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Demonstrates Blanchot's ongoing importance for contemporary philosophical debate about technology, the post-human, and ecological thinkingDemonstrates a considerable shift in Blanchot's thinking from 1940s to 1980sHighlights the significance of Blanchot for important figures of twentieth-century French thought such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Bernard StieglerArgues for the continued relevance of Blanchot to twenty first-century debates in literary theory and criticismHolly Langstaff reappraises the influential French thinker Maurice Blanchot's writing from the 1940s to his late work in the 1980s, demonstrating how Blanchot's exploration of the question of technology remains decisive throughout his career.She situates Blanchot's fictional and critical work in the context of his thinking of art as techne - as it develops out of Martin Heidegger's philosophy. While Blanchot follows Heidegger in the view that writing is a form of techne, he never appeals for salvation from the menace of technology in the modern era. Rather, he sees in all forms of technology the opportunity for a new way of thinking beyond value. This, Blanchot calls an entirely different sort of affirmation.

LITERARY CRITICISM / European / French.

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Perhaps the leading Western intellectual of his time, Jean-Paul Sartre has written highly influential works in a diverse number of subject areas: philosophy, literature, biography, autobiography, and the theory of history. The concise and lucidly-written A Preface to Sartre discusses the French philosopher's contributions in all of these fields. Making imaginative use of the insights of some of the most important contemporary French thinkers (notably Jacques Derrida), Dominick LaCapra seeks to bring about an active confrontation between Sartre and his critics in terms that transcend the opposition between existentialism and structuralism. Referring wherever appropriate to important events in Sartre's life, he illuminates such difficult works as Being and Nothingness and the Critique of Dialectical Reason, and places Sartre in relation to the traditions that he has explicitly rejected. LaCapra also offers close and sensitive interpretations of Nausea, of the autobiography, The Words, and of Sartre's biographical studies of Baudelaire, Genet, and Flaubert. "I envision intellectual history," writes laCapra, "as a critical, informed, and stimulating conversation with the past through the medium of the texts of major thinkers. Who else in our recent past is a more fascinating interlocutor than Sartre?"

LITERARY CRITICISM / European / French. --- Sartre, Jean-Paul,

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Corneille: His Heroes and Their Worlds will appeal to all those with an interest in French Drama as well as those studying the application of modern critical techniques to classical authors. Students of theory of tragedy will also find this new look at Corneillian "tragedy" stimulating.

Corneille, Pierre --- LITERARY CRITICISM / European / French. --- Corneille, Pierre, --- Characters --- Heros.

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Following the recent publication of Roland Barthes's Complete Works in French, this book explores the development of ideas across his career. Aware of the pitfalls of a biographical approach to the 'Death of the Author' theorist, Andy Stafford attempts to find Barthes somewhere between the writer as both product and producer of his time, by looking at influences on, and the reception of, his work. Barthes's life is divided into three distinct phases: the polemical journalist prior to 1960; the academic theorist in the 60s; and the celebrated intellectual of the 1970s.

Critics --- Critiques --- LITERARY CRITICISM / European / French. --- Biography --- France. --- Biographies

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Talk of repair has become ubiquitous in recent years. In the age of trauma culture, art and literature have a new purpose: to do justice, to console, comfort, and heal. Drawing on works of twenty-first-century French-language literature, this monograph shows how literature can not only serve as a means of "personal development", but expand our capacity for empathy, help repair the "brokenness" implied in victimhood, and redress individual and collective traumas. Centered on a critical reflection on discourses of repair (and reparations), it questions the canonical theories on the functions of literature and proposes a new way of writing (and reading) literary history. Praise "Repair the World is an invigorating and essential call to arms. The modern category of the literary, it declares, is being outpaced by the contemporary uses of literature: as a medium of exorcism, empathy, reparation, testimony, commemoration, existential renewal, and ethical or political connectivity. Neither celebrating nor condemning such uses, Gefen models a much-needed style of criticism - interdisciplinary, pragmatic, relational - that comes to grips with their importance." - Rita Felski, the John Stewart Bryan Professor and Professor of English at the University of Virginia (USA) "In an era where self-help, memoir, and autobiography command more than their fair share of publisher's lists in France, it's tempting, some fifty years after post-structuralism's heyday, to ascribe an impending 'death of literature' to a taste for narcissistic exhibitionism in French literary culture. But why bemoan the waning relevance of the question 'what is literature?,' asks Alexandre Gefen, when evidence abounds in the new century that literary writing increasingly posits itself as a restorative, reparative act? In the best instances, authors who give form to embodied experience imaginatively forge with their readers empathetic bonds of the sort that secular and religious institutions long sustained. Repair the World is not only a capacious study of writers who hail from surprisingly broad sectors of French society, from health and social workers to skilled laborers, journalists, and educators; it's a situated call for a pragmatics of reading that makes of each book an intervention into the fabric of the real. Harnessing sources in affect theory, trauma studies, ethics, and cognitive science, Alexandre Gefen performs a critically reparative act all his own, reminding us that the notion of literature as autonomous object was itself a historical construct, in short: an ideology. Reading and writing have always conjoined care for the self and care for others, and it's upon that reciprocity that the communities of sense of tomorrow can flourish in a spirit of reparative humanism". - Derek Schilling, Professor of French, Director of the Centre Louis Marin, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Johns Hopkins University (USA) "Alexandre Gefen's wide-ranging, thought-provoking study takes stock of a paradigm shift in contemporary French literature, away from a model of autonomy and intransitivity to ways of writing and reading that seek to repair, restore, reassure, and rebuild. From the varied forms of expressivity found in self-narratives to the empathetic projections of fiction, Repair the World maps out an expanding literary territory that seeks not critical negativity but rather the power to intervene for good in individual and collective life. While reserving judgment on the actual extent of literature's effects, Gefen demonstrates that contemporary projects and discourses undeniably center the therapeutic and remediative uses of literature. With its nuanced readings and keen insights, Repair the World has been rightly influential in France; its powerful diagnosis of contemporary sensibilities resonates far beyond, revealing both

LITERARY CRITICISM / European / French. --- 21st century. --- French literature. --- aesthetics. --- care.