Rene Girard, Law, Literature, and Cinema

Rene Girard, Law, Literature, and Cinema PDF Author: Eric M. Wilson
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9819711568
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 670

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Book Description

Rene Girard, Law, Literature, and Cinema

Rene Girard, Law, Literature, and Cinema PDF Author: Eric M. Wilson
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9819711568
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 670

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Book Description


Rene Girard, Law, Literature, and Cinema

Rene Girard, Law, Literature, and Cinema PDF Author: Eric M. Wilson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9789819711550
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book is the first monograph to critically evaluate the work of the literary scholar René Girard from the perspectives of Law and Literature and Law and Film Studies, two of the most multidisciplinary branches of critical legal theory. The central thesis is that Girard’s theory of the scapegoat mechanism provides a wholly new and original means of re-conceptualizing the nature of judicial modernity, which is the belief that modern Law constitutes an internally coherent and exclusively secular form of rationality. The book argues that it is the archaic scapegoat mechanism – the reconciliation of the community through the direction of unified violence against a single victim – that actually works best in explaining all of the outstanding issues of Law and Literature in both of its sub-forms: law-as-literature (the analysis of legal language and practice exemplified by literacy texts) and law-in-literature (the exploration of issues in legal theory through the fictitious form of the novel). The book will provide readers with: (i) a useful introduction to the most important elements of the work of René Girard; (ii) a greater awareness of the ‘hidden’ nature of legal culture and reasoning within a post-secular age; and (iii) a new understanding of the ‘subversive’ (or ‘enlightening‘) nature of some of the most iconic works on Law in both Literature and Cinema, media which by their nature allow for the expression of truths repressed by formal legal discourse.

Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel

Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel PDF Author: Pierpaolo Antonello
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1628951737
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
Fifty years after its publication in English, René Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1965) has never ceased to fascinate, challenge, inspire, and sometimes irritate, literary scholars. It has become one of the great classics of literary criticism, and the notion of triangular desire is now part of the theoretical parlance among critics and students. It also represents the genetic starting point for what has become one of the most encompassing, challenging, and far-reaching theories conceived in the humanities in the last century: mimetic theory. This book provides a forum for new generations of scholars and critics to reassess, challenge, and expand the theoretical and hermeneutical reach of key issues brought forward by Girard’s book, including literary knowledge, realism and representation, imitation and the anxiety of influence, metaphysical desire, deviated transcendence, literature and religious experience, individualism and modernity, and death and resurrection. It also provides a more extensive and detailed historical understanding of the representation of desire, imitation, and rivalry within European and world literature, from Dante to Proust and from Dickens to Jonathan Littell.

René Girard's Mimetic Theory

René Girard's Mimetic Theory PDF Author: Wolfgang Palaver
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1609173651
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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Book Description
A systematic introduction into the mimetic theory of the French-American literary theorist and philosophical anthropologist René Girard, this essential text explains its three main pillars (mimetic desire, the scapegoat mechanism, and the Biblical “difference”) with the help of examples from literature and philosophy. This book also offers an overview of René Girard’s life and work, showing how much mimetic theory results from existential and spiritual insights into one’s own mimetic entanglements. Furthermore it examines the broader implications of Girard’s theories, from the mimetic aspect of sovereignty and wars to the relationship between the scapegoat mechanism and the question of capital punishment. Mimetic theory is placed within the context of current cultural and political debates like the relationship between religion and modernity, terrorism, the death penalty, and gender issues. Drawing textual examples from European literature (Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kleist, Stendhal, Storm, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Proust) and philosophy (Plato, Camus, Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Vattimo), Palaver uses mimetic theory to explore the themes they present. A highly accessible book, this text is complemented by bibliographical references to Girard’s widespread work and secondary literature on mimetic theory and its applications, comprising a valuable bibliographical archive that provides the reader with an overview of the development and discussion of mimetic theory until the present day.

Violence and the Sacred

Violence and the Sacred PDF Author: René Girard
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826477186
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
René Girard (1923-) was Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization at Stanford Unviersity from 1981 until his retirement in 1995. Violence and the Sacred is Girard's brilliant study of human evil. Girard explores violence as it is represented and occurs throughout history, literature and myth. Girard's forceful and thought-provoking analyses of Biblical narrative, Greek tragedy and the lynchings and pogroms propagated by contemporary states illustrate his central argument that violence belongs to everyone and is at the heart of the sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory>

To Double Business Bound

To Double Business Bound PDF Author: René Girard
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801836558
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
"Girard fuses literary, psychological, and anthropological texts in order to view the activity of mimesis. This includes the phenomena of scapegoating, victimage, and sacrifice. They, in turn, serve as starting points for a breathtakingly daring and encompassing theory of the origins of human culture. In an era of interdisciplinary studies, this volume stands alone."--"Choice."

Mimesis and Theory

Mimesis and Theory PDF Author: René Girard
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804755809
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Mimesis and Theory brings together twenty previously uncollected essays on literature and literary theory by one of the most important thinkers of the past thirty years.

Anorexia and Mimetic Desire

Anorexia and Mimetic Desire PDF Author: René Girard
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1628950374
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
René Girard shows that all desires are contagious—and the desire to be thin is no exception. In this compelling new book, Girard ties the anorexia epidemic to what he calls mimetic desire: a desire imitated from a model. Girard has long argued that, far from being spontaneous, our most intimate desires are copied from what we see around us. In a culture obsessed with thinness, the rise of eating disorders should be no surprise. When everyone is trying to slim down, Girard asks, how can we convince anorexic patients to have a healthy outlook on eating? Mixing theoretical sophistication with irreverent common sense, Girard denounces a “culture of anorexia” and takes apart the competitive impulse that fuels the game of conspicuous non-consumption. He shows that showing off a slim physique is not enough—the real aim is to be skinnier than one’s rivals. In the race to lose the most weight, the winners are bound to be thinner and thinner. Taken to extremes, this tendency to escalation can only lead to tragic results. Featuring a foreword by neuropsychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian and an introductory essay by anthropologist Mark R. Anspach, the volume concludes with an illuminating conversation between René Girard, Mark R. Anspach, and Laurence Tacou.

Evolution of Desire

Evolution of Desire PDF Author: Cynthia L Haven
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1628953306
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
René Girard (1923–2015) was one of the leading thinkers of our era—a provocative sage who bypassed prevailing orthodoxies to offer a bold, sweeping vision of human nature, human history, and human destiny. His oeuvre, offering a “mimetic theory” of cultural origins and human behavior, inspired such writers as Milan Kundera and J. M. Coetzee, and earned him a place among the forty “immortals” of the Académie Française. Too often, however, his work is considered only within various academic specializations. This first-ever biographical study takes a wider view. Cynthia L. Haven traces the evolution of Girard’s thought in parallel with his life and times. She recounts his formative years in France and his arrival in a country torn by racial division, and reveals his insights into the collective delusions of our technological world and the changing nature of warfare. Drawing on interviews with Girard and his colleagues, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard provides an essential introduction to one of the twentieth century’s most controversial and original minds.

Conversations with René Girard

Conversations with René Girard PDF Author: René Girard
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350075140
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
French theorist René Girard was one of the major thinkers of the twentieth century. Read by international leaders, quoted by the French media, Girard influenced such writers as J.M. Coetzee and Milan Kundera. Dubbed “the new Darwin of the human sciences” and one of the most compelling thinkers of the age, Girard spent nearly four decades at Stanford exploring what it means to be human and making major contributions to philosophy, literary criticism, psychology and theology with his mimetic theory. This is the first collection of interviews with Girard, one that brings together discussions on Cervantes, Dostoevsky, and Proust alongside the causes of conflict and violence and the role of imitation in human behavior. Granting important insights into Girard's life and thought, these provocative and lively conversations underline Girard's place as leading public intellectual and profound theorist.