Seductive Reasoning: Pluralism as the Problematic of Contemporary Literary Theory - Softcover

"Difference excludes. On this irreducible principle of irreducibility much literary theory is founded. With its internal drive to system and purity, theory enacts the necessity of exclusion; and so an appeal to theory often prefigures a justification of exclusion. The only contemporary movement whose relation to theory might seem ambivalent is pluralism, which, insofar as it insists on anything, insists on repressing its own exclusions. Ellen Rooney argues in her new book that pluralism maintains its identity by rigorous exclusion--'the exclusion of exclusion' itself."--Modern Philology

Seductive Reasoning takes a provocative look at contemporary Anglo-American literary theory, calling into question the critical consensus on pluralism's nature and its status in literary studies. Drawing on the insights of Marxist and feminist critical theory and on the works of Althusser, Derrida, and Foucault, Rooney reads the pluralist's invitation to join in a "dialogue" as a seductive gesture. Critics who respond find that they must seek to persuade all of their potential readers. Rooney examines pluralism as a form of logic in the work of E. D. Hirsch, as a form of ethics for Wayne Booth, as a rhetoric of persuasion in the books of Stanley Fish. For Paul de Man, Rooney argues, pluralism was a rhetoric of tropes just as it was, for Fredric Jameson, a form of politics.