Published in France as La jeune nee in 1975, and now translated for the first time into English, The Newly Born Woman seeks to uncover the veiled structures of language and society that have situated women in the position called 'woman's place.'

In this volume the author forces us to reconsider many privileged objects of humanistic inquiry: the discipline of criticism, the reader of a book or viewer of a film, the artist, the 'leading intellectual, ' and even the very notion of experience itself.

In this classic of critical thought, Deleuze and Guattari challenge conventional interpretations of Kafka's work. Instead of exploring preexisting categories or literary genres, they propose a concept of "minor literature"--the use of a major language that subverts it from within. Writing as a Jew in Prague, they contend, Kafka made German "take flight on a line of escape" and joyfully became a stranger within it. His work therefore serves as a model for understanding all critical language that must operate within the confines of the dominant language and culture.

In Social Figures, Daniel Cottom maps the course of this bourgeois project. His analysis centers on the discourse of the liberal intellectual, as exemplified in the novels of George Eliot, whose awareness of her aesthetic and social task was keener than that of most Victorian writers.

Upon its publication in Germany in 1983, this author's book stirred both critical acclaim and consternation, attracting a wide readership. He finds cynicism the dominant mode in contemporary culture, in personal and institutional settings; his book is both a history of the impulse and an investigation of its role today, among those whose earlier hopes for social change have crumbled and faded away.