Jacques Rancière: Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics (1998–) [ES, EN]
Filed under book | Tags: · art history, critical theory, history, history of literature, literary criticism, literature, philosophy, poetry, politics
“Jacques Rancière has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly through his questioning of aesthetic “distributions of the sensible,” which configure the limits of what can be seen and said. Widely recognized as a seminal work in Rancière’s corpus, the translation of which is long overdue, Mute Speech is an intellectual tour de force proposing a new framework for thinking about the history of art and literature. Rancière argues that our current notion of “literature” is a relatively recent creation, having first appeared in the wake of the French Revolution and with the rise of Romanticism. In its rejection of the system of representational hierarchies that had constituted belles-letters, “literature” is founded upon a radical equivalence in which all things are possible expressions of the life of a people. With an analysis reaching back to Plato, Aristotle, the German Romantics, Vico, and Cervantes and concluding with brilliant readings of Flaubert, Mallarmé, and Proust, Rancière demonstrates the uncontrollable democratic impulse lying at the heart of literature’s still-vital capacity for reinvention.”
First published in French as La Parole muette. Essai sur les contradictions de la littérature, Hachette Litteratures, 1998
English edition
Translated by James Swenson
Publisher Columbia University Press, 2011
New Directions in Critical Theory series
ISBN 0231151039, 9780231151030
194 pages
publisher (EN)
La palabra muda: ensayo sobre las contradicciones de la literatura (Spanish, trans. Cecilia González, 2009, 112 MB, added on 2014-3-6)
Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics (English, trans. James Swenson, 2011)
Jan Zwicky: Wisdom & Metaphor (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · language, literature, metaphor, philosophy, poetry
“The shape of metaphorical thought is also the shape of wisdom,” states Jan Zwicky in her introduction to Wisdom & Metaphor, “What a human mind must do in order to comprehend a metaphor is a version of what it must do in order to be wise.” In this follow-up to her astonishingly original book Lyric Philosophy (1992), Zwicky sets out to explore the ways in which metaphorical thought links to wisdom: “Those who think metaphorically are enabled to think truly,” suggests Zwicky, “because the shape of their thinking echoes the shape of the world.” Zwicky’s prose style is the very model of her thesis, echoing the measured, sure-spoken clarity of her poetry, guiding the reader through multiple layers of meaning in the right-hand/left-hand voice style that she employed so successfully in Lyric Philosophy. Wisdom & Metaphor is a stunning work that will engage a broad range of readers.
Publisher Gaspereau Press, 2003
ISBN 1894031784
288 pages
review (Adam Dickinson, Canadian Literature)
interview with the author (Mat Laporte, The Puritan)
Michel Foucault: Raymond Roussel (1963–) [FR, EN, ES, CZ]
Filed under book | Tags: · literary criticism, literature, philosophy
Michel Foucault’s only book-length work of literary criticism.
Publisher Gallimard, Paris, 1963
212 pages
Raymond Roussel par Michel Foucault (radio broadcast, RTF France 3 National, Photogrammes, 80 min, 1962, French)
A lovely Curiosity: Raymond Roussel (1877–1933) (essay by William Clark, Variant Magazine)
Raymond Roussel (French)
Raymond Roussel (Spanish, trans. Patricio Canto, 1976)
Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel (English, trans. Charles Ruas, 1987/2007, updated on 2015-7-5)
Raymond Roussel (Czech, trans. Josef Fulka, 2006)