Download or read book Manhood written by Michel Leiris and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1992-06-15 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Not only one of the frankest of autobiographies, but also a brilliantly written book, Leiris' Manhood mingles memories, philosophic reflections, sexual revelation, meditations on bullfighting, and the life-long progress of self-discovery."—Washington Post Book World "Leiris writes to appall, and thereby to receive from his readers the gift of a strong emotion—the emotion needed to defend himself against the indignation and disgust he expects to arouse in his readers."—Susan Sontag, New York Review of Books
Download or read book The Ribbon at Olympia s Throat written by Michel Leiris and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short fragments and essays that explore how a seemingly irrelevant aesthetic detail may cause the eruption of sublimity within the mundane. That the nude painted by Manet (in a painting so conceptually new that it created a scandal in its day) achieves so much truth through such a minor detail, that ribbon that modernizes Olympia and, even more than a beauty mark or a patch of freckles would, renders her more precise and more immediately visible, making her a woman with ties to a particular milieu and era: that is what lends itself to reflection, if not divagation! —from The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat In The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat, Michel Leiris investigates what Lydia Davis has called the “expressive power of fetishism”: how a seemingly irrelevant aesthetic detail may cause the eruption of sublimity within the mundane. Written in 1981, toward the end of Leiris's life, The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat serves as a coda to his autobiographical masterwork, The Rules of the Game, taking the form of both shorter fragments (poems, memory scraps, notes) that are as formally disarming as the fetishistic experiences they describe, and longer essays, more exhaustive critical meditations on writing, apprehension, and the nature of the modern. Rooted in remembrance, devoted to the kaleidoscopic intricacies of wordplay, Leiris draws from his own aesthetic experiences as writer and spectator to explore the fetish that “exposes and disarms the sinister passage of time,” conferring “an undeniable realness upon the whole by essentially causing it to crystallize in a reality it would never have possessed if that sturdy fragment hadn't acted as bait.”
Download or read book Phantom Africa written by Michel Leiris and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the towering classics of twentieth century French literature, Phantom Africa is a singular and ultimately unclassifiable work: a book composed of one man's compulsive and constantly mutating daily travel journal--by turns melodramatic, self-deprecating, ecstatic, and morose--as well as an exhaustively detailed account of the first French state-sponsored anthropological expedition to visit sub-Saharan Africa. In 1930, Michel Leiris was an aspiring poet drifting away from the orbit of the Surrealist movement in Paris when the anthropologist Marcel Griaule invited him to serve as the "secretary-archivist" for the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, a major collecting and ethnographic journey that traversed the African continent between May 1931 and February 1933. Leiris, while maintaining the official records of the Mission, documenting the team's acquisitions, and participating in the research, also kept a diary where he noted not only a given day's activities and events but also his impressions, his states of mind, his anxieties, his dreams, and even his erotic fantasies. Upon returning to France, rather than compiling a more conventional report or ethnographic study, Leiris decided simply to publish his diary, almost entirely untouched aside from minor corrections and a smattering of footnotes. The result is an extraordinary book: a day-by-day record of one European writer's experiences in an Africa inexorably shaded by his own exotic delusions and expectations, on the one hand, and an unparalleled depiction of the paradoxes and hypocrisies of conducting anthropological field research at the height of the colonial era on the other. Never before available in English translation, Phantom Africa is an invaluable document. If the book is "a stone marking a bend on a path that is entirely personal," as Leiris himself described it years later, it is also a book whose broad canvas bears witness to the full range of social and political forces reshaping the African continent in the period between the World Wars.
Download or read book Michel Leiris written by Seán Hand and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-08 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first full-length study in English of Michel Leiris's work. Frequently cited as a central figure in contemporary French culture, Seán Hand explores Leiris's participation in some of the most striking intellectual and artistic movements of the twentieth century; surrealism, ethnography and existentialism. Hand locates his writing in these different contexts in relation to the major artistic, political and philosophical concepts of the period. He goes on to argue that Leiris's multi-volume autobiography stands as the model form of self-enquiry in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Correspondence written by Georges Bataille and published by Seagull Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the autumn of 1924, just before André Breton published the Manifeste du surréalisme, two young men met in Paris for the first time. Georges Bataille, 27, starting work at the Bibliothèque Nationa≤ Michel Leiris, 23, beginning his studies in ethnology. Within a few months they were both members of the Surrealist group, although their adherence to Surrealism (unlike their affinities with it) would not last long: in 1930 they were among the signatories of 'Un cadavre,' the famous tract against Breton, the 'Machiavelli of Montmartre,' as Leiris put it. But their friendship would endure for more than 30 years, and their correspondence, assembled here for the first time in English, would continue until the death of Bataille in 1962. Including a number of short essays by each of them on aspects of the other's work, and excerpts on Bataille from Leiris' diaries, this collection of their correspondence throws new light on two of Surrealism's most radical dissidents.
Download or read book Nights as Day Days as Night written by Michel Leiris and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Autobiography. Translated from the French by Richard Sieburth, with a foreword by Maurice Blanchot. Hailed as an important literary document and contemporary pleasure by Lydia Davis, NIGHTS AS DAY, DAYS AS NIGHT is a chronicle of Michel Leiris's dreams. But it is also an exceptional autobiography, a distorted vision of twentieth-century France, a surrealist collage, a collection of prose poems. Leiris, author of the seminal autobiography Manhood, here disrupts the line between being asleep and awake, between being and non-being. He captures the profound strangeness of the dreamer's identity: that anonymous creature who stirs awake at night to experience a warped version of waking life. Whatever the setting (from circus shows to brothels, from the streets of Paris to Hollywood silent films), Leiris concentrates on estranging the familiar, on unsettling the commonplace. Beautifully translated by Richard Sieburth, these dream records often read like an outsider's view of Leiris's life and epoch. This outsider is the dreamer, Leiris's nocturnal double, whose incisors grow as large as a street, who describes the terror he feels at being executed by the Nazis, and who can say in all seriousness, I am dead. It is an alternate life, with its own logic, its own paradoxes, and its own horrors, which becomes alienating and intimate at once. With hints of Kafka, Pirandello, and Nerval, NIGHTS AS DAY, DAYS AS NIGHT is one of Leiris's finest works of self-portraiture. Both timeless and located in the years and places of the dreaming, this forty-year-long collection of tiny, bizarre moments and longer weird narratives displays what happens at night inside the unfettered imagination of the highly cultivated, emotional, and sensuous man that was Michel Leiris. They are strange, almost unclassifiable literary creations--part involuntary, part consciously arranged--which take as their material not only himself and his friends but also the figures and works of other writers and artists, and blend the realistic and the fantastical with an occasional leavening of pure comedy. Rendered in natural, living English by Richard Sieburth and infused with his vigilant intelligence, this is an extremely welcome re-publication, as both important literary document and contemporary pleasure.--Lydia Davis, author of Can't and Won't NIGHTS AS DAY, DAYS AS NIGHT stands as a companion piece to Leiris' great work, his memoirs (L'Age d'homme). The existence of both books establishes a stunning assertion, that the dream life of a person is as valid and telling as the more usual memoirs. In fact, Leiris seems to be suggesting that only when the unconscious mind and the conscious mind are seen together, and the network of connections between politics, sexuality, fear, the exotic and the mundane, is reconstructed in all of its mystery, can the person begin to be known. Somewhere we begin to see the total life of a person come into view, like the metamorphic vision of a paradisal dream city that recurs throughout this book. It is the surrealist New Jerusalem, where the rational and irrational come together to produce the 'supreme point, ' the place of final knowing.--Lawrence R. Smith, Los Angeles Times
Download or read book Scratches written by Michel Leiris and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dazzling translation by Lydia Davis of the first volume of Michel Leiris’s masterwork, perhaps the most important French autobiographical enterprise of the twentieth century Michel Leiris, a French intellectual whose literary works inspired high praise from the likes of Simone de Beauvoir and Claude Lévi-Strauss, began the first volume of his autobiographical project at the age of 40. It was the beginning of an endeavor that ultimately required 35 years and three additional volumes. In Volume 1, Scratches, Leiris proposes to discover a savoir vivre, a mode of living that would have a place for both his poetics and his personal morality. “I can scarcely see the literary use of speech as anything but a means of sharpening one’s consciousness in order to be more—and in a better way—alive," he declares. He begins the project of uncovering memories, returning to moments and images of childhood—his father’s recording machine, the letters of the alphabet coming to life—and then of his later life—Paris under the Occupation, a journey to Africa, and a troubling fear of death.
Download or read book Scraps written by Michel Leiris and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second volume of Michel Leiris’s hugely influential four-volume autobiographical essay, available to English-language readers in a brilliant and sensitive translation by Lydia Davis One of the most versatile and beloved French intellectuals of the twentieth century, Michel Leiris reconceives the autobiography as a literary experiment that sheds light on the mechanisms of memory and on the way the unconnected events of a life become connected through invented narrative. In this volume, the second in his four-volume epic autobiographical enterprise, Leiris merges quotidian events with profound philosophical self-exploration. He also wrangles with the disillusionment that accompanies his own self-reflection. In the midst of struggling with his own motives for writing an autobiographical essay, he comes to the revelation that life, after all, has aspects worth remembering even if moments of beauty are bookended by misery. Yet what can be said of human life, of his own life, when his memory is unreliable, his eyesight is failing, and his mood is despairing?
Download or read book Fibrils written by Michel Leiris and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Translator's Note -- La Fière, la fière -- I -- II -- III -- IV
Download or read book Broken Branches written by Michel Leiris and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Michel Leiris has had a substantial influence on French culture for many years--as a poet and a member of the surrealists, as an art critic, and as an anthropologist. His great contributions to modern letter are his works of confessional autobiography, the best known of which, MANHOOD (North Point, 1984), has been described by the eminent poet and translator Richard Howard as "one of the central texts of what we call modernity." In Brisées Leiris has gathered together short nonfiction pieces written throughout his career. The wide range of topics Leiris addresses in these fifty-one essays gives testimony to the vast arena of his curiosity. Here are essays on Joan Miró, Arnold Schoenberg, the Fox Movietone Follies, Jean Arp, ethnography, Fred Astaire, alchemy, Erik Satie's humor, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Eluard, Claude Lévi-Strauss, "Mouth Water," Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, "Man and His Insides," opera, Georges Bataille, and others." -- Publisher's description
Download or read book Francis Bacon written by Sam Hunter and published by Poligrafa Ediciones Sa. This book was released on 2009 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work of Francis Bacon (1909-1992) has a strength and vitality that has seen him rightfully hailed as one of the greatest twentieth-century artists. Francis Bacon is a superbly illustrated concise monograph that provides readers with an informative yet in-depth survey of the artist¿s entire career ¿ from his earliest forays into the art world, to his death in Madrid in 1992.
Download or read book Aurora written by Michel Leiris and published by Serpent's Tail. This book was released on 1990 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translated & introduced by Anna Warby
Download or read book The Dismembered Community written by Milo Sweedler and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the intersecting communitarian endeavors of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Colette Peignot, known post-humously as Laure. Through detailed analysis of a series of interlocking texts that the four authors wrote on, for, and to one another on such topics as love, friendship, and fraternity, it explores these authors' theoretical elaborations of community, their actual communities, and the relation between the two.
Download or read book Mirror of Tauromachy written by Michel Leiris and published by Atlas. This book was released on 2007 with total page 79 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michel Leiris was a poet, novelist and ethnographer. After leaving the Surrealist group, he was associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Georges Bataille. Leiris acquired his enthusiasm for bullfighting (a life-long passion) with Bataille, Andre Masson and Pablo Picasso. Here, he describes the geometry of the bullfight, its choreography, art and structure, the notions of beauty and magic that underpin its ritual, and the idea that this can be a real mortal confrontation. The illustrations by Andre Masson were drawn especially for this book.
Download or read book Politics Writing Mutilation written by Allan Stoekl and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1985-01-01 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Myth and Metamorphosis written by Lisa Florman and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002-08-23 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radical new interpretation of Picasso and his relation to the classical seen through the artist's prints of the 1930s.
Download or read book Picasso and the Human Comedy written by Michel Leiris and published by Hassell Street Press. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
