Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452944938
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 140
Get Book
Book Description
As a transformative thinker of the twentieth century, whose work spanned all branches of the humanities, Michel Foucault had a complex and profound relationship with literature. And yet this critical aspect of his thought, because it was largely expressed in speeches and interviews, remains virtually unknown to even his most loyal readers. This book brings together previously unpublished transcripts of oral presentations in which Foucault speaks at length about literature and its links to some of his principal themes: madness, language and criticism, and truth and desire. The associations between madness and language—and madness and silence—preoccupy Foucault in two 1963 radio broadcasts, presented here, in which he ranges among literary examples from Cervantes and Shakespeare to Diderot, before taking up questions about Artaud’s literary correspondence, lettres de cachet, and the materiality of language. In his lectures on the relations among language, the literary work, and literature, he discusses Joyce, Proust, Chateaubriand, Racine, and Corneille, as well as the linguist Roman Jakobson. What we know as literature, Foucault contends, begins with the Marquis de Sade, to whose writing—particularly La Nouvelle Justine and Juliette—he devotes a full two-part lecture series focusing on notions of literary self-consciousness. Following his meditations on history in the recently published Speech Begins after Death, this current volume makes clear the importance of literature to Foucault’s thought and intellectual development.
Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022677483X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237
Get Book
Book Description
"This remarkable volume brings together texts that reveal a unique perspective on Foucault's work on the interrelated topics of madness, language, and literature in the second half of the 1960s. Not only do these texts develop analyses and concepts that cannot be found anywhere else in Foucault's oeuvre, but they also show that Foucault's relation to structuralism in those years was far more complex and rich than he himself was ready to acknowledge. They show, more precisely, that between The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, and specifically in relation to madness, literature, and literary criticism, Foucault turned to structuralism not only to challenge the central role attributed to the human subject, but also to analyze language and human experience as in a way detached from the historical conditions of their emergence and production. Madness, Language, Literature is organized around three main issues: the status and place of the madman in our societies; the relationship between madness, language, and literature in Baroque theater, the theater of cruelty by Antonin Artaud, and the work of Raymond Roussel; and the evolution of literary criticism in the 1960s. A study of the "absence of a work" in Balzac and of the relationship between desire and knowledge in Flaubert completes this ensemble, presenting a side of Foucault somewhat different from the one we know from the texts he published during this time"--
Author: Elie Wiesel
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 0805212124
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Get Book
Book Description
Now in paperback, Wiesel’s newest novel “reminds us, with force, that his writing is alive and strong. The master has once again found a startling freshness.”—Le Monde des Livres A European expatriate living in New York, Doriel suffers from a profound sense of desperation and loss. His mother, a member of the Resistance, survived World War II only to die soon after in France in an accident, together with his father. Doriel was a hidden child during the war, and his knowledge of the Holocaust is largely limited to what he finds in movies, newsreels, and books. Doriel’s parents and their secrets haunt him, leaving him filled with longing but unable to experience the most basic joys in life. He plunges into an intense study of Judaism, but instead of finding solace, he comes to believe that he is possessed by a dybbuk. Surrounded by ghosts, spurred on by demons, Doriel finally turns to Dr. Thérèse Goldschmidt, a psychoanalyst who finds herself particularly intrigued by her patient. The two enter into an uneasy relationship based on exchange: of dreams, histories, and secrets. And despite Doriel’s initial resistance, Dr. Goldschmidt helps bring him to a crossroads—and to a shocking denouement. “In its own high-stepping yet paradoxically heart-wracking way, [Wiesel’s novel] can most assuredly be considered beautiful (almost beyond belief).”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307833100
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Get Book
Book Description
Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 - from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the "insane" and the rest of humanity.
Author: Azucena G. Blanco
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110669005
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245
Get Book
Book Description
This study proposes a revised interpretation of Foucault’s views on literature. It has been argued that the philosopher’s interest in literature was limited to the 1960s and of a mostly depoliticized nature. However, Foucault’s previously unpublished later works suggest a different reality, showing a sustained interest in literature and its politics. In the light of this new material, the book repositions Foucault's ideas within recent debates on the politics of literature.
Author: Galen A. Johnson
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823288145
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Get Book
Book Description
Merleau-Ponty has long been known as one of the most important philosophers of aesthetics, yet most discussions of his aesthetics focus on visual art. This book corrects that balance by turning to Merleau-Ponty's extensive engagement with literature. From Proust, Merleau-Ponty developed his conception of “sensible ideas,” from Claudel, his conjoining of birth and knowledge as “co-naissance,” from Valéry came “implex” or the “animal of words” and the “chiasma of two destinies.” Literature also provokes the questions of expression, metaphor, and truth and the meaning of a Merleau-Pontian poetics. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, the book argues, a poetic of the flesh, a poetic of mystery, and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. Ultimately, theoretical figures or “figuratives” that appear at the threshold between philosophy and literature enable the possibility of a new ontology. What is at stake is the very meaning of philosophy itself and its mode of expression.
Author: John T Hamilton
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231142218
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274
Get Book
Book Description
John T. Hamilton investigates how literary, philosophical, and psychological treatments of music and madness challenge the limits of representation, thereby creating a crisis of language. He particularly focuses on the decidedly autobiographical impulse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where musical experience and mental disturbance disrupt the expression of referential thought, illuminating the irreducible aspects of the self before language can work them back into a discursive system. The study begins in the 1750s with Diderot's "Neveu de Rameau," and situates that text in relation to Rousseau's reflections on the voice and the burgeoning discipline of musical aesthetics. Hamilton then traces the linkage of music and madness that courses through the work of Herder, Hegel, Wackenroder, and Kleist before turning his attention to E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose writings of the first decades of the nineteenth century accumulate and qualify preceding traditions. Throughout his analysis, Hamilton considers the particular representations that link music and madness, exploring underlying motives, preconceptions, and ideological premises that facilitate the association of these two experiences.
Author: Michael Downing
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1582432546
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 407
Get Book
Book Description
A close-up look at the scandals that rocked the San Francisco Zen Center, a leader in alternative religious practice and the counterculture in America, and their repercussions. The remarkable forty-year history of the people who established the first Buddhist monastery outside of Asia in the history of the world has never been told. Michael Downing wondered why. "I'm living proof of why you better not speak out," explained one ordained Zen priest. "The degree to which I was scapegoated publicly was most effective in keeping everyone else quiet." In 1959, a Soto Zen priest took leave of his family in Japan to minister to the congregation of a Buddhist temple in San Francisco. Alan Watts and others spread the word that an authentic Zen Roshi was living there, and students, poets, drifters, and seekers began to attend his lectures. Impressed by their sincerity and commitment, Suzuki Roshi began to offer instruction in zazen (meditation) and other Buddhist practices to these devoted young spiritual pioneers. The San Francisco Zen Center was born. And then, in 1983, meltdown. A sex scandal rocked Zen Center, and it triggered tragedies and headlines about abuse of power that called into question the whole matter of alternative religious practice in America. Overnight the most prominent community of Buddhists in the West found itself at the vanguard of a cultural revolt against spiritual authority. For Shoes Outside the Door, Michael Downing spent three years studying documents and interviewing more than eighty people who were there, at ground zero. As engaging as any mystery, as mysterious as any political campaign, as political as any family gathering, this story will haunt and challenge readers as they unravel this essential chapter of American history.
Author: Carla Nappi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019263626X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Get Book
Book Description
The history of China, as any history, is a story of and in translation. Translating Early Modern China tells the story of translation in China to and from non-European languages and Latin between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and primarily in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Each chapter finds a particular translator resurrected from the past to tell the story of a text that helped shape the history of translation in China. In Chinese, Mongolian, Manchu, Latin, and more, these texts helped to make the Chinese language what it was at different points in its history. This volume explores what the form of an academic history book might look like by playing with fictioning as part of the historian's craft. The book's many stories—of glossaries and official Ming translation bureaus, of bilingual Ming Chinese-Mongolian language primers, of the first Latin grammar of Manchu, of a Qing Manchu conversation manual, of a collection of Manchu poems by a Qing translator—serve as case studies that open out into questions of language and translation in China's past, of the use of fiction as a historian's tool, and of the ways that translation creates language.
Author: Daniel Berthold-Bond
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791425053
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 332
Get Book
Book Description
This book shows how an understanding of the nature and role of insanity in Hegel's writing provides intriguing new points of access to many of the central themes of his larger philosophic project. Berthold-Bond situates Hegel's theory of madness within the history of psychiatric practice during the great reform period at the turn of the eighteenth century, and shows how Hegel developed a middle path between the stridently opposed camps of "empirical" and "romantic" medicine, and of "somatic" and "psychical" practitioners. A key point of the book is to show that Hegel does not conceive of madness and health as strictly opposing states, but as kindred phenomena sharing many of the same underlying mental structures and strategies, so that the ontologies of insanity and rationality involve a mutually illuminating, mirroring relation. Hegel's theory is tested against the critiques of the institution of psychiatry and the very concept of madness by such influential twentieth-century authors as Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz, and defended as offering a genuinely reconciling position in the contemporary debate between the "social labeling" and "medical" models of mental illness.
