"The 19th century in France spawned numerous 'fous litteraires, one of them being Jean-Pierre Brisset (1837-1919). An individualist among individualists, he dismantled the existing French tongue, reshaping it to suit his own grandiose purposes, which were to explain afresh the development of human beings (from frogs) and of their language (from croaks). Continuous and ubiquitous punning was a unique feature of his writing. In this study, Redfern examines such themes as the nature of litera...

Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a personage without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. The more sophisticated characters find it natural to speak in quotations. Proust made literary taste a means of defining personalities and gave literature an actual role to play in his novels.In this wonderfully entertaining book, scholar and biographer Anka Muhls...

The Incident at Antioch is a key play marking Alain Badiou's transition from classical Marxism to a "politics of subtraction" far removed from party and state. Written with striking eloquence and extraordinary poetic richness, and shifting from highly serious emotional and intellectual drama to surreal comic interlude, the work features statesmen, workers, and revolutionaries struggling to reconcile the nature and practice of politics.This bilingual edition presents L'...

How have we thought “the body”? How can we think it anew? The body of mortal creatures, the body politic, the body of letters and of laws, the “mystical body of Christ”—all these (and others) are incorporated in the word Corpus, the title and topic of Jean-Luc Nancy’s masterwork.Corpus is a work of literary force at once phenomenological, sociological, theological, and philosophical in its multiple orientations and approaches. In thirty-six brief sections, Nancy offers us at once a...

'sense too definite cancels your indistinct literature' Stéphane Mallarmé was the most radically innovative of nineteenth-century poets. His writings, with their richly sensuous texture and air of slyly intangible mystery, perplexed or outraged many early readers; yet no writer has more profoundly influenced the course of modern poetry - in English as well as in French. In both form and content, his poems created new ways of conveying existential doubt, fragmentation, and ...

In 1943, Northrop Frye wrote a paper, left unfinished, on "the state of the world." His ideas of what to expect after the end of the war and the role that literature might play in a time of peace, are the starting point for a meditation on the roles of writer and reader, and what kind of vision is required of them to explore and depict the world. Homer is the archetype of the writer who can see into the future through his knowledge of the past. But how has Homer been read throughout the ce...

It was as a poet that Samuel Beckett launched himself in the little reviews of 1930s Paris, and as a poet that he ended his career. This new selection, from Whoroscope (1930) to 'what is the word' (1988), describes a lifetime's arc of writing. It was as a poet moreover that Beckett made his first breakthrough into writing in French, and the Selected Poems represents work in both languages, including the sequence of brief but highly crafted mirlitonnades, which di...

This book, the English version of La traduction aujourd'hui (Hachette 1994), describes the interpretive theory of translation developed at the Paris Ecole Supérieure d'Interprètes et de Traducteurs (ESIT) over the last 35 years.The theory identifies the mental and cognitive processes involved in both oral and written translation: understanding the text, deverbalizing its language, re-expressing sense. For the purposes of translation, languages are a means of transmitting sense, the...

Ricochet is a bilingual collection of word sonnets by one of the chief innovators of the form, Seymour Mayne. It includes three sequences of pithy and evocative poems that encapsulate moments of sharp perception while also drawing attention to instants of humour that suddenly appear in daily life.Concise and visual in effect, word sonnets are fourteen line poems, with one word per line. Frequently allusive and imagistic, they can also be irreverent and playful. While infor...

The association of ideas became the foundation of Freudian psychoanalysis, informed the nascent semiology of Saussure, and characterized the literary works of Sterne, Joyce, Woolf, and especially Marcel Proust. The author of Remembrance of Things Past, acutely aware of how philosophical, historical, and narrative writing intersected, gave years of thinking and planning to his multivolume masterpiece. Its shape was protean. Each successive volume reconfigured the previous ones and ...

This volume brings together a series of essays by acknowledged experts on Flaubert. It offers a coherent overview of the writer's work and critical legacy, and provides insights into the very latest scholarly thinking. While a central place is given to Flaubert's most widely read texts, attention is also paid to key areas of the corpus that have tended to be overlooked. Close textual analyses are accompanied by discussion of broader theoretical issues, and by a consideration of Flaubert's ...

The Cambridge Companion to Proust, first published in 2001, aims to provide a broad account of the major features of Marcel Proust's great work A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27). The specially commissioned essays, by acknowledged experts on Proust, address a wide range of issues relating to his work. Progressing from background and biographical material, the chapters investigate such essential areas as the composition of the novel, its social dimension, the language in which it is co...