On poetry and politics

Abstract

Jean Paulhan was a legendary editorial figure of twentieth-century French literature, assisting and publishing many of the most important writers of his lifetime. He was also the author of several volumes of fiction and numerous essays dealing with literature, art, rhetoric, and language. Yet he published his own work in a manner that deliberately kept it inconspicuous, or as Maurice Blanchot put it, "in the margins." A critics' critic, he gave his texts the same scrupulous attention he gave to others, and was recognized as a discreet master. But when he was sufficiently upset or angry, as he was when French politics endangered the intellectual freedom of French writers and writing, he published ferociously. This volume is the first English translation of these major essays, presenting in one book the development of his thinking on his most studied subject: how language works, or, to echo Blanchot again, how literature is possible. Much of contemporary literary theory finds its modern antecedents in Paulhan's essays. He reflected on large questions such as the philosophy and psychology of literature, while at the same time showing a concern for detail and aesthetic accomplishment. He constantly emphasized the act of reading as an activity and literature as the engagement and provocation of such activity. Beloved by writers because he took the problems of writing with the utmost seriousness, his own personal style was marked by self-effacement and irony

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

  • Only published works are available at libraries.

Similar books and articles

The space of literature.Maurice Blanchot - 1982 - Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
The Art of Literature.Arthur Schopenhauer - 1891 - Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications. Edited by T. Bailey Saunders.
Essays on language and literature.J. L. Hevesi - 1947 - Port Washington, N.Y.,: Kennikat Press.
Book of addresses.Peggy Kamuf - 2005 - Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Writings on philosophy and language.Johann Georg Hamann - 2007 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Kenneth Haynes.
Broken Words: Maurice Blanchot and the Impossibility of Writing.Walter Brogan - 2009 - Comparative and Continental Philosophy 1 (2):181-192.

Analytics

Added to PP
2011-04-07

Downloads
11 (#975,863)

6 months
1 (#1,040,386)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references