The Human Form [antikvár]

Foreword My first monograph, A Modern Coleridge: Cultivation, Addiction, Habits (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) explored what it meant to be human for the conservative, post-Enlightenment poet, philosopher, and political thinker, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The essays of this present volume, published between 2010 and 2018,' examine what it has meant to be human from the eighteenth century to the present. The first part of the volume critically engages with eighteenth-century notions of sympathy (as elaborated by Adam Smith) and our present notion of narrative empathy (Martha Nussbaum, Suzanne Keen). It examines how novels such as Agota Kristof's The Notebook (1986), Noémi Szécsi's Gondolatolvasó [The Mind-reader] (2013), J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986) and Gergely Péterfy's Kitömött barbár [Stuffed Barbarian] (2014) question the ethical and political stakes involved in the exercise of "sympathetic imagination" for our (lack of) understanding and/or recognition of the human. The second part of the volume offers critical readings of texts by Matthew Arnold, Immánuel Kant, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Ranciere, and Quentin Meillassoux in order to investigate the poetics and the politics of human form. It establishes (further) dialogues between the long nineteenth century and our contemporary world through the notions of virtual trauma, autoimmunity, terror, the posthuman, the catastrophe and the crisis of temporality. See the list of previously published essays on p. 145.