastness as a formal structure in romantic and post-romantic literature and art as something other than either a privation or a conclusion. It touches on the unthinkable dimensions of our life and world, and reads the fate of romanticism as a limit of the human.

On the Nature of Marx's Things traces to Marx's earliest writings a Lucretian practice that Lezra calls necrophilological translation.

Reading with John Clare argues that poetry and its repression lies at the heart of biopolitical thinking. By rereading the emergence of biopolitics and focusing on the exemplary case of John Clare, it renews our understanding of the relation between aesthetics and politics from romanticism to the present.

Translation of a posthumous work by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on Maurice Blanchot. Discusses such topics as literature, myth, the experience of death, autobiography, metaphysics, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, as well as the political and ethical implications thereof.

Old Schools marks out a modernist countertradition: a series of engagements with classical education after the rise of progressive pedagogical theories. The book shows how figures in various cultural vanguards, from Victorian Britain to 1970s Brazil, reimagined the old school to make it facilitate the change it seemed to impede.

Mendicino retraces the ways in which the task of translation is tied in Romantic writing to prophecy, not in the sense of telling future events, but in the sense of speaking in the place of another, such that language takes place in more than one voice-and tongue-at once, unpredictably.

This collection takes its point of departure from Walter Benjamin's concept of the historical constellation, a concept which puts "contemporary" as well as "Romanticism" in play as period designations and critical paradigms. The book regards Romanticism as a thought experiment that poses questions for our own "now" time.

Corporate Romanticism reads a series of important Romantic novels alongside a wide-ranging set of debates in nineteenth-century law, politics, and aesthetics in order to show liberalism, the law, and the novel all wrestled with the moral implications of a highly collectivized and densely packed modernity.

This collection takes its point of departure from Walter Benjamin's concept of the historical constellation, a concept which puts "contemporary" as well as "Romanticism" in play as period designations and critical paradigms. The book regards Romanticism as a thought experiment that poses questions for our own "now" time.

Modernity's Mist explores an understudied aspect of Romanticism: its future-oriented poetics. In the work of John Keats, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, and William Hazlitt, Modernity's Mist describes a poetics of future anteriority or the uncertainty of "what will have been"-a grammar of historical engagement for a time of unprecedented political change.

This book examines the figure of the frontier (both bilateral border and open edge of civilization) both literally in Kant's political writings, and figuratively in Critiques, developing via a reading of teleological judgment the concept of "interrupted teleology" as a reasoned but non-rationalistic response to rationalism.

Suspended between likeness and strangeness, portraiture can identify an individual only at the moment of its advancementand withdrawal. Examining 36 portraits across two millennia, Nancy shows how, despite photograph's ubiquity, the forms of appearing that define the portraitcontinue to mark the bodies and representations that dominate our world.

How do we read after the so-called death of literature? Graff Zivin elaborates anarchaeological reading: reading for the blind spots, errors, points of opacity or untranslatability. Through interdiscursive exposure between continental philosophy and Argentine literature, art, and film, Graff Zivin shows how anarchaeological reading radicalizes the possibility of justice.

Examines various forms of the middle (such as the medium, moderation, and mediocrity) that re-negotiated in the writings of British and German romanticism, along with a consideration of how our own relationship to romanticism is influenced by its medial thinking.