Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valery, Breton - Softcover

Guerlac, Suzanne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804740046 ISBN 13: 9780804740043

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2000

Synopsis

During the 1960's and 1970's, the eruption of theory was presented as an epistemic break, reorganizing the field of questioning both prospectively and retrospectively. In the forefront of this new movement was the influential journal Tel Quel, which both canonized a body of preferred avant-garde texts (both literary and theoretical) and nullified prominent figures from preceding generations. In a broad remapping of French modernism, this book shows how the milieu of Tel Quel transferred myths of the powers of literature inherited from Bataille, Sartre, Valery, and Breton to theory, in the process erasing the traces of these myths and their common ground. The author analyzes cultural and theoretical positions-pure art, automatism, engagement, and transgression-that structured the literary and critical field from the 1920's to the 1950's to show their strong impact on the formulation and elaboration of theoretical issues in more recent decades. Focusing on the question of relations between poetry and action, she reexamines these positions and uncovers proximities between them that significantly displace theoretical issues. These proximities emerge when a philosophical subtext of Bergson-antiphilosopher and nondialectical thinker-is revealed to operate alongside the more obvious subtext of Hegel. The discourse of Bergson shifts the category of action central to these literary polemics and revalues the visual register, suggesting a reconsideration of Surrealism. The book concludes by examining the ideological pressures associated with the eclipse of the discourse of Bergson as well as some of the effects of this erasure on our understanding of the modern as distinct from the postmodern.

About this title

Review:

"This is, without question, a unique and important work, refreshingly uncontaminated by received opinion. Guerlac demonstrates that the work of the journal Tel Quel in general (and that of Kristeva in particular)-far from constituting the radical break with its philosophical and literary forbears it is usually represented as being-reflects a complex engagement with at least two preceding generations of thinkers. Many readers will be sharply taken aback by what Guerlac has uncovered, and any number of facile assumptions are going to be disturbed."-Philip R. Wood, Rice University "Guerlac rereads texts not canonized by Tel Quel, especially Henri Bergson's, to reconstruct the lost common ground of the incompatible voices of bataille, Sartre, Valery, and Breton."-Choice

About the Author:

Suzanne Guerlac is Professor of French at Emory University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0804740046
• ISBN 13: 9780804740043
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320