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Summary
Focuses on a very significant psycho-cultural concept (that of "agonistics" or "contestatory creativity") with ramifications in several areas of the postmodern debate: cultural philosophy, psychologies of race, gender and the body, and narratology.
"The editors have staked out the domain of agonistics in their Introduction, tracing its various definitions from Nietzsche through Freud and Wittgenstein, to Derrida, Bloom, and Lyotard. They have also structured the individual analyses around four, well-balanced thematic focuses that broach agonistic creativity from a philosophic, psychoanalytic, narratological, and socio-sexual point of view. These focuses are to a large extent complementary, establishing a continuous intertextual dialogue across the thematic separations." -- Marcel Cornis-Pope, Virginia Commonwealth University
This book examines the ambiguities inherent in the concept of the agon as a motivating, conflictual force behind creative and social expression. The notion of agonistics extends far beyond the literary fame lent it by Harold Bloom to embrace all aspects of culture. The editors blend theoretical sophistication with an interdisciplinary approach and reposit the agon in a new, broad context for postmodern inquiry. Taking their inspiration from Friedrich Nietzsche's essay "Homer's Contest," Lungstrum and Sauer trace the evolution of the agon: from its vital function in ancient Greece, through modernity, and onward.
Janet Lungstrum is Assistant Professor of German Literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Elizabeth Sauer is Associate Professor of English Literature at Brock University. She is the author of Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton's Epics
Table of Contents
Creative Agonistics: An Introduction
Janet Lungstrum and Elizabeth Sauer
I
Contests in Cultural Philosophy
Homer's Contest
Friedrich Nietzsche (translated by Jordan Dieterich and Janet Lungstrum)
Cultural Agonistics: Nietzsche, the Greeks, Eternal Recurrence
Benjamin C. Sax
Closing the Eye: Hegel, Derrida, and the Closure of Philosophy
Arkady Plotnitsky
Walter Benjamin: The Prophet's War against Prophecy
Marcus Paul Bullock
II
Psychoanalytic and Racial Conflicts
Interpretation Interminable: Agonistics in Psychoanalysis
Volney P. Gay
The Institutionalization of Conflict as an Interpretative Strategy in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams
Lorna Martens
The Jewish Genius: Freud and the Jewishness of the Creative
Sander L. Gilman
Criminality and Poe's Orangutan: The Question of Race in Detection
Nancy A. Harrowitz
III
Agonal Aesthetics and Narrative Theory
"A Chain of Utmost Potency": On the Agon and the Creative Impulse
John A. McCarthy
The Partial Song of Satanic Anti-Creation: Milton's Discourses of the Divided Self
Elizabeth Sauer
The Penman and the Postal-Carrier: Preordained Rivalry in Joyce's Finnegans Wake
Andrew Schmitz
The Gender of Fiction: Henry James's "Backward Glance" at the Agon of Composition
Cecile Mazzucco-Than
IV
Agons of Gender and the Body
The Muse Abused
Lisabeth Duringv
The Sportive Agon in Ancient and Modern Times
John Hoberman
Baudrillard, After Hours , and the Postmodern Suppression of Socio-Sexual Conflict
Cynthia Willett
Agonal Politics in Space and Time: Arendt and Le Guin on World Creation
