Table Of ContentLiterary Theories of Uncertainty
Literary Theories of Uncertainty
Edited by
Mette Leonard Høeg
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For Thomas
Selbst die kleinste Unsicherheit in der geringfügigsten Sache ist doch immer
quälend.
– Franz Kafka, Der Prozeß (1925)
Contents
List of figures viii
List of contributors ix
1 Introduction: Towards a conception of ‘literary theory of
uncertainty’ Mette Leonard Høeg 1
Part I Post-structuralist legacies of uncertainty
2 Suspended sentence: Experience of the undecidable Patrick ffrench 27
3 Poetry, formalism and undecidability: Some verse
explorations Christopher Norris 45
Part II Life-writing and uncertainty
4 In an undecidable: An ethical and literary right Christopher Fynsk 75
5 Temporal undecidability: In retrospect and prospect Max Saunders 92
6 Ghosts of dead authors Mieke Bal 110
Part III Contemporary literary uncertainties
7 No-fault murder: Neoliberalism and Nordic noir Bruce Robbins 139
8 Collage forms and undecidability in the work of Emine Sevgi
Özdamar’s Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde Hannah Vinter 151
9 Interrogating twilight Nicholas Royle 178
Index 201
Figures
6.1 Ken Aptekar, Is that You? 1997 111
6.2 Thomas Germaine plays Descartes 117
6.3 Scene ‘Boredom Sets In’: Marja Skaffari enacting Emma’s boredom 121
6.4 A two-dimensional figuration of the traumatic state 128
8.1 Hamlet collage, by Emine Sevgi Özdamar 157
8.2 Hamlet collage, by Emine Sevgi Özdamar 160
Contributors
Mieke Bal is a cultural theorist, critic, video artist and occasional curator who
works in cultural analysis, literature and art, focusing on gender, migratory
culture, psychoanalysis and the critique of capitalism. Her forty books include
a trilogy on political art. Her video project, Madame B, with Michelle Williams
Gamaker, is widely exhibited, in 2017 combined with paintings by Edvard Munch
in the Munch Museum in Oslo. After Reasonable Doubt, on René Descartes and
Queen Kristina (2016), she made a sixteen-channel video installation On Quijote:
Sad Countenances, and the short essay film It’s About Time! Reflections on Urgency.
Patrick ffrench is Professor of French at King’s College London, where he works
on twentieth-century French literature, film and thought and on critical theory.
He is the author of five books: The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel (1995);
The Cut: Reading Georges Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil (2000); After Bataille: Sacrifice,
Exposure, Community (2007); Thinking Cinema with Proust (2018) and Roland
Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics (2019). He is also the co-editor
(with Roland-François Lack) of The Tel Quel Reader (1998). His current work
includes projects on Deleuze and Proust and on the legacies of Félix Guattari.
Christopher Fynsk is Chief Academic Officer of the European Graduate School
and Dean of the Division of Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought. His publica-
tions include the following monographs: Heidegger: Thought and Historicity
(1986) (Expanded Edition, 1996); Language and Relation: . . . that there is
language, (1996); Infant Figures (2000); The Claim of Language: A Case for the
Humanities, (2006); Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot’s Exilic Writing (2013); Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe’s Phrase (2017). He is also the editor of Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe’s Typography: Philosophy, Mimesis, Politics (1989). His forthcoming
work bears the working title, The Rhythmic Figure.
Mette Leonard Høeg is Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. She
wrote her PhD on the notion of undecidability in twentieth-century literary
theory and literature, in particular in the works of Ford Madox Ford and Robert
Musil. She studied at the University of Copenhagen, Humboldt University, UC
Berkeley and King’s College London, and is a Fulbright scholar. Her research
