Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression (ebook)

Argumento de Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression (ebook)

In this book, the first in English devoted exclusively to Maurice Blanchot, John Gregg examines the problematic interaction between the two forms of discourse, critical and fictional, that comprise this writer's hybrid oeuvre. The result is a lucid introduction to the thought of one of the most important figures on the French intellectual scene of the past half-century.

Gregg organizes his discussion around the notion of transgression, which Blanchot himself took over from Georges Bataille--most palpably in his interpretation of the myth of Orpheus--as a paradigm capable of accounting for the relationships that exist in the textual economies formed by author, work, and reader. Chapters on the critical work address such issues as Blanchot's ambivalent attitude toward the speculative dialectic of Hegelianism, his thematization of literature's involvement with death, and the mythical and Biblical figures he uses to portray the acts of reading and writing. Gregg also performs extended close readings of two representative works of fiction, Le Très-Haut and L'Attente l'oubli, in an effort to trace Blanchot's evolution as a creator of narratives and to ascertain how his fiction can be seen as constituting a mise en oeuvre of the concerns he treats in his criticism. The book concludes with an assessment of Blanchot's place in the recent history of French critical theory.

"The first book in english devoted entirely to Blanchot, [it] is both a challenging work for scholars familiar with Blanchot, and a lucid introduction to both the critical and narrative texts."--French Review0Acknowledgments A Note on Sources Introduction 3 1 Literature and Transgression 10 2 Language, History, and Their Destinies of Incompletion 18 3 Blanchot's Suicidal Artist: Writing and the (Im)Possibility of Death 35 4 Mythical Portrayals of Writing and Reading 46 5 Writing the Disaster: Henri Sorge's Journal 72 Silencing the Critics of the State 72 An Awkward Silence 83 The Crisis of (Mis)Representation 87 The Poetics of Writing the Disaster 98 Ink-Stained Pages 108 Sorge's "Fable" and Fragments on Narcissus 115 Sorge's Revolt 121 6 Flagrants Delits: Caught in the Act of Self-Reading 127 Discreet Violations of the Noli 127 Getting Started, Finishing Up: The Pro/Epilogue of L'Attente l'oubli 132 Putting Their Story into Words 138 Perspectives of Authority 143 The Reversal 153 Flagrants delits 159 Qui parle? 162 De Man's Blind Spot 168 The Law of the Genre 171 Conclusion: Blanchot's Postmodern Legacy 173 Notes 201 Bibliography 233 Index 239