FLIRTATIONS I D I O M INVENTING WRITING THEORY Jacques Lezra and Paul North, series editors FLIRTATIONS RHETORIC AND AESTHETICS THIS SIDE OF SEDUCTION Edited by DANIEL HOFFMAN-S CHWARTZ, BARBARA NATALIE NAGEL, AND LAUREN SHIZUKO STONE Fordham University Press New York 2015 Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the per sis tence or accuracy of URLs for external or third- party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data available online at catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1 First edition CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii “Almost Nothing; Almost Everything”: An Introduction to the Discourse of Flirtation Daniel Hoffman- Schwartz, Barbara Natalie Nagel, and Lauren Shizuko Stone 1 META- FLIRTATIONS INTERLUDE. Barely Covered Banter: Flirtation in Double Indemnity Daniel Hoffman- Schwartz 13 The Art of Flirtation: Simmel’s Coquetry Without End Paul Fleming 19 “The Double- Sense of the ‘With’ ”: Rethinking Relation after Simmel Daniel Hoffman- Schwartz 31 Rhetoric’s Flirtation with Literature, from Gorgias to Aristotle: The Epideictic Genre Rüdiger Campe 37 Playing with Yourself: On the Self- Reference of Flirtation Arne Höcker 51 FLIRTATION WITH THE WORLD INTERLUDE. Staging Appeal, Performing Ambivalence Lauren Shizuko Stone 61 Life Is a Flirtation: Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull Elisabeth Strowick 64 vi CONTENTS The “Irreducibly Doubled Stroke”: Flirtation, Felicity, and Sincerity Lauren Shizuko Stone 74 Frill and Flirtation: Femininity in the Public Space Barbara Vinken 82 Learning to Flirt with Don Juan Christophe Koné 91 FLIRTATION AND TRANSGRESSION INTERLUDE. Three Terrors of Flirtation Barbara Natalie Nagel 101 The Luxury of Self- Destruction: Flirting with Mimesis with Roger Caillois John Hamilton 106 War time Love Affairs and Deathly Flirtation: Freud and Caillois on Identifying with Loss Sage Anderson 116 Bestiality: Mediation More Ferarum Jacques Lezra 125 Doing It as the Beasts Did: Intertextuality as Flirtation in Gradiva Barbara Natalie Nagel 136 Notes 143 List of Contributors 171 Index 175 AC KNOW LEDG MENTS First and foremost we would like to thank each of our contributors, whose enthusiastic embrace of the topic has yielded a volume of es- says in the spirit of fl irtation. As many of the ideas and passages in this book are the direct result of a workshop held at New York Uni- versity in 2012, we would also like to thank all those who partici- pated in that conversation. The workshop was made possible by funding from The Humanities Initiative, the Program in Poetics and Theory, and the Department of Comparative Literature at NYU. The success of that event was due in no small part to assistance from Susan Protheroe, Brooke Baker, and Mari MacLean. The visual de- sign that was used to promote the workshop and on which the cover of this book was based belongs to David Rager. We are par- ticularly grateful for the support of Helen Tartar, and we are deeply saddened that she was not able see the book’s publication. Thanks are due as well to Tom Lay for his work throughout the pro cess and also to Richard Morrison for his support in the late stages. We are also pleased to thank the departments of Comparative Literature at NYU and Harvard for their fi nancial support for the publication; heartfelt thanks as well to Jacques Lezra and especially John Hamilton, who championed this project from its earliest stages. Finally, we would also like to thank Paul North and (again) Jacques Lezra, for their inclusion of this work in their “Idiom” series, a context that per- fectly suits the spirit of Flirtations. vii FLIRTATIONS