Maurice Blanchot: The Book to Come (1959‒) [EN, PT]

“During the last half of the twentieth century in France, Maurice Blanchot was a key figure in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. He developed early on a distinctive, limpid form of essay writing, and his essays, in form and substance, left their unmistakable imprint on the work of the most distinguished French theorists. The writings of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, for example, are hardly imaginable without Blanchot.

The Book to Come gathers together essays originally published in La Nouvelle Revue Française. Not a random collection of essays, this book is organized into four sections: “the secret of literature”; literature as exigence and as meaning; literature and the novel; and the future of writing and of the book. The authors discussed constitute a veritable repertoire: Rousseau, Proust, Artaud, Brach, Musil, James, Beckett, Bataille, Mallarmé, Joubert, and Claudel, among others.”

Originally published as Le livre à venir, Gallimard, Paris, 1959

English edition
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2002
Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series
ISBN 0804742235
267 pages

Review (Mark Cohen, 2004)

Publisher (EN)
WorldCat

The Book to Come (English, trans. Charlotte Mandell, 2002, 15 MB)
O livro por vir (Portuguese, trans. Leyla Perrone-Moises, 2005, 7 MB)

Edward Braun: Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre (1979/1995)

“Legendary Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940) led the revolt against naturalism and flouted Stalinist socialist realism with his avant-garde productions incorporating mime, constructivist sets, musical scores and formalized scenery. His scenic invention and use of cinematic techniques culminated in his 1926 staging of Gogol’s The Government Inspector as well as reinterpretations of classics such as Pushkin’s Queen of Spades. Braun, a drama professor in England, sees Meyerhold as a supreme director-poet for whom the theater was designed to shatter the audience’s complacency. Decked out with 145 photographs of set reproductions, costumes and posters, Braun’s vibrant study restores Meyerhold’s radical legacy for contemporary theater. This revision of a work first published in 1979 draws on a wealth of newly discovered writings by Meyerhold, as well as KGB files released since 1989 that tell the full story of the director’s arrest, torture and execution after being falsely labeled a foreign agent by Stalin.” (Source)

Originally published in 1979
Second, revised and expanded, edition
Publisher Methuen Drama, 1995
ISBN 0413727300
347 pages

Reviews: Sharon Marie Carnicke (Modern Drama, 1996), Christine Kiebuzinska (Theatre Journal, 1996), Phil Shannon (Green Left Weekly, 1999).

PDF (33 MB)