In this book, Blanchot forcefully distinguishes his critical project from the major intellectual currents of his day, surrealism and existentialism.

The work of French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) is without doubt among the most challenging the twentieth century has to offer. Contemporary debate in literature, philosophy, and politics has yet to fully acknowledge its discreet but enduring impact. Arising from a conference that took place in Oxford in 2009, this book sets itself a simple, if daunting, task: that of measuring the impact and responding to the challenge of Blanchot's work by addressing its engagement with the Romantic legacy, in particular (but not only) that of the Jena Romantics. Drawing upon a wide range of philosophers and poets associated directly or indirectly with German Romanticism (Kant, Fichte, Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, the Schlegels, Hölderlin), the authors of this volume explore how Blanchot's fictional, critical, and fragmentary texts rewrite and rethink the Romantic demand in relation to questions of criticism and reflexivity, irony and subjectivity, narrative and genre, the sublime and the neutre, the Work and the fragment, quotation and translation. Reading Blanchot with or against key twentieth-century thinkers (Benjamin, Foucault, de Man), they also examine Romantic and post-Romantic notions of history, imagination, literary theory, melancholy, affect, love, revolution, community, and other central themes that Blanchot's writings deploy across the century from Jean-Paul Sartre to Jean-Luc Nancy. This book contains contributions in both English and French.

A new analysis of Surrealist collage in France, leading to a radical reassessment of Surrealism.

The philosophical significance of Maurice Blanchot's writings has rarely been in doubt. Specifying the nature and implications of his thinking has proved much less easy, particularly in reference to the key figure of G. W. F. Hegel. Examination reveals that Blanchot's thinking is persistently oriented towards a questioning of the terms of Hegel's thought, while nevertheless remaining within its themes, whichshows how rigorously he studied Hegel's works but also how radical his critique of them became. Equally, it allows for a crucial discussion of the differences between Blanchot's responses to Hegel and those of Jacques Derrida, with the implicit suggestion that in some ways Blanchot's critique of Hegel is more far-reaching than that developed by Derrida. William S. Allen demonstrates those aspects of Hegelian thought that permeate Blanchot's writings and, in turn, develops a detailed three-way analysis of Derrida, Hegel, and Blanchot. The key question around which this analysis develops is that of the relation between thought and language concerning the issue of the infinite and its legibility. Illegibility introduces a new and substantially philosophical account of Blanchot's importance, and also showshow his writings laid the ground for Derrida's workswhile developing their own uniquely challenging response to the problems of post-Hegelian thought.

Essays on French poets during a vital and prolific era. Covers Romanticism, lyricism, Ultraroyalisme and Eclaircissement, the Parnassians, Decadents, symbolists, intimistes and realists, as well as the proliferation of poetic sects aligned with major idioms, in many cases incorporating something from each other.

Nothing As We Need It: A Chimera imagines and writes a composite and impure form of criticism that embodies the writing of research as recursive, entangled, and many-voiced. Shaped by encounters with literature not translated in English, by the polyphonies, artifices, and concealments of a bilingual self, and by the sense of speechlessness and haunting when writing of works that cannot be instantly quoted, this book's subtitle derives from the mythological Chimera: a monstrous creature made of three different parts, impossible in theory but real in the imagination and in the reading of the myth. Similarly the book is written in different styles, some of which may seem impossible, monstrous, and disturbing. It manifests critical writing as enmeshment and conversation with its subject matters; favours impurity rather than detachment; embraces exaggeration, repetition, laughter, and self-parody as legitimate forms of knowledge. Yet a chimera also designates the object of a yearning deemed unattainable: this book exists in the space of such yearning, in the tension between words and what exceeds them, their overtones. The critic is exhausted by yearning, rather than the owner of exhaustive knowledge. A Menippean satire for critical writing, Nothing As We Need It sustains its argument for composite and impure writing in its form. It demands ways of reading equally varied, and wildly imaginative. Listening to literature beyond the limits of textual analysis, it dismisses the visual implications of reflection, which assumes detachment and polished surfaces, in favour of an aural method of resonance, allowing enmeshment and interference. This book unsettles language, welcomes uninhibited exaggeration and wordplay, and manifests possibilities for working with citation beyond the boundaries of inverted commas. Daniela Cascella is an Italian-British writer, working with forms and transformations of critical writing that inhabit, echo, and are haunted by their subjects: literature, voices, concealments of the self. Writing in English as a second language, writing as a stranger in a language, she is drawn toward unstable and uncomfortable forms of writing-as-sounding, and toward the transmissions and interferences of knowledge across cultures. Her books include: Chimeras: A Deranged Essay, An Imaginary Conversation, A Transcelation (Sublunary Editions, 2022), Singed. Muted Voice-Transmissions, After The Fire (Equus Press, 2017), F.M.R.L. Footnotes, Mirages, Refrains and Leftovers of Writing Sound (Zer0 Books, 2015), and En Abîme: Listening, Reading, Writing. An Archival Fiction (Zer0 Books, 2012). Cascella is Programme Tutor in the Art Writing MLitt at the Glasgow School of Art, Associate Lecturer in the Sound Arts MA at London College of Communication, and Commissioning Editor at MAP Magazine. She publishes and lectures internationally, and often works with artists, writers, and musicians on collaborative projects and performative readings.

This collection demonstrates the usefulness of approaching texts—verbal, visual and aural—through a framework of humour. Contributors offer in-depth discussions of humour in the West within a wider cultural historical context to achieve a coherent, chronological sense of how humour proceeds from antiquity to modernity. Reading humorously reveals the complexity of certain aspects of texts that other reading approaches have so far failed to reveal. Humour in the Arts explores humour as a source of cultural formation that engages with ethical, political, and religious controversies whilst acquainting readers with a wide range of humorous structures and strategies used across Western cultures.

A fascinating journey through Western art from the 1910s to the 1960s, charting how artists wrestled with the headlong changes of a turbulent and conflict-ridden world From the chaos of the First World War to the ravages of the Second, from the Great Depression to the rise of consumer culture, artists we call "modern" faced the challenge of responding imaginatively to utterly new circumstances of life. Original thought, startling artistic techniques, and new attitudes to experimentation were required to produce exceptional and timely work. Make It Modern guides the reader through the art of the modern world. Works of celebrated artists, from Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky to Frida Kahlo, Jackson Pollock, and Yayoi Kusama, alongside a panoply of undervalued or less-known figures, populate this decade-by-decade narrative. Make It Modern tells an unforgettable story of how art was changed forever.