This book gathers French writer Michel Butor's essays on his travels in the Mediterranean. Included are pieces on Cordova, Istanbul, Salonica, Delphi, Mallia in Crete, and Ferrara and Mantua in northern Italy. There is an extended essay on Egypt, where, when Butor was twenty-four, he spent a year teaching French in a secondary school in a provincial city. Far from the bland comments on the landscapes by an enchanted walker, inspired by memories, Butor digresses on the history and the literature of the places that he visits. He raises what he calls "geographical criticism" to the rank of art, never forgetting that cities are not miracles of nature but the masterpieces of men. Emperors built palaces where conquerors had previously destroyed them. Sculptors erected statues and writers wrote books. Michel Butor registers these as a part of the memory of place. Butor went on to become one of the leading exponents of the avant-garde writing that emerged in France in the 1950s.
But Vernier finds that the core of what he actually knows is useless unless he can spin around it a concentric web of larger suppositions, endowed with varying "degrees" of truth. Relying on his nephew's information, he writes Part Two of his manuscript as if it were being written by his nephew. Finally, in Part Three, the raw material of life overwhelms his delicate literary structure, thus exposing the impossibility of his obsession and the damaging effect this obsession has on both himself and those who surround him."--BOOK JACKET.
A rambling novel of dreams and reflection inspired by a library in a German castle full of books and maps. The narrator is a young Frenchman who works for the owner. The author is a leading practitioner of the French nouveau roman. He wrote Mobile.
Some of the artworks pose difficulties in interpretation, but regardless of amorphous subjects and confusing representations, Butor's creativity finds poetry in them.".
Considered by many to be his greatest book, Michel Butor's "Mobile" is the result of the six months the author spent traveling across America. The text is composed from a wide range of materials, including city names, road signs, advertising slogans, catalog listings, newspaper accounts of the 1893 World's Fair, Native American writings, and the history of the Freedomland theme park. Butor weaves bits and pieces from these diverse sources into a collage resembling an abstract painting (the book is dedicated to Jackson Pollock) or a patchwork quilt that by turns is both humorous and quite disturbing. This travelogue captures--in both a textual and visual way--the energy and contradictions of American life and history.
This book gathers French writer Michel Butor's essays on his travels in the Mediterranean. Included are pieces on Cordova, Istanbul, Salonica, Delphi, Mallia in Crete, and Ferrara and Mantua in northern Italy. There is an extended essay on Egypt, where, when Butor was twenty-four, he spent a year teaching French in a secondary school in a provincial city. Far from the bland comments on the landscapes by an enchanted walker, inspired by memories, Butor digresses on the history and the literature of the places that he visits. He raises what he calls "geographical criticism" to the rank of art, never forgetting that cities are not miracles of nature but the masterpieces of men. Emperors built palaces where conquerors had previously destroyed them. Sculptors erected statues and writers wrote books. Michel Butor registers these as a part of the memory of place. Butor went on to become one of the leading exponents of the avant-garde writing that emerged in France in the 1950s.
A rambling novel of dreams and reflection inspired by a library in a German castle full of books and maps. The narrator is a young Frenchman who works for the owner. The author is a leading practitioner of the French nouveau roman. He wrote Mobile.
Investigates the literary self-portrait genre. From St Augustine to Montaigne, and from Nietzsche to Barthes, individual self-portraits are analyzed along with the cultural matrix from which self-portrayal derives its non-narrative structure, and many of its recurrent topics.
Created both for everyday living and for special festivities, the extraordinary objects of adornment displayed here served at once as symbols of wealth, marks of rank and magic talismans. Fashioned from a range of precious and non-precious materials, these are pieces of high aesthetic merit. They come dramatically alive in the photographs in this book when shown adorning the body - their qualities designed to enhance both the dignity and the beauty of their wearers. Other close-up photographs demonstrate the incredible detail and workmanship of the objects.
This remarkable volume brings together texts that reveal a unique perspective on Foucault's work on the interrelated topics of madness, language, and literature in the second half of the 1960s. Not only do these texts develop analyses and concepts that cannot be found anywhere else in Foucault's oeuvre, but they also show that Foucault's relation to structuralism in those years was far more complex and rich than he himself was ready to acknowledge. They show, more precisely, that between The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, and specifically in relation to madness, literature, and literary criticism, Foucault turned to structuralism not only to challenge the central role attributed to the human subject, but also to analyze language and human experience as in a way detached from the historical conditions of their emergence and production. Madness, Language, Literature is organized around three main issues: the status and place of the madman in our societies; the relationship between madness, language, and literature in Baroque theater, the theater of cruelty by Antonin Artaud, and the work of Raymond Roussel; and the evolution of literary criticism in the 1960s. A study of the "absence of a work" in Balzac and of the relationship between desire and knowledge in Flaubert completes this ensemble, presenting a side of Foucault somewhat different from the one we know from the texts he published during this time"--
Some of the artworks pose difficulties in interpretation, but regardless of amorphous subjects and confusing representations, Butor's creativity finds poetry in them.".
Michel Winock’s biography situates Gustave Flaubert’s life and work in France’s century of great democratic transition. Flaubert did not welcome the egalitarian society predicted by Tocqueville. Wary of the masses, he rejected the universal male suffrage hard won by the Revolution of 1848, and he was exasperated by the nascent socialism that promoted the collective to the detriment of the individual. But above all, he hated the bourgeoisie. Vulgar, ignorant, obsessed with material comforts, impervious to beauty, the French middle class embodied for Flaubert every vice of the democratic age. His loathing became a fixation—and a source of literary inspiration. Flaubert depicts a man whose personality, habits, and thought are a stew of paradoxes. The author of Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education spent his life inseparably bound to solitude and melancholy, yet he enjoyed periodic escapes from his “hole” in Croisset to pursue a variety of pleasures: fervent friendships, society soirées, and a whirlwind of literary and romantic encounters. He prided himself on the impersonality of his writing, but he did not hesitate to use material from his own life in his fiction. Nowhere are Flaubert’s contradictions more evident than in his politics. An enemy of power who held no nostalgia for the monarchy or the church, he was nonetheless hostile to collectivist utopias. Despite declarations of the timelessness and sacredness of Art, Flaubert could not transcend the era he abominated. Rejecting the modern world, he paradoxically became its celebrated chronicler and the most modern writer of his time.
In this controversial manifesto, Jean-Michel Rabaté addresses current anxieties about the future of literary and cultural theory and proposes that it still has a crucial role to play.
يثير المنظر منذ ربع قرن مطلباً إجتماعياً متزايد الإلحاح والتنوّع، يجهد المعنيّون بالمناظر في إرضائه، إضافة إلى إهتمام خاصّ من لدن العديد من العلوم الإنسانية والإجتماعيّة. ويبدو من الضروري اليوم تكافل جميع هذه الميادين بغية الإحاطة بمختلف جوانب المنظر، فهو ظاهرة متعددة الأبعاد ونقطة تقاطع حقيقيّة لمساهمات الطبيعة والثقافة والتاريخ والجغرافية والفرد والمجتمع والواقع والمتخيّل والرمزيّ. ضمن هذا الإطار، كان لسؤال المنظر في الادب أن يُطرح بدوره وفق أسس جديدة، مفضياً منذ ما يقارب من عشرين عاماً إلى أبحاث متعدّدة، فضلاً عن أن الكتّاب أنفسهم لم يكفّوا يوماً عن ربط ممارستهم وتفكيرهم بأفقٍ ما... يشكلّ المنظر في الشعر، كما في كلّ سياق آخر، مكاناً مشاعاً يخصّنا جميعاً وفضاءَ حريّة ممنوحاً لحساسيّة كلٍّ منّا وإبداعه، وبهذا يهيّئ أرضيّة مشتركة تمكّن الفرد من التواصل الحقيقيّ مع الجماعة دون التخلّي عن ذاته، وفيها تكمن صيرورة الحضارة بصفتها نتاجاً جماعيّاً.
Slicing through blunt theories of supply and demand, Callon presents a rigorously researched but counterintuitive model of how everyday market activity gets produced. If you’re convinced you know what a market is, think again. In his long-awaited study, French sociologist and engineer Michel Callon takes us to the heart of markets, to the unsung processes that allow innovations to become robust products and services. Markets in the Making begins with the observation that stable commercial transactions are more enigmatic, more elusive, and more involved than previously described by economic theory. Slicing through blunt theories of supply and demand, Callon presents a rigorously researched but counterintuitive model of market activity that emphasizes what people designing products or launching startups soon discover—the inherent difficulties of connecting individuals to things. Callon’s model is founded upon the notion of “singularization,” the premise that goods and services must adapt and be adapted to the local milieu of every individual whose life they enter. Person by person, thing by thing, Callon demonstrates that for ordinary economic transactions to emerge en masse, singular connections must be made. Pushing us to see markets as more than abstract interfaces where pools of anonymous buyers and sellers meet, Callon draws our attention to the exhaustively creative practices that market professionals continuously devise to entangle people and things. Markets in the Making exemplifies how prototypes, fragile curiosities that have only just been imagined, are gradually honed into predictable objects and practices. Once these are active enough to create a desired effect, yet passive enough to be transferred from one place to another without disruption, they will have successfully achieved the status of “goods” or “services.” The output of this more ample process of innovation, as redefined by Callon, is what we recognize as “the market”—commercial activity, at scale. The capstone of an influential research career at the forefront of science and technology studies, Markets in the Making coherently integrates the empirical perspective of product engineering with the values of the social sciences. After masterfully redescribing how markets are made, Callon culminates with a strong empirical argument for why markets can and should be harnessed to enact social change. His is a theory of markets that serves social critique.
In France, a country that awards its intellectuals the status other countries give their rock stars, Michel Foucault was part of a glittering generation of thinkers, one which also included Sartre, de Beauvoir and Deleuze. One of the great intellectual heroes of the twentieth century, Foucault was a man whose passion and reason were at the service of nearly every progressive cause of his time. From law and order, to mental health, to power and knowledge, he spearheaded public awareness of the dynamics that hold us all in thrall to a few powerful ideologies and interests. Arguably his finest work, Archaeology of Knowledge is a challenging but fantastically rewarding introduction to his ideas.
Death and the Labyrinth is unique, being Foucault's only work on literature. For Foucault this was "by far the book I wrote most easily and with the greatest pleasure". Here, Foucault explores theory, criticism and psychology through the texts of Raymond Roussel, one of the fathers of experimental writing, whose work has been celebrated by the likes of Cocteau, Duchamp, Breton, Robbe Grillet, Gide and Giacometti. This revised edition includes an introduction, chronology and bibliography to Foucault's work by James Faubion, an interview with Foucault, conducted only nine months before his death, and concludes with an essay on Roussel by the poet John Ashbery.
Madness, sexuality, power, knowledge—are these facts of life or simply parts of speech? In a series of works of astonishing brilliance, historian Michel Foucault excavated the hidden assumptions that govern the way we live and the way we think. The Archaeology of Knowledge begins at the level of "things aid" and moves quickly to illuminate the connections between knowledge, language, and action in a style at once profound and personal. A summing up of Foucault's own methadological assumptions, this book is also a first step toward a genealogy of the way we live now. Challenging, at times infuriating, it is an absolutey indispensable guide to one of the most innovative thinkers of our time.
What should we learn from Vernon Subutex (volume 1), this nightmarish dive into the strata of contemporary society? Find everything you need to know about this work in a complete and detailed analysis. You will find in particular in this file : - A complete summary - A presentation of the main characters such as Vernon Subutex and Alex Bleach - An analysis of the specificities of the work: A polyphonic novel - towards a human comedy of the nineteenth century; The use of internal focus; A sharp social criticism A reference analysis to quickly understand the meaning of the work.
This is the final volume in the set of four collections of Michel Huglo's articles to be published in the Variorum series, and focuses on medieval music theory. The point of departure for Huglo's research was his doctoral dissertation on tonaries, published in 1971: as a consequence, he studied the manuscripts of music theory concerning plainchant, and, later, those with writings on music by authors of Late Antiquity as well as the Liber glossarum, with its many definitions of musical terms. In this volume, certain articles consider the interpretation or dissemination of texts, instruction in the art of plainchant, and musical instruction at the university. Others concern the manuscripts of St Augustine's De musica and of the writings of Calcidius, Macrobius, Helisachar, Hucbald, Gerbert of Aurillac, Abbo of Fleury, John of Afflighem, and Hieronymus de Moravia, amongst others. The volume closes with a bibliography of Michel Huglo complementing that published in 1993 and a summary list of his reviews of books on music and liturgy. Ce volume des articles de Michel Huglo termine la série de quatre dans la collection Variorum. Il est centré sur la théorie musicale médiévale. Le point de départ des recherches de Michel Huglo sur la théorie musicale du Moyen Âge est formé par sa thèse sur les tonaires, éditée en 1971: en consequence il etudia les manuscrits de theorie musicale concernant le plain-chant et, plus tard, les auteurs de l'Antiquité tardive et le Liber glossarum qui contient des définitions de nombreux termes musicaux. Dans ce volume, certains articles traitent de l'interprétation ou de la dissémination des textes, des instructions sur l'art du chant, et sur l'enseignement de la musique à l'Université. Ils concernent les manuscrits du De musica d'Augustin, de Calcidius, Macrobe, Helisachar, Hucbald, Gerbert d'Aurillac, Abbon de Fleury, Jean d'Afflighem, Hieronymus de Moravia, et d'autres auteurs. Le volume se termine par une bibliographie de Michel Huglo complétant celle publiée en 1993 et une liste sommaire de ses recensions d'ouvrages sur la musique et la liturgie.
In 1933, thousands of intellectuals, artists, writers, militants and other opponents of the Nazi regime fled Germany. Including such figures as Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Heinrich Mann they were "the best of Germany," refusing to remain citizens in this new state that legalized terror and brutality. They emigrated all across the globe, to Paris, Amsterdam, Prague, Oslo, Vienna, New York, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Mexico, Jerusalem, Moscow. Often distrusted as Germans in the countries they arrived in, they struggled to survive - and some committed suicide in despair. But throughout their exile they strove to give expression to the fight against Nazism through their work, in prose, poetry and painting, architecture, film and theater. Weimar in Exile follows these lives, from the rise of national socialism to the return to their ruined homeland, retracing their stories, struggles, setbacks and rare victories. In this absorbing and magisterial work Jean-Michel Palmier provides a compelling and detailed history of those whose dignity in exile is a moving counterpoint top the story of Germany under the Nazis
As a transformative thinker of the twentieth century, whose work spanned all branches of the humanities, Michel Foucault had a complex and profound relationship with literature. And yet this critical aspect of his thought, because it was largely expressed in speeches and interviews, remains virtually unknown to even his most loyal readers. This book brings together previously unpublished transcripts of oral presentations in which Foucault speaks at length about literature and its links to some of his principal themes: madness, language and criticism, and truth and desire. The associations between madness and language—and madness and silence—preoccupy Foucault in two 1963 radio broadcasts, presented here, in which he ranges among literary examples from Cervantes and Shakespeare to Diderot, before taking up questions about Artaud’s literary correspondence, lettres de cachet, and the materiality of language. In his lectures on the relations among language, the literary work, and literature, he discusses Joyce, Proust, Chateaubriand, Racine, and Corneille, as well as the linguist Roman Jakobson. What we know as literature, Foucault contends, begins with the Marquis de Sade, to whose writing—particularly La Nouvelle Justine and Juliette—he devotes a full two-part lecture series focusing on notions of literary self-consciousness. Following his meditations on history in the recently published Speech Begins after Death, this current volume makes clear the importance of literature to Foucault’s thought and intellectual development.
A superb achievement, one that successfully brings together in accessible form the work of two major writers of Renaissance France. This is now the default version of Montaigne in English. --Timothy Hampton, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley
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