Author: Allan StoeklPublisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452908443
Category : French literature
Languages : en
Pages : 182
Book Description
Politics, Writing, Mutilation
Author: Allan StoeklPublisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452908443
Category : French literature
Languages : en
Pages : 182
Book Description
Politics, Writing, Mutilation
Author: Allan StoeklPublisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816613001
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 186
Book Description
Politics, Writing, Mutilation was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Five twentieth-century French writers played, and continue to play, a pivotal role in the development of literary-philosophical thinking that has come to be known in the United States as post-structuralism. The work of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Raymond Roussel, Michel Leiris, and Francis Ponge in the 1930s and 1940s amounts to a prehistory of today's theoretical debates; the writings of Foucault and Derrida in particular would have been unthinkable outside the context provided by these writers. In Politics, Writing, Mutilation,Allan Stoekl emphasizes their role as precursors, but he also makes clear that they created a distinctive body of work that must be read and evaluated on its own terms. Stoekl's critical readings of their work—selected novels, poems, and autobiographical fragments—reveal them to be battlegrounds not only of disruptive language practices, but of conflicting political drives as well. These irreconcilable tendencies can be defined as progressive political revolution, on the one hand with its emphasis on utility, conservation, and labor; and, on the other hand, a notion of dangerous and sinister production that stresses orgiastic sexuality and delirious expenditure. Caught between these forces is the intellectual of Bataille's time (and indeed of ours), locked in impotence, self-betrayal, and automutilation. Stoekl develops his critique through dual readings of each writer's central work—the first reading deconstructive, the second a search for the political meaning excluded by a deconstructive approach. Repeating this process on a larger scale, he shows how Derrida and Foucault are indebted to their precursors even while they have betrayed them by stripping their work of political conflict and historical specificity. And he acknowledges that one of the most painful questions faced in prewar and Occupied France—that of the unthinkable guilt and duplicity of the intellectual—may not be as remote from contemporary theoretical concerns as some would have us believe.
Saints of the Impossible
Author: Alexander IrwinPublisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816639038
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Book Description
The transgressive writing of Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and the rigorous ethical philosophy of social activist and Christian mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943) seem to belong to different worlds. Yet in the political ferment of 1930s Paris, Bataille and Weil were intellectual adversaries who exerted a powerful fascination on each other. Saints of the Impossible provides the first in-depth comparison of Bataille's and Weil's thought, showing how an exploration of their relationship reveals new facets of the achievements of two of the twentieth century's leading intellectual figures and raises far-reaching questions about literary practice, politics, and religion. Book jacket.
The Dismembered Community
Author: Milo SweedlerPublisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 0874130522
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215
Book Description
This book examines the intersecting communitarian endeavors of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Colette Peignot, known post-humously as Laure. Through detailed analysis of a series of interlocking texts that the four authors wrote on, for, and to one another on such topics as love, friendship, and fraternity, it explores these authors' theoretical elaborations of community, their actual communities, and the relation between the two.
Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism
Author: Chandra Talpade MohantyPublisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253206329
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Book Description
"The essays are provocative and enhance knowledge of Third World women's issues. Highly recommended . . . " —Choice " . . . the book challenges assumptions and pushes historic and geographical boundaries that must be altered if women of all colors are to win the struggles thrust upon us by the 'new world order' of the 1990s." —New Directions for Women "This surely is a book for anyone trying to comprehend the ways sexism fuels racism in a post-colonial, post-Cold War world that remains dangerous for most women." —Cynthia H. Enloe " . . . provocative analyses of the simultaneous oppressions of race, class, gender and sexuality . . . a powerful collection." —Gloria Anzaldúa " . . . propels third world feminist perspectives from the periphery to the cutting edge of feminist theory in the 1990s." —Aihwa Ong " . . . a carefully presented wealth of much-needed information." —Audre Lorde " . . . it is a significant book." —The Bloomsbury Review " . . . excellent . . . The nondoctrinaire approach to the Third World and to feminism in general is refreshing and compelling." —World Literature Today ". . . an excellent collection of essays examining 'Third World' feminism." —The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory These essays document the debates, conflicts, and contradictions among those engaged in developing third world feminist theory and politics. Contributors: Evelyne Accad, M. Jacqui Alexander, Carmen Barroso, Cristina Bruschini, Rey Chow, Juanita Diaz-Cotto, Angela Gilliam, Faye V. Harrison, Cheryl Johnson-Odim, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, Barbara Smith, Nayereh Tohidi, Lourdes Torres, Cheryl L. West, & Nellie Wong.
Community Without Unity
Author: William CorlettPublisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822382296
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283
Book Description
Winner of the 1990 Foundations of Political Theory Section of the American Political Science Association "First Book Award" Now available in paperback with a new preface by the author, this award-winning book breaks new ground by challenging traditional concepts of community in political theory. William Corlett brings the diverse (and sometimes contradictory) work of Foucault and Derrida to bear on the thought of Pocock, Burke, Lincoln, and McIntyre, among others, to move beyond the conventional dichotomy of "individual vs. community," arguing instead that community is best advanced within a politics of difference.
Scandal and Aftereffect
Author: Steven UngarPublisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816625277
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236
Book Description
'Scandal and Aftereffect' will make a crucial contribution to discussions about the function of memory in the relationship of history to cultural production and about the history of history itself.
Derrida and Autobiography
Author: Robert SmithPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521465816
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 214
Book Description
The work of Jacques Derrida can be seen to reinvent most theories. In this book Robert Smith offers both a reading of the philosophy of Derrida and an investigation of current theories of autobiography. Smith argues that for Derrida autobiography is not so much subjective self-revelation as relation to the other, not so much a general condition of thought as a general condition of writing - what Derrida calls the 'autobiography of the writing' - which mocks any self-centred finitude of living and dying. In this context, and using literary-critical, philosophical, and psychoanalytical sources, Smith thinks through Derrida's texts in a new, but distinctly Derridean, way, and finds new perspectives to analyse the work of classical writers including Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, and de Man.
Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression
Author: John GreggPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400821274
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Book Description
In this book, the first in English devoted exclusively to Maurice Blanchot, John Gregg examines the problematic interaction between the two forms of discourse, critical and fictional, that comprise this writer's hybrid oeuvre. The result is a lucid introduction to the thought of one of the most important figures on the French intellectual scene of the past half-century. Gregg organizes his discussion around the notion of transgression, which Blanchot himself took over from Georges Bataille--most palpably in his interpretation of the myth of Orpheus--as a paradigm capable of accounting for the relationships that exist in the textual economies formed by author, work, and reader. Chapters on the critical work address such issues as Blanchot's ambivalent attitude toward the speculative dialectic of Hegelianism, his thematization of literature's involvement with death, and the mythical and Biblical figures he uses to portray the acts of reading and writing. Gregg also performs extended close readings of two representative works of fiction, Le Très-Haut and L'Attente l'oubli, in an effort to trace Blanchot's evolution as a creator of narratives and to ascertain how his fiction can be seen as constituting a mise en oeuvre of the concerns he treats in his criticism. The book concludes with an assessment of Blanchot's place in the recent history of French critical theory.
Politics and Literature
Author: Deborah M. HessPublisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
The role of politics in literary creation and interpretation is discussed for the French intellectual tradition and the critical period in France from 1931 to 1948. Maurice Blanchot's early fiction is analyzed as a symbolic expression of its sociopolitical context. He portrays the plight of the Jewish people and of the French nation in his fiction published between 1936 and 1949. A recent storm of critical reaction raises questions about the rights and limits of the literary critic and about moral and personal aspects of the author, text, and reading process. Politics and Literature offers a model for critical interpretation that takes into account complexity, process, and the sociopolitical context of the literary text.