The Lost Thread: The Democracy of Modern Fiction

In The Lost Thread, Rancière debunks the notion of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Conrad, Woolf and Keats as reactionary producers of bourgeois mythologies, and instead foregrounds the egalitarian and democratic impulses of modernist literature. Contrary to the canonical interpretation of the relation between modernism and capitalism via the commodification of everyday life, Rancière proposes a radical rethinking of our received ideas regarding the politics of aesthetics in the modern era. Through a complex and original stitching together of form and content, modernists strove to depict by embodying new forms and regimes of material and everyday life. Rancière articulates this substantial change in the politics of representation by explaining the shattering of the sacrosanct hierarchies of the genres and life-forms of classical literature. In the midst of the 19th century, poets, novelists and playwrights challenged the narrative staples of noble means and moral ends, and introduced an entirely new “structure of feeling”. In this work, Ranciere continues his project of outlining an egalitarian “distribution of the sensible” as the compelling linkage between politics and aesthetics in the modern age. The Lost Thread not only advances Rancière’s commended work on aesthetics, it also offers the reader in depth analyses of the writers in question.

Table of Contents:
Translator’s Introduction Foreword I. The Lost Thread of the Novel II. Marlow’s Lie III. The death of Prue Ramsay IV. Republic of the poets V. The infinite taste of the Republic VI. The Theatre of Thoughts Notes Index

About the Author :
Jacques Rancière is one of the most influential philosophers writing today. He taught at the University of Paris VIII, France, from 1969 to 2000, occupying the Chair of Aesthetics and Politics from 1990 until his retirement. Steven Corcoran is a writer and translator living in Berlin. He has edited and/or translated several works by Jacques Rancière, including Dissensus (Continuum, 2010), two works by Alain Badiou, Polemics (2006) and Conditions (Continuum, 2008) and Alienation and Freedom by Frantz Fanon (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).

Review :
Rancière’s continues his recent explorations of the aesthetics and politics of fiction, poetry, and theater in this beautifully written and elegantly translated volume. The dissensual strategies of thinking, speaking, and acting that Rancière finds in literary modernism are no less active in the spheres of politics and the social sciences, and this book will be of immense interest not only to scholars and students working in these fields, but to artists, writers, and activists experimenting with new modes of aesthetic and political invention today.