Between Terror and Freedom: Philosophy, Politics, and Fiction Speak of Modernity

About the Book

In this volume, Simona Goi and Frederick M. Dolan gather stimulating arguments for the indispensability of fiction—including poetry, drama, and film—as irreplaceable sites for wrestling with nature, meaning , shortcomings, and the future of modern politics. Between Terror and Freedom brings to the surface an understanding of modernity as a multifaceted and dynamic narrative as it relates to politics, philosophy, and fiction. Collecting essays across fields, Goi and Dolan challenge strict disciplinary boundaries. This is not meant to be read as another contribution to the debate of whether literature is, can, or should be political. Between Terror and Freedom instead reveals how literature illuminates and expands our understanding of philosophical and political questions. Political theorists, philosophers, cultural scholars, and rhetoricians offer a fresh perspective on the questions of our age and the paradoxes of modernity when they read literature.

Table of Contents:

Chapter 1 Introduction
Part 2 After God and Foundations: Pessimism, Worldliness, and Transcendence
Chapter 3 Thinking and Poetry: Wallace Stevens and Martin Heidegger
Chapter 4 "Phantom Wisdom:" Kant's Transcendental Sophistry
Chapter 5 Cervantes as Educator: Don Quixote and the Practice of Pessimism
Part 6 Re-imaging thie Polis: Aesthetics, Freedom, Corruption, and the Law
Chapter 7 Albert Camus on Tragedy and the Ambiguity of Politics
Chapter 8 Stirring Up of Passion: Must We Fear an Aesthetic Polics?
Chapter 9 On the "Terror" of Polis Freedom: From Martin Heidegger to Jan Patocka and the Czech Velvet Revolution
Chapter 10 Theodicies of Corruption
Chapter 11 Despotic Observation: Montesquieu on the Sociology of Law
Part 12 Politics Amidst Ordinary Life: Freedom, Nature, and Necessity
Chapter 13 Food and Freedom in The Flounder
Chapter 14 "O Happy Living Things": Frankenfoods and the Bounds of Wordsworthian Natural Piety
Chapter 15 Against Heroes: Arendt and McCarthy on the Social
Part 16 Writing Modernity: Text and Context
Chapter 17 "A Superior Disorder": The Writing, Editing, and Censorship of Madame Bovary
Chapter 18 "Written and Unwritten America: Roth on Reacing, Politics, and Theory"

About the Author :
Simona Goi is associate professor of political science at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Frederick Michael Dolan is a member of the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Rhetoric.

Review :
The essays in this fine collection address an urgent need — that we begin to overcome the gap that has grown between the disciplinary studies of the idea of modernity and the experience of modernity itself. Dolan and Goi have developed a coherent and powerful set of themes out of any school, affording us new insight into the multiple meanings of modernity. Between Terror and Freedom is a remarkably diverse set of thematically linked essays, all of which strive to make sense of the dangers and possibilities of politics in the late modern age. The resources of philosophy, literary criticism, legal, andpolitical theory are deployed by the authors with an attentiveness to text and context and a lightness of touch rarely encountered in a work of this kind. Eminently readable and thought-provoking throughout.... Between Terror and Freedom is a remarkably diverse set of thematically linked essays, all of which strive to make sense of the dangers and possibilities of politics in the late modern age. The resources of philosophy, literary criticism, legal, and political theory are deployed by the authors with an attentiveness to text and context and a lightness of touch rarely encountered in a work of this kind. Eminently readable and thought-provoking throughout.