Genealogies of the Text
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Politics in Modern France
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About This Book
In this 1995 book, which includes a substantial introduction, Jeffrey Mehlman confronts the politically devastating resonances in the work of several leading French writers. The essays focus on the series of enigmas surrounding the 'Blanchot affair' - a scandal provoked by Mehlman's revelation in 1977 that Maurice Blanchot, one of the tutelary figures of contemporary French thought, had in the 1930s been a prominent fascist journalist. Mehlman takes the issue of Blanchot's forgotten political essays deep into the most revered - and misunderstood - of his novels, L'ArrĂȘt de mort. Using this affair as a point of departure, Mehlman sheds light on the question of the usability of psychoanalysis for literary readings (examining, for example, Baudelaire, MallarmĂ© and ValĂ©ry); he also investigates the ideological and political connotations of similar literary and theoretical material. The volume as a whole provides a consistently provocative meditation on literature, ethics, and the experience of the French in World War II.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-title
- Title
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Craniometry and criticism: notes on aValery an criss-cross
- 3 Literature and hospitality: Klossowski's Hamann
- 4 Literature and collaboration: Benoist-Mechin'sreturn to Proust
- 5 "Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote" again
- 6 Iphigenia 38: deconstruction, history, and the case ofL'Arret de mort
- 7 Writing and deference: the politics ofliterary adulation
- 8 Perspectives: on Paul de Man and Le Soir
- 9 Prosopopeia revisited
- 10 The paranoid style in French proseLacan with Leon Bloy
- 11 The Holocaust comedies of "Emile Ajar'
- 12 Pour Sainte-Beuve: Maurice Blanchot,w March 1942
- 13 Flowers of evil: Paul Morand, the Collaboration,and literary history
- Appendix
- Notes
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in French