Author: Paul Valéry Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 9780691018799 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 179
Book Description
Although not autobiographical in any usual sense, Valéry's novel is profoundly personal. Monsieur Teste reflects Valéry's preoccupation with the phenomenon of a mind detached from sensibility, yet he is also an ordinary fictional character. This volume includes "Snapshots of Monsieur Teste," excerpts from Valéry's Cahiers.
Author: René Girard Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 0804755809 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 345
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.
Author: Jacques Derrida Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226144399 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 369
Book Description
When he died in 2004, Jacques Derrida left behind a vast legacy of unpublished material, much of it in the form of written lectures. With The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, the University of Chicago Press inaugurates an ambitious series, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, translating these important works into English. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1 launches the series with Derrida’s exploration of the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty. In this seminar from 2001–2002, Derrida continues his deconstruction of the traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law—the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” Hobbes’s biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake,” Machiavelli’s Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau’s evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract. Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal.
Author: Michaela Hulstyn Publisher: University of Toronto Press ISBN: 1487543778 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 224
Book Description
Altered states of consciousness – including experiences of deprivation, pain, hallucination, fear, desire, alienation, and spiritual transcendence – can transform the ordinary experience of selfhood. Unselfing explores the nature of disruptive self-experiences and the different shapes they have taken in literary writing. The book focuses on the tension between rival conceptions of unselfing as either a form of productive self-transcendence or a form of alienating self-loss. Michaela Hulstyn explores the shapes and meanings of unselfing through the framework of the global French literary world, encompassing texts by modernist figures in France and Belgium alongside writers from Algeria, Rwanda, and Morocco. Together these diverse texts prompt a re-evaluation of the consequences of the loss or the transcendence of the self. Through a series of close readings, Hulstyn offers a new account of the ethical questions raised by altered states and shows how philosophies of empathy can be tested against and often challenged by literary works. Drawing on cognitive science and phenomenology, Unselfing provides a new methodology for approaching texts that give shape to the fringes of conscious experience.
Author: Zakir Paul Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691261539 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
A critical account of the idea of intelligence in modern French literature and thought In the late nineteenth century, psychologists and philosophers became intensely interested in the possibility of quantifying, measuring, and evaluating “intelligence,” and using it to separate and compare individuals. Disarming Intelligence analyzes how this polyvalent term was consolidated and contested in competing discourses, from fin de siècle psychology and philosophy to literature, criticism, and cultural polemics around the First World War. Zakir Paul examines how Marcel Proust, Henri Bergson, Paul Valéry, and the critics of the influential Nouvelle revue française registered, negotiated, and subtly countered the ways intelligence was invoked across the political and aesthetic spectrum. For these writers, intelligence fluctuates between an individual, sovereign faculty for analyzing the world and something collective, accidental, and contingent. Disarming Intelligence shows how literary and critical styles questioned, suspended, and reimagined what intelligence could be by bringing elements of uncertainty and potentiality into its horizon. The book also explores interwar political tensions—from the extreme right to Walter Benjamin’s engaged essays on contemporary French writers. Finally, a brief coda recasts current debates about artificial intelligence by comparing them to these earlier crises of intelligence. By drawing together and untangling competing conceptions of intelligence, Disarming Intelligence exposes its mercurial but influential and urgent role in literary and cultural politics.
Author: Paul Valéry
Author: Andrei Codrescu
Author: Paul Valéry
Author: René Girard
Author: Jacques Derrida
Author: Michaela Hulstyn
Author: Roland Barthes
Author: Marianne Moore
Author: Paul Valéry
Author: Zakir Paul