They were not the "Banquet Years", those anxious wartime years when poets and novelists were made to feel embarrassed by their impulse to write literature. And yet it was the attitude of those writers and critics in the 1930s and 1940s that shaped French literature - the ideas of Derrida, Foucault, de Man, Deleuze, and Ricoeur - and has so influenced literary enterprise in the English-speaking world since 1968. This literary history, the prehistory of postmodernism, is what Denis Hollier recovers in his interlocking studies ...
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They were not the "Banquet Years", those anxious wartime years when poets and novelists were made to feel embarrassed by their impulse to write literature. And yet it was the attitude of those writers and critics in the 1930s and 1940s that shaped French literature - the ideas of Derrida, Foucault, de Man, Deleuze, and Ricoeur - and has so influenced literary enterprise in the English-speaking world since 1968. This literary history, the prehistory of postmodernism, is what Denis Hollier recovers in his interlocking studies of the main figures of French literary life before the age of anxiety gave way to the era of existentialist commitment. Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Roger Cailois, Andre Malraux and the early Jean-Paul Sartre are the figures Hollier considers, writers torn between politics and the pleasures of the text. They appear here balancing the influences of the philosopher and the man of action. These studies aim to convey the paradoxical heroism of writers fighting for a world that would extend no rights or privileges to writers, writing for a world in which literature would become a reprehensible frivolity. If the 19th century was that of the consecration of the writer, this was the time for their sacrificial death, and Hollier captures the comical pathos of these writers pursuing the ideal of engagement through an exercise in dispossession. His work identifies the master plot for literature that was crafted in the 1940s, a plot in which we are still very much entangled.
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Add this copy of Absent Without Leave: French Literature Under the to cart. $41.86, good condition, Sold by Alplaus Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Alplaus, NY, UNITED STATES, published 1997 by Harvard University Press.
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Good. Size: 6x1x9; Hardbound without dust jacket. Moderate spotting/foxing on top edge, scant on other edges. Some foxing to spine. Text unmarked, mild wear.
Add this copy of Absent Without Leave: French Literature Under the to cart. $45.00, like new condition, Sold by Sutton Books rated 3.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Norwich, VT, UNITED STATES, published 1997 by Harvard University Press, 1997,.
Add this copy of Absent Without Leave: French Literature Under the to cart. $86.38, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 1997 by Harvard University Press.
