The "ancient quarrel" between philosophy and literature seems to have been resolved once and for all with the recognition that philosophy and the arts may be allies instead of enemies. Critical Excess examines in detail the work of five thinkers who have had a huge, ongoing impact on the study of literature and film: Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Slavoj Zizek, and Stanley Cavell. Their approaches are very different from one another, but they each make unexpected interpretive leaps that render their readings exhilarating and unnerving. But do they go too far? Does a...

This book re-assesses director Jean Renoir's work between his departure from France in 1940 and his death in 1979, and contributes to the debate over how the medium of film registers the impact of trauma.

The 1930s ended in catastrophe for both for Renoir and for France: La Regle du jeu was a critical and commercial disaster on its release in July 1939 and in 1940 France was occupied by Germany. Even so, Renoir continued to innovate and experiment with his post-war work, yet the thirteen films he made between 1941 and 1969, constituting nearly half of his work in sound...

This work examines ethical problems raised by a number of key 20th century theoretical and fictional texts by authors such as Levinas, Sartre, Beauvoir, Yourcenar, Duras and Genet. It argues that even ethical texts frequently depict conflict as an insurmountable aspect of human relations.