The stelliferous fold : toward a virtual law of literature's self-formation / Rodolphe Gasché.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gasché, Rodolphe.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature--Philosophy.

Literature.

Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

Physical Description:

x, 393 pages ; 23 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2011.

Summary:

This book seeks to develop a novel approach to literature beyond the conventional divide between realism/formalism and history/aestheticism. It accomplishes this not only through a radical reassessment of the specificity of literature in distinction to one of its others-namely, philosophy-but above all by taking critical issue with the venerable concept of the "text" and its association with the artisanal techniques of weaving and interlacing. This conception of the text as an artisanal fabric is, the author holds, the unreflected presupposition of both realist, or historicist, and reflective, or "deconstructive," criticism.

Gasché argues that "scenes of production" within literary works, created by their authors yet independent of those authors' intentions, stage a work's own production in virtual fashion and thus accomplish for those works a certain ideal ontological status that allows for both historical endurance and creative interpretation.

In Gasché's construction of these scenes, in which literary works render visible within their own fabric the invisible conditions of their autonomous existence, certain images prevail: the fold, the star, the veil. By showing that these literary images are not simply the opposites of concepts, he not only puts Into question the common opposition between literature and philosophy but shows that literary works perform a way of "argumentation" that, in spite of all its difference from philosophical conceptuality, is on a par with it.

The argument progresses through close readings of literary works by Lautréamont, Nerval, de l'Isle-Adam, Huysman, Flaubert, Artaud, Blanchot, Defoe, and Melville. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part I Scenarios for a Theory

1 Un-Staging the Beginning: Herman Melville's Cetology 27

2 Autogeneous Engenderment: Antonin Artaud's Phonetic Body 49

3 Onslaughts on Filiation: Lautréamont's Chants de,Maldoror 64

4 Celestial Stars/Water Stars: Gérard de Nerval's Sylvie 87

5 The Stelliferous Fold: Villiers de I'Isle-Adam's L'Eve Future 112

6 The Falls of History: Joris-Karl Huysmans's Against Nature 146

Part II Parting with the Paradigms

7 Beginnings and Endings 173

8 On Aesthetic and Historical Determination 210

9 Hegel's Orient, or the End of Romanticism 231

Part III Light Motives for a Critical Journey

10 Of Goats, Caves, and Cannibals: Daniel Defoe's Robinson Cruisoe 247

11 Kafka's Law: In the Field of Forces Between Judaism and Hellenism 269

12 The Deepening of Apperception: On Walter Benjamin's Theory of Film 298

13 Accompaniments for a Title 310

14 The Imperative of Transparency: Maurice Blanchot's

the one who was standing aPart from me 316

15 The Veil, the Fold, the Image:

On Gustave Flaubert's Salammbo 337.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and selected names index.

ISBN:

0823234355

9780823234349

0823234347

9780823234356

OCLC:

692292480

Publisher Number:

99945625502