Download or read book Complexity in Maurice Blanchot s Fiction written by Deborah M. Hess and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Culture relates to the literary text through metaphors expressing indeterminism, subjectivity, multivalence, opposition, recursion, loops, spirals, order and disorder, and emergence.
Download or read book The Moment of Complexity written by Mark C. Taylor and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-09 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a moment of unprecedented complexity, an era in which change occurs faster than our ability to comprehend it. With "The Moment of Complexity", Mark C. Taylor offers a map for the unfamiliar terrain opening in our midst, unfolding an original philosophy of our time through a remarkable synthesis of science and culture. According to Taylor, complexity is not just a breakthrough scientific concept but the defining quality of the post-Cold War era. The flux of digital currents swirling around us, he argues, has created a new network culture with its own distinctive logic and dynamic.
Download or read book Maurice Blanchot written by Christophe Bident and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2018-11-20 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His novels, shorter narratives, literary criticism, and fragmentary texts exercised enormous influence over several generations of writers, artists, and philosophers. In works such as Thomas the Obscure, The Instant of my Death, The Writing of the Disaster, The Unavowable Community, Blanchot produced some of the most incisive statements of what it meant to experience the traumas and turmoils of the twentieth century. As a journalist and political activist, Blanchot had a public side that coexisted uneasily with an inclination to secrecy, a refusal of interviews and photographs, and a reputation for mysteriousness and seclusion. These public and private Blanchots came together in complicated ways at some of the twentieth century's most momentous occasions. He was among the public intellectuals participating in the May ’68 revolution in Paris and helped organize opposition to the Algerian war. During World War II, he found himself moments away from being executed by the Nazis. More controversially, he had been active in far-right circles in the ’30s. Now translated into English, Christophe Bident’s magisterial, scrupulous, much-praised critical biography provides the first full-length account of Blanchot’s itinerary, drawing on unpublished letters and on interviews with the writer’s close friends. But the book is both a biography and far more. Beyond filling out a life famous for its obscurity, Bident’s book will transform the way readers of Blanchot respond to this major intellectual figure by offering a genealogy of his thought, a distinctive trajectory that is at once imaginative and speculative, at once aligned with literary modernity and a close companion and friend to philosophy. The book is also a historical work, unpacking the ‘transformation of convictions’ of an author who moved from the far-right in the 1930s to the far-left in the 1950s and after. Bident’s extensive archival research explores the complex ways that Blanchot’s work enters into engagement with his contemporaries, making the book also a portrait of the circles in which he moved, which included friends such as Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Finally, the book traces the strong links between Blanchot’s life and an oeuvre that nonetheless aspires to anonymity. Ultimately, Bident shows how Blanchot’s life itself becomes an oeuvre—becomes a literature that bears the traces of that life secretly. In its even-handed appraisal, Bident’s sophisticated reading of Blanchot’s life together with his work offers a much-needed corrective to the range of cruder accounts, whether from Blanchot’s detractors or from his champions, of a life too easily sensationalized. This definitive biography of a seminal figure of our time will be essential reading for anyone concerned with twentieth-century literature, thought, culture, and politics.
Download or read book The Space of Literature written by Maurice Blanchot and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2015-11 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maurice Blanchot, the eminent literary and cultural critic, has had a vast influence on contemporary French writers--among them Jean Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. From the 1930s through the present day, his writings have been shaping the international literary consciousness. The Space of Literature, first published in France in 1955, is central to the development of Blanchot's thought. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of Mallarmé, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Blanchot's discussions of those writers are among the finest in any language.
Download or read book The Delirium of Praise written by Eleanor Kaufman and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-05-01 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The laudatory essay, in which one author praises the work of another, is frequently characterized as an unimportant, even uncritical mode of writing. But as Eleanor Kaufman argues in The Delirium of Praise, this mode of exchange is serious and substantial enough to merit scholarly attention. By not conforming to standard practices of critical discourse, laudatory essays give new status to supposedly inferior forms of communication and states of being—including chatter, silence, sickness, imbalance, and absence of work—and emphasize affective states or emotions such as joy, friendship, and longing. The Delirium of Praise examines a group of five twentieth-century French intellectuals—Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Pierre Klossowski—and their laudatory essays about each other. Structured as a circular series of exchanges, the book examines pairings of two thinkers with respect to a given theme. The exchange between Bataille and Blanchot takes up the themes of chatter and silence with regard to the novelist Louis-René des Forêts; the Blanchot-Foucault exchange explores friendship and impersonality through the lens of Jacques Derrida; the Foucault-Deleuze exchange considers "absence of work" (désoeuvrement) and the obscure French philosopher Jacques Martin; the Deleuze-Klossowski exchange revolves around the question of the sick body and the person of Nietzsche; and the final exchange between Klossowski and Bataille focuses on imbalanced economies and the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Where the praise is most excessive, approaching delirium, Kaufman locates a powerful thought-energy that pushes the laudatory essay to its limits. In her conclusion, she presents this unique mode of thought exchange as a form of intellectual hospitality. Kaufman uncovers a suspension of subjectivity, of personality, even of place and time, that is both articulated in the laudatory essays and enacted by them. Her examination of this neglected mode as practiced by five important French thinkers offers a unique perspective on twentieth-century intellectual history.
Download or read book Many Voices of Lydia Davis written by Jonathan Evans and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first in-depth analysis of Lydia Daviss translations and writingThe Many Voices of Lydia Davis shows how translation, rewriting and intertextuality are central to the work of Lydia Davis, a major American writer, translator and essayist. Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013, Davis writes innovative short stories that question the boundaries of the genre. She is also an important translator of French writers such as Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, Marcel Proust and Gustave Flaubert. Translation and writing go hand-in-hand in Daviss work. Through a series of readings, this study investigates how Daviss translations and stories relate to each other, finding that they are inextricably interlinked. It explores how Davis uses translation - either as a compositional tool or a plot device - and other instances of rewriting in her stories, demonstrating that translation is central for understanding her prose. Understanding how Daviss work complicates divisions between translating and other forms of writing highlights the role of translation in literary production.Key FeaturesThe first monograph on this key contemporary writer that analyses texts from throughout her careerA series of analyses of Daviss major translations and how her work interacts with themA rethinking of the role of translation in literary production and the boundaries between translating and writing
Download or read book Blanchot s Communism written by L. Iyer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-04-27 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Iyer argues for the transformative potential for philosophy and political practice of the thought of Maurice Blanchot. The book traces Blanchot's complex negotiations of the thought of Hegel, Heidegger, Bataille and Levinas, which allowed him to develop his distinctive account of the work of art and his account of the opening to the Other. Iyer also examines the significance of Blanchot's interventions in French political life, in particular, his participation in the events of May 1968.
Download or read book Friendship written by Maurice Blanchot and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past half century, Maurice Blanchot has been an extraordinarily influential figure on the French literary and cultural scene. He is arguably the key figure after Sartre in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. This collection of 29 critical essays and reviews on art, politics, literature, and philosophy documents the wide range of Blanchot's interests, from the enigmatic paintings in the Lascaux caves to the atomic era. Essays are devoted to works of fiction (Louis-René des Forêts, Pierre Klossowski, Roger Laporte, Marguerite Duras), to autobiographies or testimonies (Michel Leiris, Robert Antelme, André Gorz, Franz Kafka), or to authors who are more than ever contemporary (Jean Paulhan, Albert Camus). Several essays focus on questions of Judaism, as expressed in the works of Edmond Jabès, Emmanuel Levinas, and Martin Buber. Among the other topics covered are André Malraux's "imaginary museum," the Pléiade Encyclopedia project of Raymond Queneau, paperback publishing, the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Benjamin's "Task of the Translator," Marx and communism, writings on the Holocaust, and the difference between art and writing. The book concludes with an eloquent invocation to friendship on the occasion of the death of Georges Bataille.
Download or read book Blanchot and the Outside of Literature written by William S. Allen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maurice Blanchot's writings have played a critical role in the development of 20th-century French thought, but the implicit tension in this role has rarely been addressed directly. Reading Blanchot involves understanding how literature can have an effect on philosophy, to the extent of putting philosophy itself in question by exposing a different and literary mode of thought. However, as this mode is to be found most substantially in the peculiar density of his fictional writings, rather than in his theoretical or critical works, the demand on readers to grasp its implications for thought is rendered more difficult. Blanchot and the Outside of Literature provides a detailed and far-reaching explication of how Blanchot's works changed in the postwar period during which he arrived at this complex and distinctive form of writing.
Download or read book Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing written by Leslie Hill and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-07-05 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to provide a detailed account of fragmentary writing in the work of the French novelist, critic, and thinker Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003).
Download or read book The Instant of My Death Demeure written by Maurice Blanchot and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, a powerful short prose piece by Blanchot with an extended essay by Derrida, records a remarkable encounter in critical and philosophical thinking.
Download or read book Politics and Literature written by Deborah M. Hess and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of politics in literary creation and interpretation is discussed for the French intellectual tradition and the critical period in France from 1931 to 1948. Maurice Blanchot's early fiction is analyzed as a symbolic expression of its sociopolitical context. He portrays the plight of the Jewish people and of the French nation in his fiction published between 1936 and 1949. A recent storm of critical reaction raises questions about the rights and limits of the literary critic and about moral and personal aspects of the author, text, and reading process. Politics and Literature offers a model for critical interpretation that takes into account complexity, process, and the sociopolitical context of the literary text.
Download or read book When the Time Comes written by Maurice Blanchot and published by Barrytown Limited. This book was released on 1985 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WHEN THE TIME COMES ostensibly chronicles the troubled relations between the narrator - a very ill man - and the two women whose lives he invades. As in all of Blanchot's intensely subjective fiction, the true subject of the work is the narrator's consciousness and the process by which his tale emerges through its telling. Powerfully affected by the slightest of events, the narrator responds with a violence that, most disturbingly, appears inevitable.
Download or read book Nancy Dictionary written by Peter Gratton and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-31 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first dictionary dedicated to the work of Jean-Luc Nanc, a key figure in the contemporary intellectual landscape. This dictionary considers the full scope of his writing and will provide insights into the philosophical and theoretical background to hi
Download or read book The Work of Fire written by Maurice Blanchot and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maurice Blanchot is arguably the key figure after Sartre in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. Blanchot developed a distinctive, limpid form of essay writing; these essays, in form and substance, left their imprint on the work of the most influential French theorists. The writings of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida are unimaginable without Blanchot. Published in French in 1949, The Work of Fire is a collection of twenty-two essays originally published in literary journals. Certain themes recur repeatedly: the relation of literature and language to death; the significance of repetition; the historical, personal, and social function of literature; and simply the question what is at stake in the fact that something such as art or literature exists? Among the authors discussed are Kafka, Mallarme;, Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sartre, Gide, Pascal, Vale;ry, Hemingway, and Henry Miller.
Download or read book Death Sentence written by Maurice Blanchot and published by Station Hill Press. This book was released on 1978 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction. Translated from the French by Lydia Davis. This long awaited reprint of a book about which John Hollander wrote: "A masterful version of one of the most remarkable novels in any language since World War II," is the story of the narrator's relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them. "Through more than 40 years, the French writer Maurice Blanchot has produced an astonishing body of fiction and criticism," writes Gilbert Sorrentino in the New York Review of Books, and John Updike in The New Yorker: "Blanchot's prose gives an impression, like Henry James, of carrying meanings so fragile they might crumble in transit."
Download or read book The Most High written by Maurice Blanchot and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maurice Blanchot has been for a half century one of France's leading authors of fiction and theory. Two of his most ambitious works, The Space of Literature and The Writing of the Disaster, are also available in Bison Books editions.Allan Stoekl is the author of On Bataille and Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity, and the Performative in the Twentieth-Century French Tradition (Nebraska 1992).
