Literature and Event Twenty-First Century Reformulations

If "event" is a proper name we reserve for monumental changes, crises, transitions and ruptures that are by their very nature unnameable or unthinkable, then this volume is an attempt to set up an encounter between such eventhood as it comes to have a bearing on literary works and the work of reading literature. As the event continues to provide a valuable analytical paradigm for work undertaken within the newer subdisciplines of literary and critical theory, including close reading, bio- politics, world literature, and eco- criticism, this volume makes a concerted effort to update the scholarship in this area and foreground the recent resurgence of interest in the concept. The book provides both a retrospective appraisal of the significance of events to literary studies and the literary humanities, as well as contemporary and prospective appraisals of the same, and thus would appeal scholars and instructors in the areas of literary theory, comparative literature and philosophical aesthetics alike. Along with a specialist focus on thinkers such as Derrida, Badiou, Deleuze and Malabou, the essays in this volume read a wide corpus of literature ranging from Han Kang, Homer, Renee Gladman, Proust and Flaubert to Yoruba ideophones, Browning, Anne Carson, Jenichiro Oyabe and Ben Lerner.

The Gift of the Event MANTRA MUKIM SECTION I Senses 1 Plasticity and the Event of Literature: Reading Catherine Malabou with Anne Carson STEPHEN DOUGHERTY 2 Margin, Letter, and Sentence: The Graphic Event THOMAS GOULD 3 Unexceptional Events; Or, Cixous’s Scarcely Audible Literature NAOMI WALTHAM- SMITH 4 ‘Peut- e tre aurais- je d u penser’: Research and Event in Proust BRYAN COUNTER SECTION II Possibility/ Impossibility 5 Poetics of the Event or Evental Poetics? Writing as Becoming Imperceptible in Howard Barker’s Hurts Given and Received ALIREZA FAKHRKONANDEH 6 Literature, Event, and Formal Compossibility KURT CAVENDER 7 The Withness of the Earth: Haptic Epistemology in Climatic Times MIN JI CHOI 8 What Happens When Nothing Happens? Near- and Micro- Events in Contemporary Poetry SARAH BOUTTIER SECTION III After: History, Narrative, Form 9 Plastic Events, Spectral Events: Literature and the "Real of the Phantasm," Between Malabou and Derrida THOMAS CLÉMENT MERCIER 10 On Deities: The Aesthetics of Concretion MILIND WAKANKAR 11 L?yìn Kété Níbi N S?l?: Disaster, Event, and Ideophone ADÉLÉKÈ ADÉ?K? 12 The Eventful Shipwreck: Robinson Crusoe, Jenichiro Oyabe, and the World Literary Map of the Drifters IRMAK SAYGIN SECTION IV Forms 13 The Event of the Literary Work DEREK ATTRIDGE 14 History, Tearing: Hamacher’s Literary Events RONALD MENDOZA- DE JESÚS 15 Serendipitous Events: Failures and Transformations of Projects in Contemporary Anglophone Literature ALEXANDER SCHERR 16 Narrating the Other: On Speaking of the Origin of Time and the Time of the Origin LUCAS SCOTT WRIGHT

Mantra Mukim is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of English, University of Warwick, where he is researching failure and eventhood in the works of Samuel Beckett. His articles have most recently appeared in Textual Practice, Irish Studies Review and Review 31. Derek Attridge is Emeritus Professor at the University of York. His publications span such topics as the history of poetry, South African literature, James Joyce, poetic form, and literary theory. His theoretical works include Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Cornell, 1988, reissued by Routledge in 2004), The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2004; reissued as a Routledge Classic in 2017), Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction’s Traces (Edinburgh, 2010), and The Work of Literature (Oxford, 2015). He co-edited Post-structuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge, 1987), Theory after "Theory" (Routledge, 2011), and The Work of Reading: Literary Criticism in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2021), and edited Jacques Derrida's Acts of Literature (Routledge, 1992). He is a Fellow of the British Academy