Of Sade, Blanchot, and the French Twentieth Century

2016 ◽  
pp. 97-106
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Mehlman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Contemporary Practice

‘Of Sade, Blanchot, and the French Twentieth Century: Thoughts at Columbia’, written by Jeffrey Mehlman, retraces the peregrinations of Maurice Blanchot and considers his relevance today. The essay’s attention to authors’ reading (Blanchot’s readings of Sade and Duras; Marty’s readings, in turn, of Blanchot and Genet) underscores the critical valences of rereading as a contemporary practice.

Exhausted Commodities: The Material Culture of Music

2000 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Straw
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
Contemporary Practice ◽  
Flea Market ◽  
Musical Styles

Abstract: The twentieth century ended with the widespread conversion of cultural artefacts into digital information. Less attention has been granted to the ways in which cultural artefacts accumulate in the form of "things"-tangible books, recordings, and other objects whose economic value has often withered. This article examines the question of cultural waste and looks at those commercial and social institutions (such as the flea market and garage sale) which have evolved in order to keep old cultural commodities circulating. The recycling of old musical styles within contemporary practice is examined as one means of retrieving and revalorizing cultural waste. Résumé: La transposition massive d'artefacts culturels sous forme digitale a marqué la fin du 20e siècle. En revanche, on a porté moins d'attention à l'accumulation de ces artefacts sous forme de «choses»-livres, enregistrements et autres objets matériaux dont la valeur marchande a fortement diminué dans bien des cas. Cet article examine la question de détritus culturels, et jette un regard sur les institutions commerciales et sociales (telles que le marché aux puces et la vente de garage) qui ont évolué afin de garder les vieux biens culturels en circulation. En outre, l'article examine le recyclage d'anciens styles musicaux dans la pratique contemporaine, à titre d'exemple de récupération et de remise en valeur de détritus culturels.

“A School in the Interior” African Studies: Engagement and Interdisciplinary

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Ambler
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Studies ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
The Future ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Contemporary Practice

Abstract:This article explores the intellectual traditions of African studies, focusing on the central principles of interdisciplinarity and commitment to social and racial justice. Tracing the origins of the field to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African is t intellectuals such as Edward Blyden, it investigates these traditions historically and in the context of contemporary practice. Against the backdrop of concerns for the future of area studies, the author finds a vibrant field—both inside and beyond its traditional boundaries.

scholarly journals Terra firma : contemporary representations of the South African landscape

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Clinton De Menezes
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Terra Firma ◽  
The South ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contemporary Practice

This research aims to critically investigate the changing colonial and post-colonial attitudes towards the South African landscape, as physical space and its representation, through a post-colonial and Post-Modern critique. Chapter One explores the shifting colonial attitudes toward the landscape from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, to provide an historical overview and context for contemporary practice. Section One defines colonialism for the purposes of this study and provides a brief history of colonialism in South Africa. Section Two provides a concise history of European visual representation from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century in order to contextualize the development of South African landscape painting. Section Three analyzes and evaluates changing colonial attitudes and their representation through a discussion of the work of Francois Le Vaillant (1753-1842), Thomas Baines (1820-1875) and J.H. Pierneef (1886-1957). Chapter Two explores attitudes towards the South African landscape between 1948 and 1994 in order to provide a link between colonial representation and post-colonial contemporary practice.

Selling Our Souls

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam D. Reich
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Hospital Care ◽  
Models Of Care ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Health Care Market ◽  
The People ◽  
Modern Health Care ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Contemporary Practice

This book explores the contradictions inherent in one particular health care market—hospital care. Based on extensive interviews and observations across the three hospitals of one California city, the book examines the tensions embedded in the market for hospital care, how different hospitals manage these tensions, the historical trajectories driving disparities in contemporary hospital practice, and the perils and possibilities of various models of care. The book's three featured hospitals could not be more different in background or contemporary practice. PubliCare Hospital was founded in the late nineteenth century as an almshouse in order to address the needs of the destitute. HolyCare Hospital was founded by an order of nuns in the mid-twentieth century, offering spiritual comfort to the paying patient. And GroupCare Hospital was founded in the late twentieth century to rationalize and economize care for middle-class patients and their employers. The book explains how these legacies play out today in terms of the hospitals' different responses to similar market pressures, and the varieties of care that result. The book is an in-depth investigation into how hospital organizations and the people who work in them make sense of and respond to the modern health care market.

The Return of Genius

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Friedrich Hölderlin

This chapter chronicles the return of genius as a viable object of thought, this time in the context of madness. It first turns to the conjunction between neurosis and full-blown psychosis where genius commands greatest attention in the latter half of the twentieth century. This is explored in the case of Friedrich Hölderlin, who becomes the object of theoretical attention in the early 1950s. The chapter shows how, in the early years of theory Pierre Jean Jouve (a poet-essayist, more than a theorist in the late twentieth-century style) and Maurice Blanchot have examined the case of Hölderlin, with supporting illustration from other examples.

Maurice Blanchot

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christophe Bident
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Full Length ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Far Right ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
Political Activist ◽  
The 1950S

Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was one of the most important writers of the French twentieth century. His novels, shorter narratives, literary criticism, and fragmentary texts exercised great influence over writers, artists, and philosophers. As a journalist and political activist, he had a public side that matched his secret and mysterious side as someone who refused to be interviewed or photographed. Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography, the only full-length account of Blanchot’s itinerary, therefore attempts to carry out an impossible bio-graphy. It does so by drawing on unpublished letters and on interviews with the writer’s very close friends. Beyond this, it is a theoretical work that follows the genealogy of a thinking that is at once imaginative and speculative, at once aligned with literary modernity and a close companion and friend of philosophy. It is a historical work, unpacking the ‘transformation of convictions’ of an author who moved from the far-right in the 1930s to the far-left in the 1950s and after. And it is of course a biography, showing the strong links between the author’s life and an œuvre which nonetheless aspires to anonymity. In these ways, this book claims that Blanchot’s is a life that has become the œuvre, become a literature that bears the traces of that life secretly, even if they are what drives it. Blanchot’s œuvre is reconstituted in all its contexts, at a time when the critics who attack it, just like those who elevate it in unthinking fascination, often produce one-dimensional readings.

Encounters from the Twentieth Century: Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 39-41
Author(s):  
Jan Bryant
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Italo Calvino ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
The Political ◽  
Henri Lefebvre ◽  
Political Aesthetics ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of

The disappointments that flowed from the squashing of the student uprisings in 1968 is discussed as a way to underline a rupture in progressive thinking in the latter years of last century. Of particular concern for Marxists was a loss of faith in the proletariat as the revolutionary subject. It introduces three case studies that form the content of the next chapters, each revealing intellectual differences which became apparent the post 1968 era: (1) Paolo Pasolini and Italo Calvino; (2) Henri Lefebvre and Maurice Blanchot; and (3) the political aesthetic of Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK). The aim is to offer detailed encounters between left thinkers, not only to reveal a clash of approaches to resisting forms of power, but to offer an alternative for understanding how recent intellectual history has informed contemporary political aesthetics. It is also a way to avoid restaging another history of art, or received canon, to offer instead a non-totalising picture of history. [157]

Jewish Displacement as Experience and Metaphor in 20th-Century European Thought

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivian Liska
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Paul Celan ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
Philosophical Concept ◽  
The Earth ◽  
European Thought

This chapter examines discursive developments in twentieth-century European thought with respect to the question of the reality, metaphoricity, and exemplarity of Jewish displacement. Throughout the centuries, the Jews have been the epitome of the displaced, wandering, and exposed stranger, the rootless intruders, or an example embodying the forfeiting of fixity, dominance, and ownership associated with territorial emplacement. In modernity, Jewish exile, beyond being a theological, historical, and political issue, became a discursive theme, a literary motif, and a loaded philosophical concept. As an embodiment of discreditable rootlessness, it appears in the antisemitic depictions of the wandering, homeless outsider rejected from the nations of the earth. The chapter considers the views of European thinkers such as George Steiner, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-François Lyotard, Jonathan Boyarin, and Paul Celan regarding displaced Jews.

The Rise of Prophecy: Figural Neuter, Desert of Allegory

Sodomscapes ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lowell Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Late Modern

Chapter two lingers on Maître François’ design, treating its suggestive ambiguity as a premonitory witness to the twentieth-century postwar turns to the Sodom archive in Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas’ delicate yet fraught philosophical conversation about the ethical aptitude of artworks. The Sodom archive’s figural suggestiveness guides Blanchot and Levinas’s shared predisposition to identify the primordial affinity of artworks with the disruptive urgency of prophecy and its figural analogue, the desert. Lot’s wife’s subliminal association with the prophecy/desert nexus becomes the site of an ecumenical settlement between Blanchot and Levinas over the captivating and dislocating aesthetic power of artworks. On this note, Maître François’ image and the late modern moment of philosophical hospitality between Blanchot and Levinas speak to each other across centuries. Through different registers of discernment, the two scenes conjure the figure of Lot’s wife as the material remains of a thinking beyond the limit of the phenomenal face of appearances and cognition, so as to give witness to the radiant and interruptive force of artworks’ worlding and unworlding dimensions.

scholarly journals Exodes. Les politiques de la littérature d'après «Sortie d'Égypte» de Pierre Michon

1969 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-François Hamel
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Figure Of Speech ◽  
Pierre Michon ◽  
May 68 ◽  
The Relationship

L'Exode est une figure récurrente du discours des écrivains français de la seconde moitié du vingtième siècle qui se sont intéressés aux rapports entre la littérature et la politique. Présente chez Jean-Paul Sartre dès les années 1940, reprise par Roland Barthes dans les années 1950 et 1960, déplacée par Maurice Blanchot au seuil des années 1980, la séquence de la sortie d'Égypte hante aussi certains textes de Pierre Michon et d’Olivier Rolin. Cette figure permet à ces écrivains contemporains d'esquisser les traits caractéristiques d'une génération littéraire née des paradoxes de Mai 68 et de réaffirmer une conception prophétique de la modernité littéraire.AbstractExodus is a recurring figure of speech in many texts of the second half of the twentieth century in France that were concerned with the relationship between literature and politics. Present in Jean-Paul Sartre's writings in the forties, picked up by Roland Barthes in the fifties and sixties, transformed by Maurice Blanchot at the beginning of the eighties, the biblical sequence also haunts some texts by Pierre Michon and Olivier Rolin. This figure allows them to outline the characteristics of a literary generation born of the paradoxes of May 68 and to reaffirm a prophetic conception of literary modernism.

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