Kristina Mendicino's Books

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On Novelty

By: Kristina Mendicino

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A study of novelty through analyses of the language of announcement in revolutionary texts. Walter Benjamin claimed that the notion of novelty took on unprecedented importance with the growth of high capitalism in the nineteenth century. In this book, Kristina Mendicino analyzes a selection of canonical texts that reflect profound concern with novelty and its apparent contrary, the eternal return of the same, including Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Baudelaire’s lyric and prose poetry, and Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto. She also addresses Eternity by the Stars by Louis-Auguste Blanqui, who is less well known and often underestimated in considerations of his significance for revolutionary political theory. Mendicino argues that the notion of a novum cannot be understood without attentiveness to the language of announcement, not least of all because the “new” has always been associated with a particular mode of linguistic performance. Through close readings of emphatically annunciatory texts, she demonstrates how the extreme possibilities of expression that they present through specific citational and rhetorical praxes render the language of announcement overdetermined and anachronistic in ways that exceed any systematic account of historical time and experience. This excess in and through language is precisely what opens hitherto unheard of alternatives for conceiving of historical temporality and political possibility. “Impressive in scope and philosophically sophisticated, this erudite and elegantly written book is, quite simply, dazzling. Mendicino successfully tears down many of the tired clichés that too often subtend discussions about novelty and modernism and makes persuasive arguments for her own novel claims about why the appeal to novelty matters so much. In her capable hands, the question of novelty becomes a lever with which she powerfully pries open familiar texts, philosophical traditions, and concepts and transforms those recognizable topoi into resources for thinking differently about historical time, revolution, capital, wealth, theory, and practice.” — Elissa Marder, author of Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert)

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272

Publisher

SUNY Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1438477554

ISBN 13

9781438477558

Announcements

On Novelty

By: Kristina Mendicino

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Announcements

On Novelty

By: Kristina Mendicino

Walter Benjamin claimed that the notion of novelty took on unprecedented importance with the growth of high capitalism in the nineteenth century. In this book, Kristina Mendicino analyzes a selection of canonical texts that reflect profound concern with novelty and its apparent contrary, the eternal return of the same, including Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Baudelaire's lyric and prose poetry, and Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto. She also addresses Eternity by the Stars by Louis-Auguste Blanqui, who is less well known and often underestimated in considerations of his significance for revolutionary political theory. Mendicino argues that the notion of a novum cannot be understood without attentiveness to the language of announcement, not least of all because the "new" has always been associated with a particular mode of linguistic performance. Through close readings of emphatically annunciatory texts, she demonstrates how the extreme possibilities of expression that they present through specific citational and rhetorical praxes render the language of announcement overdetermined and anachronistic in ways that exceed any systematic account of historical time and experience. This excess in and through language is precisely what opens hitherto unheard of alternatives for conceiving of historical temporality and political possibility.

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272

Publisher

State University of New York Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1438477562

ISBN 13

9781438477565

Prophecies of Language

The Confusion of Tongues in German Romanticism

By: Kristina Mendicino

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Prophecies of Language

The Confusion of Tongues in German Romanticism

By: Kristina Mendicino

The scenes of Babel and Pentecost, the original confusion of tongues and their redemption through translation, haunt German Romanticism and Idealism. This book begins by retracing the ways in which the task of translation, so crucial to Romantic writing, is repeatedly tied to prophecy, not in the sense of telling future events, but in the sense of speaking in the place of another—most often unbeknownst to the speaker herself. In prophetic speech, the confusion of tongues repeats, each time anew, as language takes place unpredictably in more than one voice and more than one tongue at once. Mendicino argues that the relation between translation and prophecy drawn by German Romantic writers fundamentally changes the way we must approach this so-called “Age of Translation.” Whereas major studies of the period have taken as their point of departure the opposition of the familiar and the foreign, Mendicino suggests that Romantic writing provokes the questions: how could one read a language that is not one? And what would such a polyvocal, polyglot language, have to say about philology—both for the Romantics, whose translation projects are most intimately related to their philological preoccupations, and for us? In Prophecies of Language, these questions are pursued through readings of major texts by G.W.F. Hegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Hölderlin. These readings show how, when one questions the presupposition of works composed by individual authors in one tongue, these texts disclose more than a monoglot reading yields, namely the “plus” of their linguistic plurality. From such a surplus, each chapter goes on to advocate for a philology that, in and through an inclination toward language, takes neither its unity nor its structure for granted but allows itself to be most profoundly affected, addressed—and afflicted—by it.

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424

Publisher

Fordham Univ Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823274039

ISBN 13

9780823274031

Passive Voices (On the Subject of Phenomenology and Other Figures of Speech)

By: Kristina Mendicino

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Passive Voices (On the Subject of Phenomenology and Other Figures of Speech)

By: Kristina Mendicino

At least since Aristotle's Peri hermeneias, there has been talk of the pathos of language, of language as "symbols of the affections in the soul." The way these affections are registered, however, suggests that they are themselves structured like language. For Aristotle and others, language is suffered before any sense can be voiced. The pathos of language thus becomes a question of how language affects the subject of speech and, in the last analysis, of how language could respond to these questions of language. Passive Voices (On the Subject of Phenomenology and Other Figures of Speech) approaches these questions, first, through readings of Augustine's investigations into language and mind and Edmund Husserl's descriptions of passive synthesis. It then traces the further resonance of Augustine's and Husserl's interventions in selected literary experiments by Georges Bataille, Franz Kafka, and Maurice Blanchot that recall Husserl and Augustine while exceeding the restrictive fictions of phenomenological "science." In drawing out the echoes that emerge across confessional, philosophical, and fictional writings, this book exposes the ways in which speech occurs in the passive voice and affects any claim to experience.

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Page Count

387

Publisher

State University of New York Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1438491980

ISBN 13

9781438491981

Prophecies of Language

The Confusion of Tongues in German Romanticism

By: Kristina Mendicino

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Prophecies of Language

The Confusion of Tongues in German Romanticism

By: Kristina Mendicino

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.

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Page Count

281

Publisher

Modern Language Initiative

Published Date

ISBN 10

0823274012

ISBN 13

9780823274017

Book's by Kristina Mendicino

Announcements

Announcements

Announcements

Announcements

Prophecies of Language

Prophecies of Language

Passive Voices (On the Subject of Phenomenology and Other Figures of Speech)

Passive Voices (On the Subject of Phenomenology and Other Figures of Speech)

Prophecies of Language

Prophecies of Language

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