Third Agents: Secret Protagonists of the Modern Imagination
About this ebook
This volume offers the first comprehensive account of third agency in modern literature and its intellectual and imaginative pre-history. It provides an accessible combination of close readings and theoretical reflection, presenting figures who inhabit in-between territories such as the adventurer, the bastard, the priest, the angel, the adulterer, the poet and the outcast. These figures are read as protagonists in a genealogy of modernity that has not yet been written. The essays here also provide fascinating answers as to why these secret protagonists often became major figures in modern philosophy and literary theory, and give new insights into such writers as Benjamin, Barthes and Derrida.
About the author
Ekkehard Knörer is a scholar of film and literature. He wrote his doctoral thesis on wit and ingenium in 17th and 18th century poetics and aesthetics, and has published articles mainly on film, most recently on Tod Browning and on Robert Bresson’s aesthetics of transubstantiation. He is currently working on a book-length study of copies and remakes in film, literature and the arts. He lives in Berlin.
Bernhard Malkmus is Assistant Professor of German at The Ohio State University. He works on the picaresque novel and colonial diaries and travelogues. He has published on W.G. Sebald, Alexander Kluge, intermediality, ecocriticism, and the picaresque narrative structure.
