[It] provides a meticulous resource and sets an ambitious standard for all those who question how to think about literature.

French Studies

Jacob Bittner's The Emergence of Literature provides a welcome and rigorous reassessment of modern literature and theory's lost or 'unthought' unifying paradigm. ... In a field that has tended in recent years toward fragmentation and an increasing lack of communication between new schools, this is invigorating reassertion of a unifying paradigm that will serve as the basis for future dialogue on literary studies' most significant questions.

Style

At a time when literary writings are studied primarily as manifestations of a given reality (moral needs, ecological dangers, racial problems, mental issues), Jacob Bittner's The Emergence of Literature offers a timely return to a critical tradition - running from the Schlegel brothers, Kant and Hölderlin over Heidegger and Blanchot to Barthes and Agamben - that chooses to define literature in its own terms. Taking his central cue from Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's L'absolu littéraire, Bittner aims for what he terms an archeology of literary theory, an understanding of the conceptual framework that made possible the idea that the true poet cannot but write poetry and that to write means to write 'intransitively', without reference to an external object. Bittner's book is by no means an easy read, but given the complex philosophical and aesthetic issues that he deals with, that in itself can only be taken as a compliment. A proper historiography of literary theory is one of the larger projects that the field of literary studies is in need of: I take this book to become a central contribution to that collective endeavor.

Jürgen Pieters, Professor of Literary Theory, Ghent University, Belgium

Bittner's work represents a genuinely original and interesting contribution both to contemporary literary-philosophical and literary-theoretical debate and to intellectual-historical accounts of the development of literary thought and practice since the Romantic era.

Ian James, Head of Department of French and Reader in Modern French Literature and Thought, University of Cambridge, UK, and author of The New French Philosophy (2012)

This book is the most thorough exploration of the 'Literary Absolute' I know – and a condensed intellectual history of continental thought in modernity.

Christian Benne, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and editor of Nietzsche und die Lyrik : Ein Kompendium (2017), Athenäum and Orbis Litterarum

A remarkable intellectual feat, based on an in- depth knowledge of continental philosophy and modern literary theory.

Recherche littéraire/Literary Research