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In this book, Jeffrey Mehlman dwells on the series of enigmas surrounding the "Blanchot affair," in which one of the leading figures of contemporary French thought was shown to have been a prominent fascist journalist during the 1930s. Using this as a point of departure, Mehlman investigates the ideological and political connotations of similar literary material, shedding new light on the question of the usability of psychoanalysis for literary readings. The volume provides a provocative meditation on literature, ethics, and the experience of the French in World War II.
List of contents
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.
About the author
Jeffrey Mehlman, who has taught at Cornell, Johns Hopkins and Harvard Universities, is Professor of French Literature and University Professor at Boston University. He is the author (most recently) of Adventures in the French Trade, Emigré New York, Walter Benjamin for Children and Genealogies of the Text.
Summary
This 1995 book confronts the series of enigmas surrounding the 'Blanchot affair', in which one of the leading figures of contemporary French thought was shown to have been a prominent fascist journalist during the 1930s. Using this as a point of departure, Mehlman investigates the ideological and political connotations of similar literary material.
