Deleuze and American Literature

" Bourassa has written a splendid book that speaks to the deep relation of the novel as a literary form to the meaning of being. . . This book marks an important contribution to the growing theoretical work concerned with reading Deleuze in the context of literature and film. " - Choice

" Deleuze and American Literature expertly spins a unique weave of concepts for the analysis of the novel. Affect, event, force, singularity, the outside, and the virtual. These concepts interlace and vary to generate a series of refreshingly original readings of nineteenth and twentieth century authors revolving around the notion of the nonhuman. Provocatively, it is from this notion that Bourassa draws his theory of character. The tension between the humanity of the novelistic character and its nonhuman conditions of literary emergence unfolds into an extended meditation on the difference between morality and ethics, playing out in particular around issues of race and gender. A masterful contribution to literary theory and the philosophy of the novel. " - Brian Massumi, University of Montreal and author of Parables for the Virtual