After Blanchot
Title | After Blanchot PDF eBook |
Author | Leslie Hill |
Publisher | University of Delaware Press |
Pages | 292 |
Release | 2005 |
Genre | Literary Collections |
ISBN | 9780874139464 |
What does it mean to come after Blanchot? Three things, at least. First, it is to recognise that it is no longer possible to believe in an essentialist determination of literary discourse or of aesthetic experience. All this has disappeared; and there is no way back. Second, there is the question of history. What is Blanchot's legacy to us, his readers? Any name, however irreplaceably singular, is always already preceded, limited, challenged even, by the abiding anonymity of the person, animal, or thing it claims to name. Every name is necessarily impersonal, anonymous, other. Blanchot after Blanchot, then, can best be understood in the sense of that which is according to Blanchot - and that is nothing other than the infinite process of reading and rereading Blanchot: without end. Here, a third meaning to the phrase after Blanchot comes into view. For if we come after Blanchot, it is surely because Blanchot is still before us, still in front, still in the future, still to come.
The Space of Literature
Title | The Space of Literature PDF eBook |
Author | Maurice Blanchot |
Publisher | U of Nebraska Press |
Pages | 393 |
Release | 2015-11 |
Genre | Literary Collections |
ISBN | 0803278772 |
Maurice Blanchot, the eminent literary and cultural critic, has had a vast influence on contemporary French writers--among them Jean Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. From the 1930s through the present day, his writings have been shaping the international literary consciousness. The Space of Literature, first published in France in 1955, is central to the development of Blanchot's thought. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of Mallarmé, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Blanchot's discussions of those writers are among the finest in any language.
The Step Not Beyond
Title | The Step Not Beyond PDF eBook |
Author | Lycette Nelson |
Publisher | SUNY Press |
Pages | 172 |
Release | 1992-07-01 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 9780791409084 |
This book is a translation of Maurice Blanchot's work that is of major importance to late 20th-century literature and philosophy studies. Using the fragmentary form, Blanchot challenges the boundaries between the literary and the philosophical. With the obsessive rigor that has always marked his writing, Blanchot returns to the themes that have haunted his work since the beginning: writing, death, transgression, the neuter, but here the figures around whom his discussion turns are Hegel and Nietzsche rather than Mallarme and Kafka. The metaphor Blanchot uses for writing in The Step Not Beyond is the game of chance. Fragmentary writing is a play of limits, a play of ever-multiplied terms in which no one term ever takes precedence. Through the randomness of the fragmentary, Blanchot explores ideas as varied as the relation of writing to luck and to the law, the displacement of the self in writing, the temporality of the Eternal Return, the responsibility of the self towards the others.
Blanchot and Literary Criticism
Title | Blanchot and Literary Criticism PDF eBook |
Author | Mark Hewson |
Publisher | A&C Black |
Pages | 177 |
Release | 2011-09-01 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1441115234 |
An outstanding overview of Blanchot's importance to contemporary literary theory.
The Work of Fire
Title | The Work of Fire PDF eBook |
Author | Maurice Blanchot |
Publisher | Stanford University Press |
Pages | 366 |
Release | 1995 |
Genre | Literary Collections |
ISBN | 9780804724937 |
Maurice Blanchot is arguably the key figure after Sartre in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. Blanchot developed a distinctive, limpid form of essay writing; these essays, in form and substance, left their imprint on the work of the most influential French theorists. The writings of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida are unimaginable without Blanchot. Published in French in 1949, The Work of Fire is a collection of twenty-two essays originally published in literary journals. Certain themes recur repeatedly: the relation of literature and language to death; the significance of repetition; the historical, personal, and social function of literature; and simply the question what is at stake in the fact that something such as art or literature exists? Among the authors discussed are Kafka, Mallarme;, Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sartre, Gide, Pascal, Vale;ry, Hemingway, and Henry Miller.
The Book to Come
Title | The Book to Come PDF eBook |
Author | Maurice Blanchot |
Publisher | Stanford University Press |
Pages | 292 |
Release | 2003 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9780804742245 |
Featuring essays originally published in La Nouvelle Revue Française, this collection clearly demonstrates why Maurice Blanchot was a key figure in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy.
The Writing of the Disaster
Title | The Writing of the Disaster PDF eBook |
Author | Maurice Blanchot |
Publisher | U of Nebraska Press |
Pages | 201 |
Release | 2015-11 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0803277474 |
Modern history is haunted by the disasters of the century--world wars, concentration camps, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust--grief, anger, terror, and loss beyond words, but still close, still impending. How can we write or think about disaster when by its very nature it defies speech and compels silence, burns books and shatters meaning? The Writing of the Disaster reflects upon efforts to abide in disaster's infinite threat. First published in French in 1980, it takes up the most serious tasks of writing: to describe, explain, and redeem when possible, and to admit what is not possible. Neither offers consolation. Maurice Blanchot has been praised on both sides of the Atlantic for his fiction and criticism. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas once remarked that Blanchot's writing is a "language of pure transcendence, without correlative." Literary theorist and critic Geoffrey Hartman remarked that Blanchot's influence on contemporary writers "cannot be overestimated."