Out of this World: Gnostic Encounters in Modern French Literature and Thought: 96 (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 96) - Softcover

Chaouat, Bruno

Softcover

ISBN 10: 180596576X ISBN 13: 9781805965763

Publisher: Liverpool University Press, 2026

Synopsis

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative. The 20th century is one of “great derangement.” The idea that History has any meaning or direction has been challenged by two world wars, totalitarianism, and genocides, and now by pandemics, artificial intelligence, and the environmental crisis. The experience of the absurd is tangible and widespread. Times of cultural and material transitions further anxiety and disorientation. In the 1950s philosopher Hans Jonas suggested that cultural and geopolitical disorientation had fostered the re-emergence of cosmologies known as “gnostic” at the dawn of the Christian era. Out of This World revisits French modernity through the prism of this ancient cosmology. How to escape this world, this body? How can one invent a world parallel to this one? How do language and literature strive for a heterotopia that empties out the world and replaces it with words? From the mass graves of the First World War to transhumanist utopias, from Louis-Ferdinand Céline to Michel Houellebecq, this book focuses on the modern and postmodern vexed relation to the world, body, and Creation, a major theme in gnostic metaphysical rebellion.

About this title

About the Author

Bruno Chaouat is Professor of French at the University of Minnesota.

Edition details

• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 180596576X
• ISBN 13: 9781805965763
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232