New Perspectives on Community and the Modernist Subject

Book excerpt: New Perspectives on Community and the Modernist Subject: Finite, Singular, Exposed offers new approaches to the modernist subject and its relation to community. With a non-exclusive focus on narrative, the essays included provide innovative and theoretically informed readings of canonical modernist authors, including: James, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Mansfield, Stein, Barnes and Faulkner (instead of Eliot), as well as of non-canonical and late modernists Stapledon, Rhys, Beckett, Isherwood, and Baldwin (instead of Marsden). This volume examines the context of new dialectico-metaphysical approaches to subjectivity and individuality and of recent philosophical debate on community encouraged by critics such as Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito and Jacques Derrida, among others, of which a fresh re-definition of the modernist subject and community remains to be made, one that is likely to enrich the field of "new Modernist studies". This volume will fill this gap, presenting a re-definition of the subject by complementing community-oriented approaches to modernist fiction through a dialectical counterweight that underlines a conception of the modernist subject as finite, singular and exposed, and its relation to inorganic and inoperative communities.