Is writing haunted by a categorical imperative? Does the Kantian sublime continue to shape the writer's vocation, even for twentieth-century authors? What precise shape, form, or figure does this residue of sublimity take in the fictions that follow from itand that leave it in ruins?
This book explores these questions through readings of three authors who bear witness to an ambiguous exigency: writing as a demanding and exclusive task, at odds with life, but also a mere compulsion, a drive without end or reason, even a kind of torture. If Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett mimic a sublime vocation in their extreme devotion to writing, they do so in full awareness that the trajectory it dictates leads not to metaphysical redemption but rather downward, into the uncanny element of fiction. As this book argues, the sublime has always been a deeply melancholy affair, even in its classical Kantian form, but it is in the attenuated speech of narrative voices
progressively stripped of their resources and rewards that the true nature of this melancholy is revealed.
Recenzijas
"Jeff Fort writes with energy and verve, ambitiously tackles some formidably difficult works, and treats in this study an extensive and important corpus of some key figures in literary modernism." -- -Alain Toumayan University of Notre Dame "The Imperative to Write examines three formidably difficult and fascinating writers of the last century: Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett. Jeff Fort analyzes the exigency to write in each of the three, and produces a powerful study of these major authors. A 'tour de force' of close reading." -- -Kevin Hart University of Virginia "In this ambitious and wide-ranging book, Jeff Fort addresses some of the most enduring and intractable issues affecting modern literature." -- -Leslie Hill University of Warwick
Papildus informācija
Provides nuanced and textured readings of authors who set out to destitute the treasure that literature has always promised to deliver, but whose texts leave open--and empty--the slim margin of an enigma that demands to be read.
List of Abbreviations Introduction: "Why Do You Write?"-The Fault
of Writing Part I: Kafka
1. Kafka's Teeth: The Literary
Gewissenbiss
2. The Ecstasy of Judgment: Ungrasping Justice
3.
Embodied Violence and the Leap from the Law: "In the Penal Colony" and The
Trial
4. Degradation of the Sublime: "A Hunger Artist" Part II:
Blanchot
5. Pointed Instants: Blanchot's Exigencies
6. The Shell
and the Mask: L'arret de mort
7. The Dead Look: The Death Mask, the
Corpse Image, and the Haunting of Fiction Part III: Beckett
8.
Beckett's Voices and the Paradox of Expression Conclusion: Speech
Unredeemed-From the Call of Conscience to the Torture of Language
Notes Bibliography Index
Jeff Fort is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Imperative to Write (2014) and translator of more than a dozen books, by Jean Genet, Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others.
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