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urn:uuid:ec0cc90a-1765-4ef2-8829-9f2342c9c922 03 15 9781685711795 00 EB E107 10 01 01 The Ruins of Solitude Maternity at the Limits of Academic Discourse 1 A01 Lette Bragg <p><bold>Lette Bragg</bold> received her PhD in English Language and Literature from Cornell University in 2018, with a Graduate Minor concentration in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research interests span continental philosophy, feminist theory, and postcolonial literature, and she has published articles in <italic>Cultural Studies Review, The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy,</italic> and <italic>Feminist Theory.</italic> Her work experiments with form and genre in an effort to stay with what is often effaced or smoothed over in academic discourse. <italic>The Ruins of Solitude</italic> is her first book.</p> 01 eng 00 96 03 23 Autotheory 23 maternity 10 SOC010000 10 FAM032000 23 Humanities+University 23 solitude 23 feminist studies 23 Philosophy 23 intersubjectivity 23 embodiment 23 becoming 23 philosophy 23 D.W. Winnicott 01 06 03 00 <p>What happens when love unravels one’s knowledge structures? In <italic>The</italic> <italic>Ruins of Solitude</italic>, after the birth of a child, Bragg embraces the event of love and examines the resulting disintegration of her supposed authorial subjectivity. Against the pressure to produce and organize knowledge—the pressure of writing a dissertation, for example—Bragg contemplates the poetic modes of thinking and ethics that emerge from her experience of reading continental philosophy while caring for her infant child. Dwelling on what she would have once excluded from her intellectual work—her maternity, the mole on her chest, her palm against another body, her exhaustion at the work of deconstruction—Bragg details a shift in her orientation and method that leads to creative theoretical thought, allowing her to illuminate and interrogate what she names “solitude,” a condition of academic discourse that limits our critical-liberatory projects of transformation.</p><p>Ultimately, <italic>The Ruins of Solitude</italic> lets go of authority and mastery, and engages in a poetic and fractured writing style that lets in the relationality of thought. Bragg offers a philosophy of bodies beyond solitude and an intimacy of love and writing that fractures solitude, bringing forward the possibility of selfhood and authorship uncontained by the isolationist, tangible time of the present. Bragg’s book also unravels familiar narratives of childcare, considering the parallels between poststructuralist theory and the embodied materiality of relation.</p> punctum books 01 punctum books 04 01 20241016 02 WORLD 06 15 9781685711788 06 15 9781685711795 WORLD 09 punctum books 20 01