by Françoise Meltzer (1994)
But is it original? The question, on which so much of writing stakes its claim to greatness, may be more interesting than the answer. In this provocative book, Francoise Meltzer takes a subtle and incisive look at the anxiety of origins at the heart of the literary enterprise. Using four case studies, Meltzer reveals the shaky status of originality as a founding principle of the critical establishment. Three dreams were the starting point for Descartes's famous methode. In the short shrift given to these nightly visions by the author of The Interpretation of Dreams, Meltzer sees a symptom of Freud's overwhelming anxiety about originality and authorship, an obsession that mirrors Descartes's own fear of plagiarism. Turning next to the Holocaust poet Paul Celan, who was actually accused of plagiarism by another poet's widow, Meltzer takes us through the minority discourse on the European Jew - in which "the Jew" is seen as having no homeland except for the text - to show us why such an accusation was so devastating for Celan. The question of originality becomes even trickier in the case of Colette, whose early books were published under her husband Willy's name. Scrutinizing Willy's elaborate promotion of himself as a serious writer, unlike his "lazy" wife, Meltzer questions our investment in the working notion of a writer, and in the way that notion is gendered. Finally she considers the case of Walter Benjamin, whose early interpreters, especially Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, challenged his seriousness and originality by alluding to his supposed 'feminine' qualities of vagabondage and sloth. In each of these cases, Meltzer shows how a threat to a writer's status as creator betrays the larger fraud of the originality myth itself . Fascinating for its insights into the ways originality is both at risk and at work in Western literary culture, Hot Property will engage all those who have an interest in questions of authorship, textual sovereignty, and the legitimacy of the critical establishment.
Charles Johnson
Inspirational and thematically linked essays explore W.E.B. DuBois's 1926 question to African Ameicans about what they really wanted if race was not an issue, in a collection that introduces basic Buddhist practices.
Andrew Ford
"By "literary criticism" we usually mean a self-conscious act involving the technical and aesthetic appraisal, by individuals, of autonomous works of art. Aristotle and Plato come to mind. The word "social" does not. Yet, as this book shows, it should - if, that is, we wish to understand where literary criticism as we think of it today came from. Andrew Ford offers a new understanding of the development of criticism, demonstrating that its roots stretch back long before the sophists to public commentary on the performance of songs and poems in the preliteracy era of ancient Greece. He pinpoints when and how, later in the Greek tradition than is usually assumed, poetry was studied as a discipline with its own principles and methods.". "Serving as a monumental preface to Aristotle's Poetics, this book allows readers to discern the emergence, within the manifold activities that might be called criticism, of the historically specific discourse on poetry that has shaped subsequent Western approaches to literature."--BOOK JACKET.
Elie Wiesel
Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man. Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be. - Publisher. Night is Elie Wiesel's account of his childhood experiences in a Hungarian ghetto and the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Also contained in: Night with Related Readings La Nuit / L'Aube / Le Jour
Bernard Hamon
A travers cet essai critique, Bernard Hamon s'appuie sur les textes de George Sand pour montrer que sa pensée religieuse ne peut entrer "dans le moule de religions existantes". Spiritualiste et humaniste, elle est "empreinte d'une religiosité cosmique en dehors de toute confession". "Je suis toujours croyante, tout à fait croyante en Dieu. La vie éternelle. Le mal un jour vaincu par la science. La science éclairée par l'amour. Mais les symboles, les figures, les dieux humains ? Bonjour ! J'ai dépassé tout cela. Je suis entrée dans l'univers, et voilà." Extrait de Journal intime.