This adventurous critical inquiry into Sontag's archive illuminates the intimate link between modernism and theory while also providing a fascinating reintroduction to these two movements and concepts. Mena Mitrano explores three core ideas in this study: the confusion of terms between modernism and theory; the concept of an 'unwritten theory' suggested by Sontag's subterranean engagement with the foremost theorists of our time (Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan, Jameson and others) in the rawness of her journals and notebooks; and Sontag's identity as a non-traditional philosopher, through...

Provides a road map for negotiating the tensions between the text and the world in our reading practices It sets out an innovative agenda for approaching literary critique which will open new avenues of research especially with regard to the formation of disciplines and critical method in literary studies It deals with the link between modernism and theory as an important object of intellectual history and discusses theory as much more than a transatlantic moment of modernization It elaborates on the potential of feminism and psychoanalysis to respond to the new relational ontologies by...