Genealogies of the Text

Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Politics in Modern France

Jeffrey Mehlman

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 1995
• Print ISBN: 9780521472135
• eBook ISBN: 9780511886447
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Craniometry and criticism: notes on aValery an criss-cross
• 3 Literature and hospitality: Klossowski's Hamann
• 4 Literature and collaboration: Benoist-Mechin'sreturn to Proust
• 5 "Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote" again
• 6 Iphigenia 38: deconstruction, history, and the case ofL'Arret de mort
• 7 Writing and deference: the politics ofliterary adulation
• 8 Perspectives: on Paul de Man and Le Soir
• 9 Prosopopeia revisited
• 10 The paranoid style in French proseLacan with Leon Bloy
• 11 The Holocaust comedies of "Emile Ajar'
• 12 Pour Sainte-Beuve: Maurice Blanchot,w March 1942
• 13 Flowers of evil: Paul Morand, the Collaboration,and literary history
• Appendix
• Notes
• Index
• Cambridge Studies in French