Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> European - French

The familiar classical France of splendor, formalism, and conquest had a hidden double, one ruled by the cultural imperative to "be interior," to look inside oneself and to write about what one found. Being Interior explores how seventeenth-century readers and writers busied themselves with the pressing task of inventing a text commensurate with these newly opened subjective depths. Their practices laid the groundwork not only for the future success of autobiography as a genre but also for our entire modern culture of interiority.

In tracing the emergence of autobiography as a...

This volume introduces English speakers to genetic criticism, arguably the most important critical movement in France today. In recent years, French literary scholars have been exploring the interpretive possibilities of textual history, turning manuscript study into a recognized form of literary criticism. They have clearly demonstrated that manuscripts can be used for purposes other than establishing an accurate text of a work.

Although its raw material is a writer's manuscripts, genetic criticism owes more to structuralist and poststructuralist notions of textuality than to...

"A valuable addition to Camus studies. . . . Opens new perspectives on an array of characters, situations, and stances. . . . A highly readable book written in an unpretentious but elegant prose."--Raymond Gay-Crosier, University of Florida

"Questions of love and sexuality have been a recurrent problem for critics, scholars, and general readers of Camus. . . . No one has come close to Rizzuto s work in depth and breadth, in subtlety, or in explanatory power. . . . Create s] a coherent portrait of Camus as a man and writer struggling with the implications of his ideas and...

Samuel Beckett's work harbors an inevitable complicity with traditional modes and values. His idealist and even nihilist inclinations, for example, are closely related to the abstracting and systematizing tendencies that have predominated in Western thinking. His drama and fiction, in reproducing these tendencies, also help to reinforce and legitimate them. Beckett's work can thus be said to encourage an attitude of stoic resignation or life-denying withdrawal.

Sylvie Debevec Henning's study reveals an important countertendency. In examining Beckett's art and literary criticism, his...

Winner of the 1996 Walker Cowen Memorial Prize, Catherine Cusset's No Tomorrow traces the moral meaning of pleasure in several libertine works of the eighteenth-century--Watteau's Pelerinage a l'ile de Cythere, Prevost's Manon Lescaut, Crebillon's Les egarements du coeur et de l'esprit, the anonymous pornographic novel Therese philosophe, Diderot's La religieuse, and Vivant Denon's short story -Point de lendemain.-

In this ambitious book, Cusset reframes the often misunderstood genre that celebrates what Casanova calls -the present enjoyment of the senses.- She contends libertine...

As the existentialist philosophers of mid-twentieth-century Paris famously asserted, a life can only be assessed fully after it has ended. Fitting, then, that since her death in 1986, the philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir has been the subject of numerous attempts to evaluate her contributions to intellectual thought. With the uncovering of her early diaries and the recent publication of her passionate letters to Nelson Algren, she has become more than a towering figure of twentieth-century feminism. She is at once an intensely human figure and a fertile field for application of...

As the existentialist philosophers of mid-twentieth-century Paris famously asserted, a life can only be assessed fully after it has ended. Fitting, then, that since her death in 1986, the philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir has been the subject of numerous attempts to evaluate her contributions to intellectual thought. With the uncovering of her early diaries and the recent publication of her passionate letters to Nelson Algren, she has become more than a towering figure of twentieth-century feminism. She is at once an intensely human figure and a fertile field for application of...

Although the literature of modern subjectivity has its sources in the Renaissance and manifests itself in texts as early as Montaigne's Essays and Shakespeare's Hamlet, autobiography as we know it is one of the significant developments of the later eighteenth century. Indeed, the rise of writing about the self is an important indicator of the transition from the culture of the Enlightenment to that of Romanticism.

Arguing that Rousseau and Goethe are the foremost practitioners of Romantic autobiography, Eugene L. Stelzig offers the first comparative study of these foundational...

From the Left Bank chronicles the intimate, behind-the-scenes encounters of an American Francophile and the stars of the French Avant Garde theater and literary worlds. It reflects the author's extensive, first-hand experience of the modern French theater and with those artists who wrote and staged the work that has revolutionized the way we think of theater. The book contains a distillation of Bishop's best original writings on such pivotal figures as Jean Cocteau, Jean-Louis Barrault, Eugne Ionesco, Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, and Albert Camus in theater and Claude...

-An ambitious study, the fruit of sustained work over many years. Professor Carter's book deploys a stunning knowledge of Proust and places Carter among the first line of Proust scholars in the country.-
--Roger Shattuck, Boston University

The Proustian Quest is the first full-length study that explores the influence of social change on Proust's vision. In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust describes how the machines of transportation and communication transformed fashion, social mores, time-space perception, and the understanding of the laws of nature....

Edgar Allen Poe's influence on the twentieth century French writer Paul Valery was profound, much more so than on Baudelaire and Mallarme. This book is the first comprehensive study of Poe's influence of Valery and is based on Valery's own concept of literary influence. Valery discovered in Poe's tales and literary essays a Drama of the intellect that was to inspire his Evening with Monsieur teste, Agathe, and Introduction to the method of Leonardo Da Vinci. Valery's poetics and approach to literary criticism have direct connections to Poe's Philosophy of Composition and Poetic Principle....