Cathy Gere: Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (2009)

“In the spring of 1900, British archaeologist Arthur Evans began to excavate the palace of Knossos on Crete, bringing ancient Greek legends to life just as a new century dawned amid far-reaching questions about human history, art, and culture. With Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, Cathy Gere relates the fascinating story of Evans’s excavation and its long-term effects on Western culture. After the World War I left the Enlightenment dream in tatters, the lost paradise that Evans offered in the concrete labyrinth—pacifist and matriarchal, pagan and cosmic—seemed to offer a new way forward for writers, artists, and thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Graves, and Hilda Doolittle.

Assembling a brilliant, talented, and eccentric cast at a moment of tremendous intellectual vitality and wrenching change, Cathy Gere paints a portrait of the age of concrete and the birth of modernism.”

Publisher University Of Chicago Press, 2009
ISBN 0226289532, 9780226289533
277 pages

Reviews: Nicoletta Momigliano (Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2009), Mary Beard (The New York Review of Books, 2009), Nanno Marinatos (American Journal of Archaeology, 2010), Marnin Young (NonSite, 2011).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF

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)

Jean-Luc Nancy: The Inoperative Community (1986–) [EN, ES, CR, RO]

“In this powerful work, Jean-Luc Nancy examines community as an idea that has dominated modern thought and traces its relation to concepts of experience, discourse, and the individual. Contrary to popular Western notions of community, Nancy shows that it is neither a project of fusion nor production. Rather, he argues, community can be defined through the political nature of its resistance against immanent power.”

Publisher Christian Bourgois, Paris, 1986
New edition, 2004
ISBN 22670008939
278 pages

English edition
Edited by Peter Connor
Translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney
Foreword by Christopher Fynsk
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1991
Theory and History of Literature series, 76
176 pages

Publisher (FR)
Publisher (EN)
WorldCat (FR)
WorldCat (EN)

The Inoperative Community (English, ed. Peter Connor, 1991)
La comunidad inoperante (Spanish, trans. Juan Manuel Garrido Wainer, 2000)
Dva ogleda. Razdjelovljena zajednica. O singularnom pluralnom bitku (Croatian, trans. Tomislav Medak, 2003)
Comunitatea absentă (Romanian, trans. Emilian Cioc, 2005, 69 MB)