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Literary Debate
Texts and Contexts, Postwar French Thought, Volume II
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Edited by Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman
New Press
Due/Published
September 2001, 499 pages,
paper
ISBN
1565846699
In Literary Debate, the second volume in The New Press's Postwar French Thought Series, editors Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman present a selection of texts, many available in English for the first time, that together offer an illuminating and provocative overview of the last half-century of French literary criticism. Combining examination of literature as an institution and in historical context with path breaking interpretations of writing by such authors as Stephan Mallarme and Sigmund Freud, Literary Debate presents the seminal work of figures such as Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Jean-Paul Sartre. These selections represent one of the most fertile periods the field has known. Including original essays by its editors, this volume brings together the important threads of one of the most influential movements in Western intellectual history. |
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Review
The immense influence of French literary theory has profoundly shaped our doubts and questions about the meaning, ends, and possibilities of literature. This superb volume collects the most important French literary theorists and their seminal works. Included are writings that articulate the conflicting claims for the place (if any) of literature in French society and the responsibilities of the writer in the aftermath of liberation and the heroism of the resistance movement. Other selections also echo the debates that swirled in literary circles during the cold war where mass culture, both the American and Soviet versions, were seen as a threat to literature. In the fascinating section “The Central Case of Mallarme," essays by Derrida, Sartre, Foucault, Deleuze, discuss the writer, who the editors consider to be a “prism within which the most luminous tendencies of recent French thought as a whole may be captured and understood.” Other sections include writings on the new novel, new criticism, psychoanalysis and literature, structuralism and post-structuralism, and French literature written outside of France. Intelligently organized, Literary Debate is an essential volume for its collection of the most influential essays from the most dramatic movements in post-war thought. Also of interest:
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