Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> European - French

The metaphor Blanchot uses for writing in The Step Not...

In Enlightenment and Pathology Anne Vila surveys the various understandings of sensibility that passed back and forth between different professional modes of discourse in eighteenth-century France. The thrills of the nervous system, the delectations of taste, and the pangs of the heart mattered as much in the laboratory as in literature. Vila shows that the multiple junctures between the body and the mind promoted a steady commerce between science and the salons.

Vila looks deeply into that commerce and its changing purposes in the course of the eighteenth century. She...

In (Un)Manly Citizens, political theorist Lori Jo Marso explores an alternative vision of citizenship in the writings of French Enlightenment figures Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Germaine de Stael. This critique transgresses the boundary between political philosophy and literature in turning explicitly to fictional texts as the site of an alternative conception of the self, citizenship, and democratic politics.

Marso departs from previous feminist scholarship on Rousseau by reading Emile and La Nouvelle Heloise from the perspective of his women characters. In this...

As a novelist, essayist, critic, and theorist, Maurice Blanchot has earned tributes from authors as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Giles Deleuze, and Emmanuel Levinas. But their praise has told us little about what Blanchot's work actually says and why it has been so influential. In the first comprehensive study of this important French writer to appear in English, Gerald Bruns ties Blanchot's writings to each other and to the works of his contemporaries, including the poet Paul Celan.

Blanchot belongs to the generation of French intellectuals who came of age during the 1930s, survived...

Focusing on the political commitments of three French writers who collaborated with the Vichy Regime and Nazi Germany during World War II, and on those of three leading French intellectuals of the 1990s whose misplaced political idealism led them to support xenophobic, authoritarian regimes and dangerous historical revisionisms, Richard J. Golsan reexamines the notion of political commitment or engagement in two difficult periods in modern French history.

Discussing the fiction, essays, and journalism of Henry de Montherlant, Jean Giono, and Alphonse de Chateaubriant, Golsan...

A quiet renaissance has been unfolding in certain parts of Europe - a renaissance of literature written in minority languages. In this book, William Calin explores the renaissance through an examination of twentieth-century works in Scots, Breton, and Occitan minority languages flourishing inside the borders of the United Kingdom and France.

For each of the three bodies of literature Calin considers major authors whose works include novels, poetry and plays, and shows that all three literatures have evolved in a like manner, repudiating their romantic folk heritage and turning...

In The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self, Susan Harrow explores the fascinating interrelation of subjectivity, materiality, and representation in the poetry and related texts of four modern French writers: Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Francis Ponge, and Jacques R?da. She demonstrates the richness and the relevance of modern French poetry for today's readers, putting contemporary thought to work on the fractured self emerging in the post-Baudelairian lyric.

Harrow addresses the widely perceived marginalization of poetry in the writing/theory debate,...

In Proust and Emotion, Inge Crosman Wimmers proposes a new approach to A la recherche du temps perdu that centres on the role of affect. Through close reading of the hero-narrator's personal history, the author shows how emotional paradigms (especially separation anxiety), involuntary memory, and other compelling impressions give focus and structure to Proust's novel. Drawing on reader-oriented and emotion theories, she shows how affect commands the attention of the 'motivated reader' and is crucial to the process of self-understanding for both the narrator and the...

For forty years, scholars have had access to a vast array of documents that reveal the stages by which a few modest episodes grew into the vast and complex structure the world reveres as Marcel Proust's unique novel, A la recherche du temps perdu. Although many soundings have been made in this corpus, which comprises manuscript pages, exercise books, typescripts, and publisher's proofs, Anthony Pugh's study is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive view of the story that the documents reveal, at least in the years before the outbreak of war in 1914.

A crucial feature of...