4 posts tagged “french”
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative (Temps et Récit), 3 vols. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984-1988 (1981-1985).
I kind of want to Cafepress myself a JE COEUR PAUL RICOEUR T-shirt. I had been wondering where was the account of nineteenth-century historiography and the novel; why no one could engage with Hayden White's tropological theory of history without sliding into his dumb relativism; where was the reasonable account of those qualities that make narrative an indispensable counterweight to science which still took seriously the ways in which our lives are not very much like The Brothers Kamarazov. Every vein here is loaded with ore, and as with Truth and Method, which I read over the holidays, this was only a first pass through something I'll be returning to for a long time. (I did kind of skim the twenty pages about The Magic Mountain. Hans, the magic mountain sucks! Go home!)
I kind of want to Cafepress myself a JE COEUR PAUL RICOEUR T-shirt. I had been wondering where was the account of nineteenth-century historiography and the novel; why no one could engage with Hayden White's tropological theory of history without sliding into his dumb relativism; where was the reasonable account of those qualities that make narrative an indispensable counterweight to science which still took seriously the ways in which our lives are not very much like The Brothers Kamarazov. Every vein here is loaded with ore, and as with Truth and Method, which I read over the holidays, this was only a first pass through something I'll be returning to for a long time. (I did kind of skim the twenty pages about The Magic Mountain. Hans, the magic mountain sucks! Go home!)
Flaubert, Gustave. Bouvard and Pécuchet; with the Dictionary of Received Ideas (Bouvard et Pécuchet, Dictionnaire des idées reçues). Trans. A.J. Krailsheimer. London: Penguin, 1976 (1874-1880).
It's so funny. It's so mean. It's so funny. There's no way to do right by it - one of B. and P.'s principal occupations is mocking the stupidity and unoriginality of other people, and they aren't precisely wrong to do so. It doesn't feel unfinished. The tone is so homogenous that it's easy enough to superimpose it over Flaubert's plot sketch for the last chapters (with another steel-trap ending, just like L'Éducation Sentimentale), have the received ideas for dessert and go to bed with heartburn.
It's so funny. It's so mean. It's so funny. There's no way to do right by it - one of B. and P.'s principal occupations is mocking the stupidity and unoriginality of other people, and they aren't precisely wrong to do so. It doesn't feel unfinished. The tone is so homogenous that it's easy enough to superimpose it over Flaubert's plot sketch for the last chapters (with another steel-trap ending, just like L'Éducation Sentimentale), have the received ideas for dessert and go to bed with heartburn.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (Discourse sur les sciences et les arts) and Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes). Ed. Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. (1750, 1754).
What, must Man then retire from Society and go to live with the Bears? Well no, but consider the Savage who sells his cotton bed to the Explorer and returns weeping later that day to buy it back, for he gave no thought in the morning to his needs for the evening. Like me, who just poured his bottled water into a glass at the cafe, thus depriving myself of water for the walk home. God damn it, Rousseau.
What, must Man then retire from Society and go to live with the Bears? Well no, but consider the Savage who sells his cotton bed to the Explorer and returns weeping later that day to buy it back, for he gave no thought in the morning to his needs for the evening. Like me, who just poured his bottled water into a glass at the cafe, thus depriving myself of water for the walk home. God damn it, Rousseau.
Casanova, Pascale. Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution (Beckett L'abstracteur: Anatomie d'une révolution littéraire). Trans. Gregory Elliott. New York: Verso, 2007 (1997).
It is very hard to write well about Beckett, but Casanova largely pulls it off - ignore the révolution and pay attention to the abstracteur. It isn't the familiar-sounding claims for Beckett's novelty that make this book important, but rather Casanova's reading of him against the dominant Blanchot-inspired critical tradition. She takes Beckett's decision to write about the impossibility of writing not as an existential statement but as a solution to a technical problem, resolutely formalist in nature, with its closest analogue in abstract art. What emerges from her argument is an affecting portrait of a demythologized Beckett, occupied above all with matters of craft. It makes his later works in particular more real to me.
It is very hard to write well about Beckett, but Casanova largely pulls it off - ignore the révolution and pay attention to the abstracteur. It isn't the familiar-sounding claims for Beckett's novelty that make this book important, but rather Casanova's reading of him against the dominant Blanchot-inspired critical tradition. She takes Beckett's decision to write about the impossibility of writing not as an existential statement but as a solution to a technical problem, resolutely formalist in nature, with its closest analogue in abstract art. What emerges from her argument is an affecting portrait of a demythologized Beckett, occupied above all with matters of craft. It makes his later works in particular more real to me.
