The highs and lows of structuralist reading / François Rigolot -- Rabelais' strength and the pitfalls of methodology / Michel Jeanneret -- "Blonde chef, grande conqueste" / Ann Rosalind Jones -- Louise Labé's feminist poetics / Carla Freccero -- Reading and writing in the tenth story of the Heptaméron / Floyd Gray -- Fetishism and storytelling in the Nouvelle 57 of Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron / Nancy Frelick -- Creative choreography / Malcolm Quainton -- An overshadowed valediction / Thomas Greene -- "De l'amitié" / Ann Moss -- Montaigne's death sentences / Lawrence Kritzman

Set in 'a world before Elvis, in a Liverpool before the Beatles', Terence Davies' film 'Distant Voices, Still Lives' is an elegiac and intensely autobiographical meditation on a post-war working-class childhood. Paul Farley's study of the film is both a personal response, as a Liverpudlian and as a poet, and an exploration of Davies' unique visual style, blending the spaces - the 'short halls, stairways, coal cellars and meter cupboards of northern England' - and sounds - the BBC shipping forecast, a pub sing-a-long, the strains of Vaughan Williams and Britten - of memory.

An indispensable collection of one of America's most outspoken and original critics of the second half of the twentieth century Man of letters, political critic, public intellectual, Irving Howe was one of America's most exemplary and embattled writers. Since his death in 1993 at age 72, Howe's work and his personal example of commitment to high principle, both literary and political, have had a vigorous afterlife. This posthumous and capacious collection includes twenty-six essays that originally appeared in such publications as the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the Nation. Taken together, they reveal the depth and breadth of Howe's enthusiasms and range over politics, literature, Judaism, and the tumults of American society. A Voice Still Heard is essential to the understanding of the passionate and skeptical spirit of this lucid writer. The book forms a bridge between the two parallel enterprises of culture and politics. It shows how politics justifies itself by culture, and how the latter prompts the former. Howe's voice is ever sharp, relentless, often scathingly funny, revealing Howe as that rarest of critics--a real reader and writer, one whose clarity of style is a result of his disciplined and candid mind.

As one of the 16th century's most brilliant writers, Montaigne formed his ethical self and his eventual theories of physical and spiritual skepticism. Zalloua explores this enlightened thinker's mind. (Literary Criticism)

Text in English with some contributions in French.

Montaigne's Essays resemble a patchwork of personal reflections, but they engage with questions that animate the human mind, and tend to a single goal: to live better in the present and to prepare for death. For this reason, Montaigne's thought and writings have been a subject of enduring interest across disciplines. This Handbook brings together essays by prominent scholars that examine Montaigne's literary, philosophical, and political contributions, and assess his legacy and relevance today in a global perspective. It presents Montaigne's Essays not only in their historical context but also as a starting point for discussing issues that concern us today.

More than three hundred years before the advent of psychoanalysis, Michel de Montaigne (1533--1592) embarked on a remarkable quest to see and imagine the self from a variety of vantages. He explored the significance of monsters, nightmares, and traumas; the fear of impotence; the fragility of gender; and the anticipation of death. For Montaigne, imagination lies at the core of an internal universe influencing both the body and the mind. "The fabulous imagination" can be curative, enabling the mind's "I" to sustain itself in the face of hardship. Tracing Montaigne's development of the Western concept of the self, Lawrence D. Kritzman begins with his study of the fragility of gender and its relationship to the peripatetic movement of a fabulous imagination. He then follows with the essayist's examination of the act of mourning and the power of the imagination to overcome the fear of death, and Montaigne's views on philosophy, experience, and the connection between self-portraiture, ethics, and oblivion.