This is a collection in translation of recent essays by Tzvetan Todorov, one of the most eminent of today's literary critics. The essays concentrate on the idea of genre, literary or otherwise, and asks such questions as: What is literature? What is genre? Which are the major literary genres? In the first section, Todorov proposes definitions for the notions of literature, discourse, and genre. Following is a general discussion of the two principal literary genres, fiction and poetry. Finally, in the third section of essays, Todorov examines individual authors as case studies: among them Poe,...
This is a collection in translation of recent essays by Tzvetan Todorov, one of the most eminent of today's literary critics. The essays concentrate o...
The ancient Middle East was the theater of passionate interaction between Phoenicians, Aramaeans, Arabs, Jews, Greeks, and Romans. At the crossroads of the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and the Arabian peninsula, the area dominated by what the Romans called Syria was at times a scene of violent confrontation, but more often one of peaceful interaction, of prosperous cultivation, energetic production, and commerce--a crucible of cultural, religious, and artistic innovations that profoundly determined the course of world history.
Maurice Sartre has written a long overdue and...
The ancient Middle East was the theater of passionate interaction between Phoenicians, Aramaeans, Arabs, Jews, Greeks, and Romans. At the crossroad...
They were not the "Banquet Years," those anxious wartime years when poets and novelists were made to feel embarrassed by their impulse to write literature. And yet it was the attitude of those writers and critics in the 1930s and 1940s that shaped French literature--the ideas of Derrida, Foucault, de Man, Deleuze, and Ricoeur--and has so profoundly influenced literary enterprise in the English-speaking world since 1968. This literary history, the prehistory of postmodernism, is what Denis Hollier recovers in his interlocking studies of the main figures of French literary life before the...
They were not the "Banquet Years," those anxious wartime years when poets and novelists were made to feel embarrassed by their impulse to write lit...
In a book full of playful irony and striking insights, the controversial social philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky draws on the history of fashion to demonstrate that the modern cult of appearance and superficiality actually serves the common good. Focusing on clothing, bodily deportment, sex roles, sexual practices, and political rhetoric as forms of "fashion," Lipovetsky bounds across two thousand years of history, showing how the evolution of fashion from an upper-class privilege into a vehicle of popular expression closely follows the rise of democratic values. Whereas Tocqueville feared...
In a book full of playful irony and striking insights, the controversial social philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky draws on the history of fashion to de...
A vital and underappreciated dimension of social interaction is the way individuals justify their actions to others, instinctively drawing on their experience to appeal to principles they hope will command respect. Individuals, however, often misread situations, and many disagreements can be explained by people appealing, knowingly and unknowingly, to different principles. On Justification is the first English translation of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot's ambitious theoretical examination of these phenomena, a book that has already had a huge impact on French sociology and is...
A vital and underappreciated dimension of social interaction is the way individuals justify their actions to others, instinctively drawing on their...
Socrates is an elusive figure, Sarah Kofman asserts, and he is necessarily so since he did not write or directly state his beliefs. "With Socrates", she writes in her introduction, "we will never leave fiction behind". Kofman suggests that Socrates's avowal of ignorance was meant to be ironic. Later philosophers who interpreted his text invariably resisted the profoundly ironic character of his way of life and diverged widely in their interpretations of him. Kofman focuses especially on the views of Plato, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.
The information that is available about Socrates's...
Socrates is an elusive figure, Sarah Kofman asserts, and he is necessarily so since he did not write or directly state his beliefs. "With Socrates", s...
This work argues that if the logic of the Oedipus myth were subjected to analysis with the tools of anthropology, comparative mythology and narratology, it might invalidate the approach to the Oedipus complex that Freud derived from his psychoanalytic experience.
This work argues that if the logic of the Oedipus myth were subjected to analysis with the tools of anthropology, comparative mythology and narratolog...
"Art history and art theory are inseparable. A history of art can be achieved only through the simultaneous construction of a theory of art." These words of the eminent scholar and critic Louis Marin suggest why he considered the paintings and the writings of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), painter and theoretician of painting, an enduring source of inspiration. Poussin was the artist to whom Marin returned most faithfully over the years. Since Marin did not live to write his proposed book on Poussin, the ten major essays in this volume will remain his definitive statement on the painter who...
"Art history and art theory are inseparable. A history of art can be achieved only through the simultaneous construction of a theory of art." These wo...
At his death in 1992, the eminent philosopher, critic, and theorist Louis Marin left, in addition to a dozen influential books (including Sublime Poussin, Stanford, 1999), a corpus of some three hundred articles and essays published in journals and anthologies. A collection of twenty-two essays that appeared between 1971 and 1992, this book interrogates the theory and practice of representation as it is carried out by both linguistic and graphic signs, and thus the complex relation between language and image, between perception and conception. The essays are grouped in four parts that...
At his death in 1992, the eminent philosopher, critic, and theorist Louis Marin left, in addition to a dozen influential books (including Sublime P...
