Failure and Ethics in Contemporary American Literature

By: Daniel Dufournaud

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Hardcover | 31 March 2026

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Failure and Ethics in Contemporary American Literature contends that failure is both a response to the social and economic conditions of neoliberalism and a site of ethical imagining where alternative modes of being and being together are proposed. Daniel Dufournaud capaciously construes failure to include performing badly, unhappiness and dysphoria, family dysfunction, and formal discontinuity. He contends that the function of failure in contemporary American literature resonates with the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas, the self emerges as a conscious subject only through the imposition of the Other, a preconscious sequence that installs responsibility for others at the heart of selfhood. Levinas frames the suspension of egoism and the self's concomitant awareness of its constitutive responsibility as an ethical interruption. Similarly, this study's primary texts treat failure as an interruption that forces the self to acknowledge its foundational sociality, an acknowledgement that contests neoliberalism's individualist protocols.

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