On Pain of Speech - (Flashpoints) by Dina Al-Kassim (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

On Pain of Speech tracks the literary rant, an expression of provocation and resistance that imagines the power to speak in its own name where no such right is granted. Focusing on the "politics of address," Dina Al-Kassim views the rant through the lens of Michel Foucault's notion of the biopolitical subject and finds that its abject address is an essential yet overlooked feature of modernism. Deftly approaching disparate fields--decadent modernism, queer studies, subjection, critical psychoanalysis, and postcolonial avant-garde--and encompassing both Euro-American and Francophone Arabic modernisms, she offers an ambitious theoretical perspective on the ongoing redefinition of modernism. She includes readings of Jane Bowles, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Oscar Wilde, and invokes a wide range of ideas, including those of Theodor Adorno, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, Jean Laplanche, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

Review Quotes

"Al-Kassim's analysis could profitably be applied to much modernist and avant-garde writing. . . . It is already remarkably portable across decades and nations and movements. . . . This wide portability and the refreshingly readable prose of the book make On Pain of Speech an ideal text for courses on post-colonialism, Modernism, and avant-garde literatures at the advanced undergraduate level and beyond."-- "Inside Higher Ed" (4/23/2011 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

Dina Al-Kassim is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.