While we conventionally define solitude as the absence of relation, The Ruins of Solitude takes up solitude as a rubric of legible subjectivity that regulates what it means to interact with and make meaning within a material world. Working to imagine an alternative to solitude, the book considers how this mode of embodiment intersects with knowledge production, exploring ways of being and knowing in the academy that refuse to perform or reproduce solitude. The book thus enacts a philosophy of bodies beyond solitude, undergoing an intimacy of bodies, love, and writing such that solitude fractures.
Through line breaks, exhaustion, interruption, and repetition, The Ruins of Solitude acknowledges and draws from a poeticity of selfhood and authorship uncontained by the tangible time of the present. A phenomenological account of the intense intimacy possible of skin-to-skin contact that ruptures solitudinous paradigms of knowing and being, The Ruins of Solitude unravels familiar narratives of childcare, considering the parallels between poststructuralist theory and the embodied materiality of relation.
About the Author
Lette Bragg received her Ph.D. 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 Cultural Studies Review, The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, and Feminist Theory. Her work experiments with form and genre in an effort to stay with what is often effaced or smoothed over in academic discourse. The Ruins of Solitude is her first book.