In nine linked essays, Riley deftly unravels the rhetoric of lifeโs absurdities and urgencies, its comforts and embarrassments, to insist on the forcible affect of language itself. She teases out the emotional complexities of such quotidian matters as what she ironically terms the right to be lonely in the face of the imperative to be social or the guilt associated with feeling as if youโre lying when you arenโt. Impersonal Passion reinvents questions from linguistics, the philosophy of language, and cultural theory in an illuminating new idiom: the compelling emotion of the language of the everyday.
Denise Riley is a professor in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of East Anglia. Her books include The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony; โAm I That Name?โ Feminism and the Category of โWomenโ in History; and War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother, as well as many collections of poetry.