Most modern critics (even those who have emphasized the "evolution" of Montaigne's ideas) have sought to explain away the contradictions and incoherences of Montaigne's Essais. Rendall investigates the role of these internal differences in the opinions recorded, in voices and modes of discourse, in logical levels, in conceptions of writing and of reading, through a series of careful, lucid readings of selected passages of Essais. The author tracks their operation in the text and shows how Montaigne's writing constantly recontextualizes his own discourse--through his practice of interpolating...

Eleven-year-old Nora K. received Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World as a birthday present, and in it she read about Plato's theory of ideas. One problem especially intrigued her: What about the platonic idea of the dinosaur? Ideas are timeless and cannot die. The dinosaurs, however, became extinct ages ago. Does the idea of the dinosaur still exist all the same? Could it ever be that the material world is a dream and time an illusion? Moreover, is there such a thing as free will, or is everything predetermined? Is the soul eternal? Do animals have a consciousness? Is the universe infinite? Is...

"Our daily encounters with forgetting have not taught us enough about how much power it exercises over our lives, what reflections and feelings it evokes in different individuals, how even art and science presuppose with sympathy or antipathy forgetting, and finally what political and cultural barriers can be erected against forgetting when it cannot be reconciled with what is right and moral. . . . We find that cultural history provides a helpful perspective in which the value of the art of forgetting emerges. . . . That is the subject this book (through which flows Lethe, the meandering...

In one of the most thought-provoking and wry books by one of the most intriguing contemporary writers in French literature, readers become party to the dilemma of "challenging" literature in a singularly involving and amusing fashion. Opening a book that has mysteriously appeared amid the clutter of his desk, the narrator finds himself exhorted not to read further, to throw the book away Instead (but of course) he tries different strategies for approaching the book, none of which work. The narrator's tempestuous, increasingly obsessive relationship with the book he is determined to read,...

Originally published in 1538, The Torments of Love tells the story of the ill-starred love affair of the heroine, Helisenne, and her paramour, Guenelic. The first part relates the tale of Helisenne's happy marriage and her sudden adulterous desire for Guenelic, a desire so overwhelming that her husband, in desperation, imprisons her in a tower. Heliseene writes The Torments of Love as a missive to her lover, hoping it will fall into his hands and he will come to her rescue.