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book: Sibling Action
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Sibling Action

The Genealogical Structure of Modernity
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2017

About this book

Stefani Engelstein argues that the sibling paradigm shaped the modern subject, life sciences, human sciences, and collective identities such as race, religion, and gender. Integrating close readings with panoramic intellectual history, Sibling Action presents a compelling new understanding of systems of knowledge.

Author / Editor information

Stefani Engelstein is associate professor and chair of the department of Germanic languages and literature at Duke University. She is the author of Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse (2008) and coeditor of Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture (2011).

Reviews

Robert Mitchell, author of Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature:
The scope, complexity, and importance of Sibling Action is extraordinary: working fluently and fluidly across German, French, and British eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literatures and sciences, as well as ancient Greek tragedy and its modern interpretations, Engelstein establishes convincingly that the sibling is a key “boundary object” by means of which many of our modern disciplines, as well as the very notion of disciplinarity, have established themselves. Sibling Action is an enormous contribution not only to German and British literary studies, but also to science studies and contemporary feminist theory, and is certain to be a key reference in all of those fields for a long time to come.

Laura Otis, author of Rethinking Thought: Inside the Minds of Creative Scientists and Artists:
In an utterly original way, Engelstein reveals how the figure of the sibling—not quite self and not quite other—has shaped Western understandings of biology, language, and politics. Through deft analysis, she uncovers an epistemological move that since the late eighteenth century has been destabilizing quests for origins and descriptions of unique, historically grounded individuals: a lateral rather than a vertical comparison that blurs boundaries by claiming both affinity and difference.

Marc Redfield, author of Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America:
This ambitious, powerful, and highly original study examines the figure of the sibling as a major anchoring device of the epistemological and political systems of modernity—a figure that not only relays the great shift from a vertical model of sovereignty to a horizontal one of fraternité but also causes trouble for the various systems it underwrites by transforming dichotomies into more open relational structures. At the same time, Engelstein interrogates the gender politics of this master trope by way of the figure of the sister, whose role in the new citizenship model that emerged from the French Revolution was to provide a locus of stable affective bonding, while being excluded from the public sphere. Through incisive readings of texts by Sophocles, Schiller, Rousseau, Lessing, Goethe, Shelley, Byron, and George Eliot, among others, Engelstein open up archives in a new way and adds her eloquent voice to the ongoing discussion of cosmopolitanism and participatory democracy.

Adrian Daub, Stanford University:
As inviting, invigorating, and stimulating an academic book as I have encountered. An astonishing read from the first page to the last.

Topics

  • Publicly Available

    Frontmatter

    i
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  • Publicly Available

    CONTENTS

    vii
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    List of Illustrations

    ix
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    Acknowledgments

    xi
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    INTRODUCTION: THE SIBLING AND MODERNITY

    1
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  • PART I. RECUPERATING THE SIBLING
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    1. SIBLING LOGIC

    35
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  • PART II. FRATERNITY AND REVOLUTION
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    2. THE SHADOWS OF FRATERNITY

    59
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    3. ECONOMIZING DESIRE: THE SIBLING (IN) LAW

    87
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  • PART III. GENEALOGICAL SCIENCES
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    4. LIVING LANGUAGES: COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY AND EVOLUTION

    125
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    5. THE EAST COMES HOME: RACE AND RELIGION

    174
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    EPILOGUE: SPAWNING DISCIPLINES

    225
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    Notes

    239
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    Works Cited

    309
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    Index

    341
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
December 5, 2017
eBook ISBN:
9780231542715
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Other:
18 b&w figures
View content
https://doi.org/10.7312/enge18040
eBook ISBN: 9780231542715
Audience(s) for this book
Professional and scholarly;
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