Words' Worth

Claudia Brodsky is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, USA, and ancien Directeur de Programme at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris, France. Her publications include The Imposition of Form (1987), Lines of Thought (1996), Birth of a Nation'hood (co-edited with Toni Morrison, 1997), In the Place of Language (2009), Inventing Agency (co-edited with Eloy LaBrada, Bloomsbury, 2017), and The Linguistic Condition (forthcoming Bloomsbury, 2020).

• Acknowledgments Part I. Language Theory and Poetics 1. Wordsworth and the “Material Difference” of the “Real Language of Men”2. A “Complex Scene”3. “What the Poet Does”4. The Poetics of Contradiction 5. “The True Difficulty”6. “Spontaneous Overflow” StagedPart II. “Real Language” in Action7. “Strange Fits”8. “A Slumber . . .”9. “Imagination”Part III. Necessary Poetics: Theory of the Real10. “The Real Horizon” (Beyond Emotion): “Living Things” “That Do Not Live Like Living Men,” or the “Path” of the Subject Crossed11. “The Real Horizon” (Before Emotion): What Proust (Rousseau, Diderot, and Hegel) Had "in" MindBibliography Index

In this compelling study, Claudia Brodsky radically revises our understanding of what the poet does, above all by developing dazzling readings of what Wordsworth meant by such central terms as real language, imagination, and nature. Through Brodsky’s tenacious, fine-grained readings of Wordsworth’s poetry and poetics – and also through her perceptive discussions of other writers from Diderot to De Man – language emerges as uniquely active and as capable of producing a distinctive kind of knowledge that goes beyond the merely empirical. This is a revelatory book that will transform our sense of the capacities of poetry for good.