Sara E. Melzer's Books

Discourses of the Fall

A Study of Pascal's Pensées

By: Sara E. Melzer

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Discourses of the Fall

A Study of Pascal's Pensées

By: Sara E. Melzer

Here is a unique and penetrating postmodernist invitation to reread Pascal's Pensées. With a full control on two centuries of Pascalian hermeneutics, Sara Melzer leads her readers into a passionate quest far beyond the worn-out search for a paleontological reconstruction of the Pensées's hypothetical final form. She rightly and deeply understands Pascal's writing--écriture--as the complex story of the "Fall of Truth into language." Such a perspective gives to Pascal's fragments a rejuvenated life, a newness, a dramatic and powerful voice for our own culture. In brief, a welcome breeze of fresh air in the Pascalian world!"--Edouard Morot-Sir, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "By approaching Pascal's Pensées from the point of view of contemporary critical theory, Melzer sheds new light on this well-known work. Her argument is clear, lucid, and cogent. She has a firm grasp of the major issues at stake in debates among literary critics. I think this is an important work that will be of interest not only to Pascal specialists but also to people who work in the general area of literary theory. . . . One of the genuine strengths of the book is the author's ability to discern the theological implications of issues that preoccupy literary theorists. This is particularly important at a time when students of theology and religion are becoming more and more interested in literary theory. They will find this analysis of Pascal very suggestive."--Mark Taylor, Williams College

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253

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520352904

ISBN 13

9780520352902

Colonizer or Colonized

The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture

By: Sara E. Melzer

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Colonizer or Colonized

The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture

By: Sara E. Melzer

Colonizer or Colonized introduces two colonial stories into the heart of France's literary and cultural history. The first describes elite France's conflicted relationship to the Ancient World. As much as French intellectuals aligned themselves with the Greco-Romans as an "us," they also resented the Ancients as an imperial "them," haunted by the memory that both the Greeks and Romans had colonized their ancestors, the Gauls. This memory put the elite on the defensive—defending against the legacy of this colonized past and the fear that they were the barbarian other. The second story mirrored the first. Just as the Romans had colonized the Gauls, France would colonize the New World, becoming the "New Rome" by creating a "New France." Borrowing the Roman strategy, the French Church and State developed an assimilationist stance towards the Amerindian "barbarian." This policy provided a foundation for what would become the nation's most basic stance towards the other. However, this version of assimilation, unlike its subsequent ones, encouraged the colonized and the colonizer to engage in close forms of contact, such as mixed marriages and communities. This book weaves these two different stories together in a triangulated dynamic. It asks the Ancients to step aside to include the New World other into a larger narrative in which elite France carved out their nation's emerging cultural identity in relation to both the New World and the Ancient World.

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Page Count

330

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812205189

ISBN 13

9780812205183

The Fear of French Negroes

Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas

By: Sara E. Johnson

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The Fear of French Negroes

Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas

By: Sara E. Johnson

This book explores how people of African descent responded to the collapse and reconsolidation of colonial life in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1845). It examines the migration of people, ideas, and practices across imperial boundaries and traces expressions of both aesthetic and experiential transcolonial black politics across the Caribbean world, including Hispaniola, Louisiana and the Gulf South, Jamaica, and Cuba. It looks at the lives and work of figures as diverse as armed black soldiers and privateers, female performers, and newspaper editors to argue for the existence of "competing inter-Americanisms"to uncover the struggle for unity amidst the realities of class, territorial, and linguistic diversity.

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Page Count

313

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520271122

ISBN 13

9780520271128

Encyclopédie Noire

The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World

By: Sara E. Johnson

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Encyclopédie Noire

The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World

By: Sara E. Johnson

If you peer closely into the bookstores, salons, and diplomatic circles of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Mederic Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Mery is bound to appear. As a lawyer, philosophe, and Enlightenment polymath, Moreau created and compiled an immense archive that remains a vital window into the social, political, and intellectual fault lines of the Age of Revolutions. But the gilded spines and elegant designs that decorate his archive obscure the truth: Moreau's achievements were predicated upon the work of enslaved people and free people of color. Their labor afforded him the leisure to research, think, and write. Their rich intellectual and linguistic cultures filled the pages of his most applauded works. Every beautiful book Moreau produced contains an embedded story of hidden violence. Sara Johnson's arresting investigation of race and knowledge in the revolutionary Atlantic surrounds Moreau with the African-descended people he worked so hard to erase, immersing him in a vibrant community of language innovators, forgers of kinship networks, and world travelers who strove to create their own social and political lives. Built from archival fragments, creative speculation, and audacious intellectual courage, Encyclopedie noire is a communal biography of the women and men who made Moreau's world.

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Page Count

394

Publisher

UNC Press Books

Published Date

ISBN 13

9798890862037

Discourses of the Fall

A Study of Pascal's Pensées

By: Sara E. Melzer

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Discourses of the Fall

A Study of Pascal's Pensées

By: Sara E. Melzer

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

253

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520352904

ISBN 13

9780520352902

Book's by Sara E. Melzer

Discourses of the Fall

Discourses of the Fall

Colonizer or Colonized

Colonizer or Colonized

The Fear of French Negroes

The Fear of French Negroes

Encyclopédie Noire

Encyclopédie Noire

Discourses of the Fall

Discourses of the Fall

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