The Work of Difference ─ Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form

The Work of Difference addresses a fundamental ontological question: What is literature? And at the heart of this question, it argues, is the problem of the new. How is it that new works or new forms are possible within the rule-governed orders of history, language use, or the social? How are new works in turn recognizable to already-existing institutions? Tracing the relationship between literature and the problem of newness back to am set of concerns first articulated in early German romanticism, this book goes on to mount a critique of romantic tendencies in contemporary criticism in order, ultimately, to develop an original theory of literary production. Following the impasses of romanticism into the twentieth century, Wasser examines the way they resurface in treatments of intention and possibility in key texts by Cleanth Brooks and Maurice Blanchot. A central chapter draws on Gilles Deleuze's work for a critique of the metaphysics at stake in this persistent romanticism; and it proposes an exit by developing an alternative account of literary production, one in which the work is grasped as individuating, self-differing, and problem-solving. This account is put to the test through new readings of major modernist novels--Samuel Beckett's trilogyMolloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, Marcel Proust'sA la recherche du temps perdu, and Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans. Focusing in particular on the system-building potential of rhetorical figures, these readings characterize the modernist work as an open, self-organizing system.

Audrey Wasser is Assistant Professor of French at Miami University of Ohio.