The Failure of the Word

The Failure of the Word
Author :
Publisher : Yale University Press
Total Pages : 244
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0300045921
ISBN-13 : 9780300045925
Rating : 4/5 (925 Downloads)

Book Synopsis The Failure of the Word by : Richard H. Weisberg

Download or read book The Failure of the Word written by Richard H. Weisberg and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1984-01-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cruel power of misdirected words, artfully structured but spiritually empty and bearing the stamp of law or legalistic reasoning, is a persistent theme in the modern novel. Richard Weisberg, who has written extensively on both literature and law, explores the role of legalism and its abuses in eight major novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning with Dostoevski and moving by way of trenchant analyses of Flaubert and Camus, Weisberg culminates his argument in a brilliantly revisionist reading of Melville's Billy Budd. In each of the novels treated, Weisberg sees a verbally gifted central character relying on wordiness to avoid or distort previously revealed truths. He argues that the malaise Nietzsche called ressentiment goads these characters to verbalizations that do violence to others and, ironically, indict their very creators. He identifies the legalistic theme as the major mode of iconoclasm in modern fiction and the source of its holocaustic vision. Writers, he reflects, viewed with profound skepticism their culture's tendency to substitute complex narrative formalism for earlier, absolute approaches to justice. In this, Weisberg concludes, their works anticipated the jurisprudential discourse of today. "The Failure of the Word is a creative, provocative, and learned work, written with style and feeling. Weisberg brings to bear on his core themes (the legalistic proclivity and ressentiment) a wide body of knowledge and thought in law and philosophy, literary history and theory."--Robert L. Jackson, Yale University


The Failure of the Word Related Books

The Failure of the Word
Language: en
Pages: 244
Authors: Richard H. Weisberg
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 1984-01-01 - Publisher: Yale University Press

GET EBOOK

The cruel power of misdirected words, artfully structured but spiritually empty and bearing the stamp of law or legalistic reasoning, is a persistent theme in t
The Other
Language: en
Pages: 291
Authors: John Danner
Categories: Business & Economics
Type: BOOK - Published: 2015-03-04 - Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

GET EBOOK

Leverage the power of failure in your organization Nobody wants to fail, but failure is a fact of life. Most of us treat it as a regrettable, even shameful, eve
Failure: the Back Door to Success
Language: en
Pages: 155
Authors: Erwin W. Lutzer
Categories: Religion
Type: BOOK - Published: 2015-12-15 - Publisher: Moody Publishers

GET EBOOK

Find the goodin your failure. Failure is a fact of life, one we’d rather forget. Fortunately it has a silver lining. Failure, the Back Door to Success shows u
The Wrong End of the Telescope
Language: en
Pages: 305
Authors: Rabih Alameddine
Categories: Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-09-18 - Publisher: Grove Press

GET EBOOK

WINNER OF THE 2022 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION By National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award finalist for An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Al
The Queer Art of Failure
Language: en
Pages: 234
Authors: Jack Halberstam
Categories: Performing Arts
Type: BOOK - Published: 2011-09-19 - Publisher: Duke University Press

GET EBOOK

DIVProminent queer theorist offers a "low theory" of culture knowledge drawn from popular texts and films./div