The UberReader: SELECTED WORKS of AVITAL RONELL

"Avital Ronell has put together what must be one of the most remarkable critical oeuvres of our era… Zeugmatically yoking the slang of pop culture with philosophical analysis, forcing the confrontation of high literature and technology or drug culture, Avital Ronell produces sentences that startle, irritate, illuminate. At once hilarious and refractory, her books are like no others."--Jonathan Culler, Diacritics   For twenty years Avital Ronell has stood at the forefront of the confrontation between literary study and European philosophy. She has tirelessly investigated the impact of technology on thinking and writing, with groundbreaking work on Heidegger, dependency and drug rhetoric, intelligence and artificial intelligence, and the obsession with testing. Admired for her insights and breadth of field, she has attracted a wide readership by writing with guts, candor, and wit.   Coyly alluding to Nietzsche's "gay science," The ÜberReader presents a solid introduction to Avital Ronell's later oeuvre. It includes at least one selection from each of her books, two classic selections from a collection of her early essays (Finitude's Score), previously uncollected interviews and essays, and some of her most powerful published and unpublished talks. An introduction by Diane Davis surveys Ronell's career and the critical response to it thus far.   With its combination of brevity and power, this Ronell "primer" will be immensely useful to scholars, students, and teachers throughout the humanities, but particularly to graduate and undergraduate courses in contemporary theory.  

Table of Contents:
Contents Acknowledgments IntroductionDiane Davis I. The Call of Technology 1. Delay Call Forwarding 2. Support Our Tropes: Reading Desert Storm 3. TraumaTV: Twelve Steps Beyond the Pleasure Principle 4. State of the Art: Julia Scher's Disinscription of National Security II. Freedom and Obligation: Minority Report on Children, Addicts, Outlaws, and Ghosts 5. On the Unrelenting Creepiness of Childhood: Lyotard, Kid-Tested 6. Toward a Narcoanalysis 7. Deviant Payback: The Aims of Valerie Solanas 8. Preface to Dictations III. Psyche--Soma: The Finite Body 9. A Note on the Failure of Man's Custodianship 10. The Disappearance and Returns of the Idiot 11. The Philosophical Code: Dennis Cooper's Pacific Rim IV. Danke! Et Adieu: On Hookups and Breakups Three Hometown Talks: 12. The Sacred Alien: Heidegger's Reading of H¿lderlin's "Andenken" 13. On Friendship; Or, Kathy Goes to Hell 14. Loving Your Enemy V. The Fading Empire of Cognition 7 15. Slow Learner 16. The Experimental Disposition: Nietzsche's Discovery of America (Or, Why the Present Administration Sees Everything in Terms of a Test) 17. Koan Practice or Taking Down the Test 18. "Is It Happening?" Index

About the Author :
Avital Ronell is a professor of German, comparative literature, and English at New York University, where she directs the Research in Trauma and Violence project. She is author of Dictations: On Haunted Writing, The Telephone Book, Crack Wars, Finitude's Score, Stupidity, and The Test Drive. Diane Davis is an associate professor of rhetoric at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter.  

Review :
"Avital Ronell has put together what must be one of the most remarkable critical oeuvres of our era… Zeugmatically yoking the slang of pop culture with philosophical analysis, forcing the confrontation of high literature and technology or drug culture, Avital Ronell produces sentences that startle, irritate, illuminate. At once hilarious and refractory, her books are like no others."--Jonathan Culler, Diacritics