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“This book is provocative, compelling, and beautifully written. Zechner has transformed the pain of reading into a very pleasurable experience.” —Elissa Marder (Emory University, USA) The Violence of Reading: Literature and Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain expounds the scene of reading as one that produces an overwhelmed body exposed to uncontainable forms of violence. The book argues that the act of reading induces a representational instability that causes the referential function of language to collapse. This breakdown releases a type of “linguistic pain” (Scarry; Butler; Hamacher) that indicates a constitutive wounding of the reading body. The wound of language marks a rupture between linguistic reality and the phenomenal world. Exploring this rupture in various ways, the book brings together texts and genres from diverse traditions and offers close examinations of the rhetoric of masochism (Sacher-Masoch; Deleuze), the relation between reading and abuse (Nietzsche; Proust; Jelinek), the sublime experience of reading (Kant; Kafka; de Man), the “novel of the institution” (Musil; Campe), and literary suicide (Bachmann; Berryman; Okkervil River). Dominik Zechner served as the Artemis A.W. and Martha Joukowsky Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University’s Pembroke Center and is currently an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University Zechner is the co-editor of Forces of Education: Walter Benjamin and the Politics of Pedagogy (Bloomsbury, 2023) and Thresholds, Encounters: Paul Celan and the Claim of Philology (SUNY, 2023). He is also the co-editor of a special issue of parallax (“Initiations: The Pitfalls of Beginning,” vol. 28.3, 2022) and the editor of a special issue of Modern Language Notes (“What is a Prize?” vol. 131.5, 2016).

Literature --- Reading --- Philosophy. --- Continental Philosophy. --- Literary Theory. --- Philosophy of Literature.

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Benjamin, Walter

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The Technological Introject explores the futures opened up across the humanities and social sciences by the influential media theorist Friedrich Kittler. Joining the German tradition of media studies and systems theory to the Franco-American theoretical tradition marked by poststructuralism, Kittler’s work has redrawn the boundaries of disciplines and of scholarly traditions. The contributors position Kittler in relation to Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Derrida, discourse analysis, film theory, and psychoanalysis. Ultimately, the book shows the continuing relevance of the often uncomfortable questions Kittler opened up about the cultural production and its technological entanglements.

Mass media --- Technology and civilization. --- Philosophy. --- Kittler, Friedrich A. --- Cultural Techniques. --- Friedrich Kittler. --- German Media Theory. --- History of Science. --- The New Germans. --- critical media epistemology. --- history of technology. --- media philosophy.