Publisher's Synopsis
The essays collected in this volume trace the evolution over a period of thirty years of a critical approach resembling what would now be described as the new materialism. These essays insist that literature and film are never more vital than in their enactment of the brute meaning Maurice Merleau-Ponty once found in the work of Paul Cézanne: the crude sense we make, as creatures exercising an always already dispersed and relational agency, of the world we inhabit. This is a materialist criticism attentive at once to the forms brute meaning has taken in fiction and film, and to the history of its constitution by or in species, class, racial, and sexual difference.
