Author: Mark Hewson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441192581
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
Blanchot's writings on literature have imposed themselves in the canon of modern literary theory and yet have remained a mysterious presence. This is in part due to their almost hypnotic literary style, in part due to their distinctive amalgam of a number of philosophical sources (Hegel, Heidegger, Levinas, Bataille), which, although hardly unknown in the Anglophone philosophical world, have not yet made themselves fully at home in literary theory. This book aims to make visible the coherence of Blanchot's critical project. To recognize the challenge that Blanchot represents for literary criticism, one has to see that he always has in view the self-interrogation that characterizes modern literature, both in its theory and its practice. Blanchot's essays study the forms and the paths of this research, its solutions and its impasses; and increasingly, they sketch out the philosophical and historical horizon within which its significance appears. The effect is to revise the terms in which we see the genesis of the modern literary concept, not least of the manifestations of which is literary criticism itself.
Author: Herschel Farbman
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823228657
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 165
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Book Description
I sleep, but my heart wakes, says the Song of Songs. The other nightnames the sleepless night we spend in dreams.From The Interpretation of Dreams to Finnegans Wake, many of the great writing projects of the first half of the twentieth century tell tales of this sleepless night. In the post-war waning of the dreamier modernist projects, writers such as Beckett and Blanchot work through the residual fatigue.The Other Night looks anew into the causes of this fatigue. Beginning by establishing a link between Freud's claim that the dream is a kind of pictographic writing and his metapsychologicalclaim that the dreamrepresents the impossibility of complete sleep, The Other Night studies, in readings of Joyce, Beckett, and Blanchot, the unrest, at once literary and political, in which dreams come to u
Author: Lucy Alford
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547323
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
A poem is often read as a set of formal, technical, and conventional devices that generate meaning or affect. However, Lucy Alford suggests that poetic language might be better understood as an instrument for tuning and refining the attention. Identifying a crucial link between poetic form and the forming of attention, Alford offers a new terminology for how poetic attention works and how attention becomes a subject and object of poetry. Forms of Poetic Attention combines close readings of a wide variety of poems with research in the philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology of attention. Drawing on the work of a wide variety of poets such as T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, Anne Carson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Harryette Mullen, Al-Khansā’, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, and Claudia Rankine, Alford defines and locates the particular forms of attention poems both require and produce. She theorizes the process of attention-making—its objects, its coordinates, its variables—while introducing a broad set of interpretive tools into the field of literary studies. Forms of Poetic Attention makes the original claim that attention is poetry’s primary medium, and that the forms of attention demanded by a poem can train, hone, and refine our capacities for perception and judgment, on and off the page.
Author: Christopher Langlois
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 150133137X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
Maurice Blanchot occupies a central though still-overlooked position in the Anglo-American reception of 20th-century continental philosophy and literary criticism. On the one hand, his rigorous yet always-playful exchanges with the most challenging figures of the philosophical and literary canons of modernity have led thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault to acknowledge Blanchot as a major influence on the development of literary and philosophical culture after World War II. On the other hand, Blanchot's reputation for frustrating readers with his difficult style of thought and writing has resulted in a missed opportunity for leveraging Blanchot in advancing the most essential discussions and debates going on today in the comparative study of literature, philosophy, politics, history, ethics, and art. Blanchot's voice is simply too profound, too erudite, and too illuminating of what is at stake at the intersections of these disciplines not to be exercising more of an influence than it has in only a minority of intellectual circles. Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism brings together an international cast of leading and emergent scholars in making the case for precisely what contemporary modernist studies stands to gain from close inspection of Blanchot's provocative post-war writings.
Author: David Appelbaum
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438459793
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 182
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Book Description
A creative study of Maurice Blanchots theory of literary voice. In His Voice considers the idea of the neuter in Maurice Blanchots work, and seeks to work out through an exercise of literary impersonation, or ventriloquism, how and why Blanchot relied on this form. Neither active nor passive, the neuter expresses a kind of third voice beyond the command of the author, one that speaks paradoxically of what lies outside of speaking but nonetheless exerts an irrepressible influence on thought. The neuter is exilic, messianic, and fragmentary. Since it cannot be directly accounted for, Blanchot uses a number of indirect approachesnotably, mythto announce the key elements of his view. Orpheus, Odysseus, and principally Narcissus figure his conception and elaborate the operation of giving voice. Through a distillation of Blanchots narrative and critical textsfocusing on the late works, The Step Not Beyond, and The Writing of the Disasterand through an emphasis on performance, In His Voice enacts the event of writing in search of how authors inscriptive reality appears in the world.
Author: Arthur Bradley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131798210X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
This collection explores the phenomenon of the messianic in contemporary philosophy, religion and culture. From the later Derrida’s work on Marx and Benjamin to Agamben and Badiou’s recent texts on St Paul, it is becoming possible to detect a marked ‘messianic turn’ in contemporary continental thought. However, despite the plethora of work in the field there has not been any sustained attempt to think through the larger philosophical, theological and cultural implications of this phenomenon. What, then, characterises our contemporary messianic moment? Where does it come from? And why speak of the messianic now? In The Messianic Now: Philosophy, Religion, Culture, a group of internationally-known figures and rising stars within the fields of continental philosophy, religious studies and cultural studies come together to consider what the messianic might mean at the beginning of the 21st century. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Research.
Author: Gerald L. Bruns
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801881992
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 382
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Book Description
Ch. 9 (pp. 207-234), "Blanchot's 'holocaust'", discusses the French thinker's philosophy of the Holocaust.
Author: L. Iyer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 023050325X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
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.
Author: L. Iyer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230503977
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
Of the many questions provoked by Blanchot's thought and writing, that of understanding its ethical and political significance is perhaps the most pressing. Spanning his literary critical and philosophical writings, and addressing such major concepts as the image and the neuter, Blanchot's Vigilance presents a sustained analysis of Blanchot's response to Levinas's ethical thought, the political commitments of the Surrealists, Heidegger's readings of the ancient Greeks, and the claims of psychoanalysis. In a series of thorough and lucid readings, Iyer presents Blanchot's central concern as maintaining a kind of vigilance over a difference which opens in the articulation of sense.
Author: Craig Dworkin
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262527553
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
Close readings of ostensibly “blank” works—from unprinted pages to silent music—that point to a new understanding of media. In No Medium, Craig Dworkin looks at works that are blank, erased, clear, or silent, writing critically and substantively about works for which there would seem to be not only nothing to see but nothing to say. Examined closely, these ostensibly contentless works of art, literature, and music point to a new understanding of media and the limits of the artistic object. Dworkin considers works predicated on blank sheets of paper, from a fictional collection of poems in Jean Cocteau's Orphée to the actual publication of a ream of typing paper as a book of poetry; he compares Robert Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning Drawing to the artist Nick Thurston's erased copy of Maurice Blanchot's The Space of Literature (in which only Thurston's marginalia were visible); and he scrutinizes the sexual politics of photographic representation and the implications of obscured or obliterated subjects of photographs. Reexamining the famous case of John Cage's 4'33”, Dworkin links Cage's composition to Rauschenberg's White Paintings, Ken Friedman's Zen for Record (and Nam June Paik's Zen for Film), and other works, offering also a “guide to further listening” that surveys more than 100 scores and recordings of “silent” music. Dworkin argues that we should understand media not as blank, base things but as social events, and that there is no medium, understood in isolation, but only and always a plurality of media: interpretive activities taking place in socially inscribed space.
