Genealogies of the Text
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Politics in Modern France

This 1995 book is a provocative meditation on literature, ethics, and the experience of the French in World War II.

Jeffrey Mehlman (Author)

9780521032353, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 23 November 2006

276 pages
21.5 x 13.7 x 1.5 cm, 0.359 kg

'… heuristic value of Mehlman's approach is undeniable …' Contemporary European History

In this 1995 book, which includes a substantial introduction, Jeffrey Mehlman confronts the politically devastating resonances in the work of several leading French writers. The essays focus on the series of enigmas surrounding the 'Blanchot affair' - a scandal provoked by Mehlman's revelation in 1977 that Maurice Blanchot, one of the tutelary figures of contemporary French thought, had in the 1930s been a prominent fascist journalist. Mehlman takes the issue of Blanchot's forgotten political essays deep into the most revered - and misunderstood - of his novels, L'Arrêt de mort. Using this affair as a point of departure, Mehlman sheds light on the question of the usability of psychoanalysis for literary readings (examining, for example, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Valéry); he also investigates the ideological and political connotations of similar literary and theoretical material. The volume as a whole provides a consistently provocative meditation on literature, ethics, and the experience of the French in World War II.

Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Craniometry and criticism: notes on a Valéryan criss-cross
3. Literature and hospitality: Klossowski's Hamann
4. Literature and collaboration: Benoist-Méchin's return to Proust
5. 'Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote' again
6. Iphigenia 38: deconstruction, history and the case of L'Arrêt de mort
7. Writing and deference: the politics of literary adulation
8. Perspectives: on Paul de Man and Le Soir
9. Prosopopeia revisited
10. The paranoid style in French prose: Lacan with Léon Bloy
11. The Holocaust comedies of 'Emile Ajar'
12. Pour Sainte-Beuve: Maurice Blanchot, 10 March 1942
13. Flowers of evil: Paul Morand, the Collaboration and literary history
Appendix
Notes
Index
Series list.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]