The Violence of Reading Literature and Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain

The Violence of Reading: Literature and Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain expounds the scene of reading as one that produces an overwhelmed body exposed to uncontainable forms of violence. The book argues that the act of reading induces a representational instability that causes the referential function of language to collapse. This breakdown releases a type of “linguistic pain” (Scarry; Butler; Hamacher) that indicates a constitutive wounding of the reading body. The wound of language marks a rupture between linguistic reality and the phenomenal world. Exploring this rupture in various ways, the book brings together texts and genres from diverse traditions and offers close examinations of the rhetoric of masochism (Sacher-Masoch; Deleuze), the relation between reading and abuse (Nietzsche; Proust; Jelinek), the sublime experience of reading (Kant; Kafka; de Man), the “novel of the institution” (Musil; Campe), and literary suicide (Bachmann; Berryman; Okkervil River).

1. Introduction: Violence and the Text.- 2. Cry Me a Reader.- 3. The Promise of Oblivion.- 4. Transcendental Masochism.- 5. Sublime Sufferings.- 6. Sticks and Stones.

Dominik Zechner served as the Artemis A.W. and Martha Joukowsky Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University’s Pembroke Center and is currently an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University.

Zechner is the co-editor of Forces of Education: Walter Benjamin and the Politics of Pedagogy (Bloomsbury, 2023) and Thresholds, Encounters: Paul Celan and the Claim of Philology (SUNY, 2023). He is also the co-editor of a special issue of parallax (“Initiations: The Pitfalls of Beginning,” vol. 28.3, 2022) and the editor of a special issue of Modern Language Notes (“What is a Prize?” vol. 131.5, 2016).