Paths to Contemporary French Literature, Band 1Transaction Publishers, 31.12.2011 - 381 Seiten The first volume of Paths to Contemporary French Literature offered a critical panorama of over fifty French writers and poets. With this second volume, John Taylorâ an American writer and critic who has lived in France for the past thirty yearsâ continues this ambitious and critically acclaimed project. Praised for his independence, curiosity, intimate knowledge of European literature, and his sharp readerâ s eye, John Taylor is a writer-critic who is naturally skeptical of literary fashions, overnight reputations, and readymade academic categories. Charting the paths that have lead to the most serious and stimulating contemporary French writing, he casts light on several neglected postwar French authors, all the while highlighting genuine mentors and invigorating newcomers. Some names (Patrick Chamoiseau, Pascal Quignard, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Jean Rouaud, Francis Ponge, Aimé Césaire, Marguerite Yourcenar, J. M. G. Le Clézio) may be familiar to the discriminating and inquisitive American reader, but their work is incisively re-evaluated here. The book also includes a moving remembrance of Nathalie Sarraute, and an evocation of the authorâ s meetings with Julien Gracq Other writers in this second volume are equally deserving authors whose work is highly respected by their peers in France yet little known in English-speaking countries. Taylorâ s pioneering elucidations in this respect are particularly valuable. This second volume also examines a number of non-French, originally non-French-speaking writers (such as Ghérasim Luca, Petr Král, Armen Lubin, Vénus Ghoura-Khata, Piotr Rawicz, as well as Samuel Beckett) who chose French as their literary idiom. Taylor is in a perfect position to understand their motivations, struggles, and goals. In a day and age when so little is known in English-speaking countries about foreign literature, and when so little is translated, the two volumes of Paths to Contemporary French Literature are absorbing guides for literary scholars, writers, poets, students of French culture, and readers of contemporary fiction and poetry. |
Inhalt
3 | |
The Pilgrimage to SaintFlorentleVieil | 12 |
Part 2 | 23 |
The Strange Case of Dr Froeppel and Monsieur Tardieu | 25 |
A Purée of Black Thoughts | 29 |
DeadSerious Wordplay | 34 |
Of Farce and Fragility | 38 |
Two BrowBashing Comics | 47 |
Feeling our Aliveness | 171 |
Elusive Life | 176 |
Belief Magic Miracle | 185 |
A Passionate Lettré | 199 |
Part 6 | 213 |
The Art of Convivance | 215 |
A Miserere of ForgetMeNots | 218 |
The Governing Passions of Exceptional Lives | 223 |
Breaking Dishes in Neverland | 50 |
One is not Serious at 117 | 53 |
A Tongue In and Out of Cheek | 55 |
A Deceptive Lightness of Being | 60 |
Part 3 | 67 |
A Little Tour through the Land of AlainFournier | 69 |
Haunting Transparence of the World | 84 |
Intuitions of Elsewhere | 91 |
In Praise of Lightness | 93 |
From the Middle of Nowhere | 97 |
Commemorating Lifes Minuscule Pleasures | 102 |
Comprehending the Quotidian | 105 |
The Clandestine Passenger of French Poetry | 109 |
The Voices of Tattered People | 113 |
Prose from a NoMans Land | 117 |
Part 4 | 119 |
The Lure of Things | 121 |
The Essential Enigmas | 124 |
Making a Gift to the Possibilities of Telling | 132 |
Bonnefoy and Shakespeare | 142 |
The Path to Impersonalization | 149 |
Ladders Leading Beyond the Self | 156 |
Of Language and the Human Heart | 158 |
From Césaire to Chamoiseau | 164 |
Part 5 | 169 |
Eros Landscapes | 228 |
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter | 230 |
From the Heart of the Limousin | 233 |
Protean Paradoxical Jean Paulhan | 237 |
Sensual Intellect | 241 |
MetaEroticism and Simulacra | 245 |
The Double Keyboard of Sensuality and Spirituality | 251 |
Part 7 | 255 |
Autobiography as Panegyric | 257 |
The Perils of Autobiography | 261 |
The Survivors Tale | 264 |
The Moral Traps of Occupied France | 266 |
Irène Némirovskys Final Manuscript | 268 |
Of Heritage and Experience | 272 |
The Commitment of an Incessant Traveler | 278 |
Before the First Page | 284 |
Part 8 | 289 |
I Cant Go On Ill Go On | 291 |
The Intimate Pierre Guyotat | 300 |
From Aristotles Quandary to French and American Prose Poems | 306 |
Notes | 323 |
Bibliography | 335 |
361 | |
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