Genealogies of the Text: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Politics in Modern France: 54 (Cambridge Studies in French, Series Number 54)
Cambridge University Press, 9/28/1995
EAN 9780521472135, ISBN10: 052147213X
Hardcover, 276 pages, 21.6 x 14 x 1.9 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
In this 1995 book, which includes a substantial introduction, Jeffrey Mehlman confronts the politically devastating resonances in the work of several leading French writers. The essays focus on the series of enigmas surrounding the 'Blanchot affair' - a scandal provoked by Mehlman's revelation in 1977 that Maurice Blanchot, one of the tutelary figures of contemporary French thought, had in the 1930s been a prominent fascist journalist. Mehlman takes the issue of Blanchot's forgotten political essays deep into the most revered - and misunderstood - of his novels, L'Arrêt de mort. Using this affair as a point of departure, Mehlman sheds light on the question of the usability of psychoanalysis for literary readings (examining, for example, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Valéry); he also investigates the ideological and political connotations of similar literary and theoretical material. The volume as a whole provides a consistently provocative meditation on literature, ethics, and the experience of the French in World War II.
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Craniometry and criticism
notes on a Valéryan criss-cross
3. Literature and hospitality
Klossowski's Hamann
4. Literature and collaboration
Benoist-Méchin's return to Proust
5. 'Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote' again
6. Iphigenia 38
deconstruction, history and the case of L'Arrêt de mort
7. Writing and deference
the politics of literary adulation
8. Perspectives
on Paul de Man and Le Soir
9. Prosopopeia revisited
10. The paranoid style in French prose
Lacan with Léon Bloy
11. The Holocaust comedies of 'Emile Ajar'
12. Pour Sainte-Beuve
Maurice Blanchot, 10 March 1942
13. Flowers of evil
Paul Morand, the Collaboration and literary history
Appendix
Notes
Index
Series list.
'… heuristic value of Mehlman's approach is undeniable …' Contemporary European History