Duras, Writing, and the Ethical

Duras, Writing, and the Ethical PDF Author: Martin Crowley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198160137
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
This book offers a study of the whole of Duras's written oeuvre, covering journalism and lesser-known works as well as more famous texts. It brings out the constant presence of ethical questions in and around the experiences of passion and excess with which her work is always concerned, andsubjects Duras's texts to an unprecedented level of close reading, carrying her beyond the terms of her usual reception. On the basis of this approach, and with reference to Duras's involvement with her intellectual and political contexts, the book demonstrates the detailed engagement of Duras'swriting in the ethical and political issues of her day. Careful textual analysis shows the particular, fragile nature of this engagement, as well as the intricate textures of Duras's work; this leads to a striking new model of the relation between the literary text and the ethical life of itsreaders, which will be of importance not only to specialists in French Studies, but to all those interested in ethical criticism and modern literary studies.

Duras, Writing, and the Ethical

Duras, Writing, and the Ethical PDF Author: Martin Crowley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198160137
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers a study of the whole of Duras's written oeuvre, covering journalism and lesser-known works as well as more famous texts. It brings out the constant presence of ethical questions in and around the experiences of passion and excess with which her work is always concerned, andsubjects Duras's texts to an unprecedented level of close reading, carrying her beyond the terms of her usual reception. On the basis of this approach, and with reference to Duras's involvement with her intellectual and political contexts, the book demonstrates the detailed engagement of Duras'swriting in the ethical and political issues of her day. Careful textual analysis shows the particular, fragile nature of this engagement, as well as the intricate textures of Duras's work; this leads to a striking new model of the relation between the literary text and the ethical life of itsreaders, which will be of importance not only to specialists in French Studies, but to all those interested in ethical criticism and modern literary studies.

Ethical Issues in Twentieth Century French Fiction

Ethical Issues in Twentieth Century French Fiction PDF Author: C. Davis
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230287476
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
This book examines ethical problems raised by a number of key twentieth-century theoretical and fictional texts by authors such as Levinas, Sartre, Beauvoir, Yourcenar, Duras and Genet. It argues that even texts which apparently espouse ethical positions based on respect for and responsibility towards others, frequently depict conflict as an insurmountable aspect of human relations. This is reflected at an aesthetic level, as these texts both describe the struggle for supremacy and replicate it in their relation to their readers.

Literary Silences in Pascal, Rousseau, and Beckett

Literary Silences in Pascal, Rousseau, and Beckett PDF Author: Elisabeth Marie Loevlie
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199266364
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
To explore literary silence is to explore the relationships between texts and the silence of the ineffable. This study describes silent dynamics through readings of Pascal's 'Pensees', Rousseau's 'Reveries', and Beckett's trilogy 'Molloy', 'Malone Dies' and 'The Unnameable'.

The Wasting Heroine in German Fiction by Women 1770-1914

The Wasting Heroine in German Fiction by Women 1770-1914 PDF Author: Anna Richards
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199267545
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
In this broad-ranging study of German fiction by women between 1770-1914, the author aims to add a new dimension to existing debates on the association of women and illness in literature. She constructs a history of women's self-starvation, eating behaviour and wasting diseases.

The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-century French Literature

The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-century French Literature PDF Author: Alison Siân James
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198859686
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Studying works by authors including Gide, Breton, Aragon, Yourcenar, Duras, and Modiano, this volume re-thinks twentieth-century French literature and engages with the question of distinctions between the factual and the fictional.

Scanning the Hypnoglyph

Scanning the Hypnoglyph PDF Author: Nathaniel Wallace
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004316213
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Nathaniel Wallace’s Scanning the Hypnoglyph chronicles a contemporary genre that exploits sleep’s evocative dimensions. While dreams, sleeping nudes, and other facets of the dormant state were popular with artists of the early twentieth century (and long before), sleep experiences have given rise to an even wider range of postmodern artwork. Scanning the Hypnoglyph first assesses the modernist framework wherein the sleeping subject typically enjoys firm psychic grounding. As postmodernism begins, subjective space is fragmented, the representation of sleep reflecting the trend. Among other topics, this book demonstrates how portrayals of dormant individuals can reveal imprints of the self. Gender issues are taken up as well. “Mainstream,” heterosexual representations are considered along with depictions of gay, lesbian, and androgynous sleepers.

Blanchot Romantique

Blanchot Romantique PDF Author: Hannes Opelz
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039119738
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
The work of French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) is without doubt among the most challenging the twentieth century has to offer. Contemporary debate in literature, philosophy, and politics has yet to fully acknowledge its discreet but enduring impact. Arising from a conference that took place in Oxford in 2009, this book sets itself a simple, if daunting, task: that of measuring the impact and responding to the challenge of Blanchot's work by addressing its engagement with the Romantic legacy, in particular (but not only) that of the Jena Romantics. Drawing upon a wide range of philosophers and poets associated directly or indirectly with German Romanticism (Kant, Fichte, Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, the Schlegels, Hölderlin), the authors of this volume explore how Blanchot's fictional, critical, and fragmentary texts rewrite and rethink the Romantic demand in relation to questions of criticism and reflexivity, irony and subjectivity, narrative and genre, the sublime and the neutre, the Work and the fragment, quotation and translation. Reading Blanchot with or against key twentieth-century thinkers (Benjamin, Foucault, de Man), they also examine Romantic and post-Romantic notions of history, imagination, literary theory, melancholy, affect, love, revolution, community, and other central themes that Blanchot's writings deploy across the century from Jean-Paul Sartre to Jean-Luc Nancy. This book contains contributions in both English and French.

Mallarmé and Debussy

Mallarmé and Debussy PDF Author: Elizabeth McCombie
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199266371
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
This book examines afresh the web of similarities and differences between music and poetry using works by Mallarm and Debussy as case studies. It challenges the easy metaphorical impressionism that has characterized much of the scholarly literature to date. Analyzing Mallarm 's vision of a shared musico-poetic aesthetic, Elizabeth McCombie derives a set of performative structural motifs, analytical tools that express our experience of the two arts and their middle ground.

The Memory of Pain

The Memory of Pain PDF Author: Camila Loew
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9401207062
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
In this book, Camila Loew analyzes four women’s testimonial literary writings on the Holocaust to examine and question some of the tenets of the fields of Holocaust studies, gender studies, and testimony. Through a close reading of the works of Charlotte Delbo, Margarete Buber-Neumann, Ruth Klüger, and Marguerite Duras, Loew foregrounds these authors’ search for a written form to engage with their experiences of the extreme. Although each chapter contains its individual focus and features, the book possesses a unity in intention, concerns, and consequences. In the theoretical introduction that unites the four chapters, Loew eschews essentialism and revises the emergence of the field of Women and Holocaust studies from the early 1980s on, and signals some of its shortcomings. In response, and in accordance with a recent turn in various disciplines of the Humanities, Loew highlights the ethical dimension of testimony and its responsible commitment to the other. In dealing with the texts as literary testimonies—a complex genre, between literature and history—, testimony is freed from the obligation to respond to the requirements of factual truth, and becomes a privileged form to voice the traumatic event, and to symbolically explore the role of excess.

Cacaphonies

Cacaphonies PDF Author: Annabel L. Kim
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452965404
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Exploring why there is so much fecal matter in literary works that matter Cacaphonies takes fecal matter and its place in literature seriously. Readers and critics have too long overlooked excrement’s vital role in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century French canon. In a stark challenge to the tendency to view this literature through sanitizing abstractions, Annabel L. Kim undertakes close readings of key authors to argue for feces as a figure of radical equality, both a literary object and a reflection on literature itself, without which literary studies is impoverished and sterile. Following the fecal through line in works by Céline, Beckett, Genet, Sartre, Duras, and Gary and the contemporary authors Anne Garréta and Daniel Pennac, Kim shows that shit, far from vanishing from the canon after the early modern period, remains present in the modern and contemporary French literature that follows. She argues that all the shit in the canon expresses a call to democratize literature, making literature for all, just as shit is for (or of) all. She attends to its presence in this prized element of French identity, treating it as a continually uttered desire to manifest the universality France aspires to—as encapsulated by the slogan Liberté, égalité, fraternité—but fails to realize. In shit there is a concrete universalism that traverses bodies with disregard for embodied differences. Cacaphonies reminds us that literature, and the ideas to be found therein, cannot be separated from the corporeal envelopes that create and receive them. In so doing, it reveals the aesthetic, political, and ethical potential of shit and its capacity to transform literature and life.