The Rhetoric of Sincerity
Published on 6. November 2008
Book
Paperback/Softback
352 pages
978-0-8047-6302-8 (ISBN)
Description
In times of intercultural tensions and conflicts, sincerity matters. Traditionally, sincerity concerns a performance of authenticity and truth, a performance that in intercultural situations is easily misunderstood. Sincerity plays a major role in law, the arts-literature, but especially the visual and performing arts-and religion. Sincerity enters the English language in the sixteenth century, when theatre emerged as the dominant idiom of secular representation, during a time of major religious changes. The present historical moment has much in common with that era; with its religious and cultural conflicts and major transformations in representational idioms and media. The Rhetoric of Sincerity is concerned with the ways in which the performance of sincerity is culturally specific and is enacted in different media and disciplines. The book focuses on the theatricality of sincerity, its bodily, linguistic, and social performances, and the success or failure of such performances.
Reviews / Votes
"This brilliantly conceived and well-executed volume combines the surprising and the obvious in the very best way: there is, to my knowledge, no existing significant body of contemporary critical discourse on the subject, but once we are presented with its theme, it appears not only exciting and important, but inevitable. The Rhetoric of Sincerity is the kind of book that calls an entire field of inquiry into being." -Mark Reinhardt, Williams CollegeMore details
Series
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Palo Alto
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
New edition
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 228 mm
Width: 153 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
483 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8047-6302-8 (9780804763028)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Ernst van Alphen is Professor of Literary Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Mieke Bal is Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Professor. She is based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam. Carel Smith is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the Meijers Research Institute in Law, both at Leiden University, The Netherlands.
Content
Contents List of Contributors xxx Introduction 000 Ernst van Alphen and Mieke Bal Part I. Sincerity as Subjectivity Effect 1 "Why do you tear me from Myself?": Torture, Truth, and the Arts of the Counter-Reformation 000 Jane Taylor 2 Melody and Monotone: Performing Sincerity in Republican France 000 Katherine Bergeron 3 The Irreconcilability of Hypocrisy and Sincerity 000 Frans-Willem Korsten 4 The Rhetoric of Justification: The Preponderance of Decisions over Rules 000 Carel Smith 5 Must We (NOT) Mean What We Say? Seriousness and Sincerity in the Work of J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell 000 Hent de Vries Part II. Declining Sincerity 6 Can the Subaltern Confess? Pasolini, Gramsci, Foucault, and the Deployment of Sexuality 000 Cesare Casarino 7 Like a Dog: Narrative and Confession in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace and The Lives of Animals 000 Yasco Horsman 8 Putting Sincerity to Work: Acquiescence and Refusal in Postfordist Art 000 David McNeill 9 When Sincerity Fails: Literatures of Migration and the Emblematic Labor of Personhood 000 Leslie A. Adelson Part III. Sincerity as a Media Effect 10 A Feeling of Insincerity: Politics, Ventriloquy, and the Dialectics of Gesture in Mediality 000 Jill Bennet 11 Derrida on Film: Staging Spectral Sincerity 000 Michael Bachmann 12 Documenting September 11th: Trauma and the (Im)possibility of Sincerity 000 Alison Young 13 Being Angela Merkel 000 Maaike Bleeker 14 "Saying Everything" and Affected Self-Disclosure in the Works of Reinaldo Arenas and Herv' Guibert 000 Reindert Dhondt Notes 000 Bibliography 000 Index 000