Failure and Ethics in Contemporary American Literature
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A01=Daniel Dufournaud
Author_Daniel Dufournaud
Category=DSBJ
Category=DSK
Contemporary American literature
deconstruction
Emmanuel Levinas
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
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ethics
failure
neoliberalism
Product details
- ISBN 9781399554466
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 31 Mar 2026
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Failure and Ethics in Contemporary American Literature contends that failure is both a response to the social and economic conditions of neoliberalism and a site of ethical imagining where alternative modes of being and being together are proposed. Daniel Dufournaud capaciously construes failure to include performing badly, unhappiness and dysphoria, family dysfunction, and formal discontinuity. He contends that the function of failure in contemporary American literature resonates with the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas, the self emerges as a conscious subject only through the imposition of the Other, a preconscious sequence that installs responsibility for others at the heart of selfhood. Levinas frames the suspension of egoism and the self’s concomitant awareness of its constitutive responsibility as an ethical interruption. Similarly, this study’s primary texts treat failure as an interruption that forces the self to acknowledge its foundational sociality, an acknowledgement that contests neoliberalism’s individualist protocols.
Daniel Dufournaud is an Assistant Professor at the University of Macau. He is the editor of ReFocus: The Films of John Singleton (EUP, 2024). His work appears in such journals as Poetics Today, College Literature, Studies in the Novel, Journal of Modern Literature and Journal of American Studies.
