Literary Polemics

Name: Literary Polemics
Brand: STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
SKU: 9780804727150
Price: 59.99 AUD
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STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESSISBN: 9780804727150

Bataille, Sartre, Valery, Breton

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By Suzanne Guerlac
Imprint: STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Release Date: August 30, 1997
Format: HARDBACK
Dimensions: 229 x 152 mm
Weight:
Pages: 320

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During the 1960's and 1970's, the eruption of theory was presented as an epistemic break, reorganizing the field of questioning both prospectively and retrospectively. In the forefront of this new movement was the influential journal Tel Quel, which both canonized a body of preferred avant-garde texts (both literary and theoretical) and nullified prominent figures from preceding generations. In a broad remapping of French modernism, this book shows how the milieu of Tel Quel transferred myths of the powers of literature inherited from Bataille, Sartre, ValZry, and Breton to theory, in the process erasing the traces of these myths and their common ground. The author analyzes cultural and theoretical positions pure art, automatism, engagement, and transgression that structured the literary and critical field from the 1920's to the 1950's to show their strong impact on the formulation and elaboration of theoretical issues in more recent decades. Focusing on the question of relations between poetry and action, she reexamines these positions and uncovers proximities between them that significantly displace theoretical issues.

Suzanne Guerlac is Professor of French at Emory University.

Introduction Part I. Abstract: 1. Bataille: the fiction of transgression 2. Kristeva: reconciliations - in theory Part II. Abstract: 3. Sartre: reading engagement 4. Vale;ry: the work of perfecting and the chemistry of the mind 5. Breton: angelic truth Part III. Abstract: 6. The voluntary and the automatic: Sartre, Vale;ry, Breton and Bergson 7. The politics of erasure: the modern and the postmodern Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index.

"This is, without question, a unique and important work, refreshingly uncontaminated by received opinion. Guerlac demonstrates that the work of the journal Tel Quel in general (and that of Kristeva in particular) - far from constituting the radical break with its philosophical and literary forbears it is usually represented as being - reflects a complex engagement with at least two preceding generations of thinkers. Many readers will be sharply taken aback by what Guerlac has uncovered, and any number of facile assumptions are going to be disturbed." - Philip R. Wood, Rice University "Guerlac rereads texts not canonized by Tel Quel, especially Henri Bergson's, to reconstruct the lost common ground of the incompatible voices of bataille, Sartre, Valery, and Breton." - Choice

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