Search all library resources

The Blanchot reader, Maurice Blanchot

Maurice Blanchot's impact on French thinking and culture over the last 50 years has been enormous. Yet he still remains a writer whose work, though often cited, is little-known to the English-speaking reader. In "The Blanchot Reader", Michael Holland answers that urgent need and does so in a way that provides a coherent perspective on what by any standard is an extraordinary personal and intellectual career. We see how Blanchot in the 1940s anticipated later post-Sartrean trends, as followed by among others Samuel Beckett and the practitioners of the nouveau roman. We discover how the linguistic turn of the 1950s took place for Blanchot in a political climate, while also occurring within literature and philosophy, and we trace the emergence of the entretien, a dialogue format used by Blanchot to interrogate the writing of his contemporaries, and beyond this to entertain a real dialogue with the 'Other' and so to broach the question of ultimate responsibility. The volume concludes with a consideration of Blanchot's development of the 'fragment', in his philosophical and his political writings, as well as in those devoted to literature. A final subsection focuses on his recent midrash on Moses and Aaron, dedicated to Jacques Derrida. A chronology of Blanchot's career and a succinct primary and secondary bibliography are also included, together with a list of English translations of Blanchot's work.

Maurice Blanchot ou l'autonomie littéraire

Maurice Blanchot and fragmentary writing : a change of epoch

Writing in fragments is often held to be one of the most distinctive signature effects of Romantic, modern, and postmodern literature. But what is the fragment, and what may be said to be its literary, philosophical, and political significance? Few writers have explored these questions with such probing radicality and rigorous tenacity as the French writer and thinker Maurice Blanchot. For the first time in any language, this book explores in detail Blanchots own writing in fragments in order to understand the stakes of the fragmentary within philosophical and literary modernity. It attends in.Writing in fragments is often held to be one of the most distinctive signature effects of Romantic, modern, and postmodern literature. But what is the fragment, and what may be said to be its literary, philosophical, and political significance? Few writers have explored these questions with such probing radicality and rigorous tenacity as the French writer and thinker Maurice Blanchot. For the first time in any language, this book explores in detail Blanchot's own writing in fragments in order to understand the stakes of the fragmentary within philosophical and literary modernity. It attends in detail to each of Blanchot's fragmentary works (Awaiting Forgetting, The Step Not Beyond, and The Writing of the Disaster) and reconstructs Blanchot's radical critical engagement with the philosophical and literary tradition, in particular with Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Heraclitus, Levinas, Derrida, Nancy, Mallarme, Char, and others, and assesses Blanchot's account of politics, Jewish thought, and the Shoah, with a view to understanding the stakes of fragmentary writing in Blanchot and within philosophical and literary modernity in general.

Online EBSCO Academic Comprehensive Collection