Biography and the Question of Literature in France

Biography and the Question of Literature in France
by Ann Jefferson

# Hardcover: 438 pages
# Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (March 1, 2007)

This book takes a fresh look at the relations between literature and biography by tracing the history of their connections through three hundred years of French literature. The starting point for this history is the eighteenth century when the term "biography" first entered the French language and when the word "literature" began to acquire its modern sense of writing marked by an aesthetic character. Arguing that the idea of literature is inherently open to revision and contestation, Ann Jefferson examines the way in which biographically-orientated texts have been engaged in questioning the definition of literature. At the same time, she tracks the evolving forms of biographical writing in French culture, and proposes a reappraisal of biography in terms not only of its forms, but also of its functions.
Although Ann Jefferson's book has powerful theoretical implications for both biography and the literary, it is first and foremost a history, offering a comprehensive new account of the development of French literature through this dual focus on the question of literature and on the relations between literature and biography. It offers original readings of major authors and texts in the light of these concerns, beginning with Rousseau and ending with "life-writing" contemporary authors such as Pierre Michon and Jacques Roubaud. Other authors discussed include Mme de Stael, Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Baudelaire, Nerval, Mallarme, Schwob, Proust, Gide, Leiris, Sartre, Genet, Barthes, and Roger Laporte.

link

Hegel, Literature, and the Problem of Agency

Hegel, Literature, and the Problem of Agency
(Modern European Philosophy)
by Allen Speight

# Paperback: 166 pages
# Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (February 5, 2001)

Allen Speight argues that behind Hegel's extraordinary appeal to literature in the Phenomenology of Spirit lies a philosophical project concerned with understanding human agency in the modern world. It shows that Hegel looked to three literary genres--tragedy, comedy, and the romantic novel--as offering privileged access to three moments of human agency: retrospectivity, theatricality, and forgiveness. Taking full account of the authors that Hegel himself refers to (Sophocles, Diderot, Schlegel, Jacobi), Allen Speight has written a book with a broad appeal to both philosophers and literary theorists.

go
Ohh Blanchot where are you?

Vernant & Vidal-Naquet - Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece [made in istanbul]

MADE IN TURKEY
Fark Yaralari Presents:

Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet are leaders in a contemporary French classical scholarship that has produced a stunning reconfiguration of Greek thought and literature. In this work, the authors present a disturbing and decidedly nonclassical reading of Greek tragedy that insists on its radical discontinuity with our own outlook and with our social, aesthetic, and psychological categories. Originally published in French in two volumes, this new single-volume edition includes revised essays from Volume I as well as the first English translation of Volume II.

“What is Dionysiac about Greek tragedy, Vernant suggests, and specific to the genre, is the ‘otherness’ of the hero, his belonging to an absent world that no longer exists, and the blurring and shifting of the boundaries between illusion and reality that result for the audience from the enacted fictions of the tragic theatre.... Myth and Tragedy is a book to be unreservedly welcome for its progressive unfolding of ideas which have proved consistently fertile in new perceptions and for thinking that is in the best sense individual as well as collective.”
— Times Literary Supplement

the uncanny as the ground

Derrida - Writing and Difference

Jacques Derrida
Writing and Difference
Translated by Alan Bass. 362 p. 1978

First published in 1967, Writing and Difference, a collection of Jacques Derrida's essays written between 1959 and 1966, has become a landmark of contemporary French thought. In it we find Derrida at work on his systematic deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The book's first half, which includes the celebrated essay on Descartes and Foucault, shows the development of Derrida's method of deconstruction. In these essays, Derrida demonstrates the traditional nature of some purportedly nontraditional currents of modern thought—one of his main targets being the way in which "structuralism" unwittingly repeats metaphysical concepts in its use of linguistic models.

The second half of the book contains some of Derrida's most compelling analyses of why and how metaphysical thinking must exclude writing from its conception of language, finally showing metaphysics to be constituted by this exclusion. These essays on Artaud, Freud, Bataille, Hegel, and Lévi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing and différence—the untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that does not exclude writing—for almost a generation of students of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

Writing and Difference reveals the unacknowledged program that makes thought itself possible. In analyzing the contradictions inherent in this program, Derrida foes on to develop new ways of thinking, reading, and writing,—new ways based on the most complete and rigorous understanding of the old ways. Scholars and students from all disciplines will find Writing and Difference an excellent introduction to perhaps the most challenging of contemporary French thinkers—challenging because Derrida questions thought as we know it.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Force and Signification
2. Cogito and the History of Madness
3. Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book
4. Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas
5. "Genesis and Structure" and Phenomenology
6. La parole soufflée
7. Freud and the Scene of Writing
8. The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation
9. From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve
10. Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
11. Ellipsis
Notes
Sources

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The Theory Of Literature in German Romanticism

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

&

Jean-Luc Nancy

The Literary Absolute

The Theory Of Literature In German Romanticism

from Preface: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/nancy/nancy-the-literary-absolute.html
"O Genoa, willingly would I divide myself into thee And a wave, in thy port, roll with the waves, Ripen in the company of thy golden oranges, Become the marble and audacity of thy porticos; A hero, I would rally thy band of maidens, I would tear the veil from their fiery eyes, I would revel in cups of nectar, In all of them, tarrying at none. Done with vague longing and hazy dreams! Let me delight in and embrace the stone statue, The Cytherean, and not her reflection. I dreamt--when from the foam, upsurging Came the goddess in a fragrance of roses. A voice resounded: "I form and transfigure!" Zacharias Werner From Selected Writings, published by his friends( Grimma, 1840- 1841), vol 1, 174. "

thou!