Absent without Leave
French Literature Under the Threat of War
Denis Hollier(Author)
Harvard University Press
Published on 15. November 1997
Book
Hardback
244 pages
978-0-674-21270-1 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge, Mass
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 155 mm
Weight
510 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-674-21270-1 (9780674212701)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification