Elias Canetti, or, the Failing of the Novel

To write a book about Elias Canetti is to engage in the problematic of marginality, of that voice that grapples obsessively with language and silence as they relate to historical contingency. A book about Canetti must be concerned with the ways in which we define the parameters of the linguistic territory as they affect the productive process of expressive forms; it must look at the way an individual consciousness is caught within a historical situation denying meaning and yet resists that denial, affirming signification, even if negational.