Four cold chapters on the possibility of literature : leading mostly to Borges and Oulipo / Pablo M. Ruiz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ruiz, Pablo Martin, 1964- author.

Series:

Dalkey Archive scholarly series

Scholarly series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature--Philosophy.

Literature.

Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.).

Physical Description:

382 pages ; 22 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Champaign [Illinois] : Dalkey Archive Press, 2014.

Summary:

What can be said about the silence that precedes a poem or a story? What myths have been thought up to explain the transition from "nothing" to a work of art? And when did the "account of composition" turn into a literary genre of its own? These questions are the heart of Pablo M. Ruiz's excursion into the center(s) of literary creativity. Filled with paradoxes and parables, Four Cold Chapters takes in Borges, Perec, and Felisberto Hernandez, among numerous other topics-a new reason to consider the Odyssey to be the work of a single author, thus putting an end to a centuries-old debate; a novel way to approach the interaction between literature and religion; an original hypothesis about the way James Joyce's Ulysses was conceived; an erudite and futile, but perhaps meaningful, visit to the Provencal troubadours-as well as several suggested but politely avoided doctoral dissertations, on its journey through the universe of writing (and writing about writing). Book jacket.

Contents:

Chapter I Accounts of Composition

1 A genre with no name: Ars poetica, manifesto, plus the lights and shadows of the self 15

2 Poe and the Aristotelian tradition: The dance of the Muses and the mind 30

3 Chaos and order in the twentieth century: Dadaists and Surrealists, the reactions of Borges and Queneau 43

4 Borges and literary judgment: The experiment, from Wordsworth to Oulipo; the game 76

5 Raymond Roussel tells how he wrote his books, that is, he tells his life 117

6 Origins of the literary work Expectations on sense, potentiality, and the silences of autobiography 140

7 Oulipian constraints and the potential of potentiality 141

Chapter II (Potential). Mathematics and Literature 166

1 Numerology and the universe from Pythagoras to Kepler, a short history

2 The number of the Muses: Poetry, music, and prepositional calculus

3 Poe and Borges: The quest for the total self

4 Oulipo and the potential of form; a universal language

Chapter III (Potential). Translation and Literature 169

1 A short introduction to the history of Babel

2 The word of the Muses: voices of tradition

3 Borges: The text and its doubles

4 Oulipo and the potential of language

Chapter IV Ways of Reading as Ways of Writing

1 A missing theory: The sacred text 173

2 From the misbehavior of the gods to the quadruplication of sense 197

3 Exegesis and creation: A discipline proposed 209

4 A medieval debate: Trobar clus vs trobar leu 217

5 Kabbalah, detective fiction, and Borges's new reader for the short story 222

6 Perec, Borges, and a silent solution for La Disparition 248

7 Oulipo: From "How I Wrote X" to "How to Read X" 273

7 bis. Origins of the literary work: Notes on sense, potentiality, and the traces of autobiography 290.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9781628970586

1628970588

OCLC:

863197620