Awards

• Long-listed for The Florence Gould Foundation and the French-American Foundations Translation Prize 2015

Overview

These articles gradually outline a practical project that both looks back to the radical artistic doctrines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and anticipates the most original developments in the postwar era, among writers such as Robbe-Grillet, Butor, Sarraute, and Duras, not to mention Blanchot himself. In addition Blanchot is receptive in his weekly column to the extraordinarily wide range of original writing and thinking that was produced during the dark years of occupation, in areas such as psychology, anthropology, ancient history, linguistics, and philosophy. A highly original doctrine of writing can be seen to develop in which, thanks to the desperate clarity with which Blanchot's mind accepts and advances into what he sees as absolute and irrevocable disaster, thought is carefully and systematically deflected away from any sort of nihilism, thanks to a new relationship between reason, with its unitary subject, and the otherness to which imagination offers access.

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9780823250998

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Reviews

Maurice Blanchot became the greatest literary critic in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. Here, though, in these early pieces, we find him as a reviewer. And what a reviewer he is! Things emerge in what is always a strange light, he writes. This is the light that literature casts, he comes to think. We read these reviews with admiration: their like could never appear in today's papers. And, when we look at them with political lenses, we learn a great deal about mid-century French political culture. Michael Holland has translated them beautifully, and his Introduction is superb. Kevin Hart, The University of Virginia

Author Information

Maurice Blanchot (Author) Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003)—writer, critic, and journalist—was one of the most important voices in twentieth-century literature and thought. His books include Thomas the Obscure, The Instant of my Death, The Writing of the Disaster, and The Unavowable Community. Michael Holland (Translator) Michael Holland is a Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford.

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