- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853239963
- eISBN:
- 9781846313059
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853239963.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Anthony Wilden has analysed the literary project of the Essays in terms of Michel de Montaigne's longing for the lost plenitude of his friendship with Étienne de La Boétie. This chapter examines ...
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Anthony Wilden has analysed the literary project of the Essays in terms of Michel de Montaigne's longing for the lost plenitude of his friendship with Étienne de La Boétie. This chapter examines Wilden's complex use of Marxist (Georg Lukács) and Freudian (Jacques Lacan) interpretation as well as his arguments regarding Montaigne's concept of self and social relationships. In reading the Essays, Wilden locates Montaigne in a particular socio-economic context and labels him as an ideologist of bourgeois individualism. This strategy is informed by the authority in Karl Marx, and in particular in Lukács's The Theory of the Novel.Less
Anthony Wilden has analysed the literary project of the Essays in terms of Michel de Montaigne's longing for the lost plenitude of his friendship with Étienne de La Boétie. This chapter examines Wilden's complex use of Marxist (Georg Lukács) and Freudian (Jacques Lacan) interpretation as well as his arguments regarding Montaigne's concept of self and social relationships. In reading the Essays, Wilden locates Montaigne in a particular socio-economic context and labels him as an ideologist of bourgeois individualism. This strategy is informed by the authority in Karl Marx, and in particular in Lukács's The Theory of the Novel.
Henry Sussman
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823232833
- eISBN:
- 9780823241170
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823232833.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Amid radical transformation and rapid mutation in the nature, transmission, and deployment of information and communications, this book offers a status report and theoretically nuanced update on the ...
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Amid radical transformation and rapid mutation in the nature, transmission, and deployment of information and communications, this book offers a status report and theoretically nuanced update on the traditions and medium of the book. What, it asks, are the book's current prospects? The study highlights the most radical experiments in the book's history as trials in what the author terms the Prevailing Operating System at play within the fields of knowledge, art, critique, and science. The investigations of modern systems theory, as exemplified by Gregory Bateson, Anthony Wilden, and Niklas Luhmann, turn out to be inseparable from theoretically astute inquiry into the nature of the book. The author's primary examples of such radical experiments with the history of the book are Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book (both the text and Peter Greenaway's screen adaptation), Stéphane Mallarmé's Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard, Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Jacques Derrida's Glas, Maurice Blanchot's Death Sentence, and Franz Kafka's enduring legacy within the world of the graphic novel. In the author's hands, close reading of these and related works renders definitive proof of the book's persistence and vitality. The book medium, with its inbuilt format and program, continues, he argues, to supply the tablet or screen for cultural notation. The perennial crisis in which the book seems to languish is in fact an occasion for readers to realize fully their role as textual producers, to experience the full range of liberty in expression and articulation embedded in the irreducibly bookish process of textual display.Less
Amid radical transformation and rapid mutation in the nature, transmission, and deployment of information and communications, this book offers a status report and theoretically nuanced update on the traditions and medium of the book. What, it asks, are the book's current prospects? The study highlights the most radical experiments in the book's history as trials in what the author terms the Prevailing Operating System at play within the fields of knowledge, art, critique, and science. The investigations of modern systems theory, as exemplified by Gregory Bateson, Anthony Wilden, and Niklas Luhmann, turn out to be inseparable from theoretically astute inquiry into the nature of the book. The author's primary examples of such radical experiments with the history of the book are Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book (both the text and Peter Greenaway's screen adaptation), Stéphane Mallarmé's Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard, Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Jacques Derrida's Glas, Maurice Blanchot's Death Sentence, and Franz Kafka's enduring legacy within the world of the graphic novel. In the author's hands, close reading of these and related works renders definitive proof of the book's persistence and vitality. The book medium, with its inbuilt format and program, continues, he argues, to supply the tablet or screen for cultural notation. The perennial crisis in which the book seems to languish is in fact an occasion for readers to realize fully their role as textual producers, to experience the full range of liberty in expression and articulation embedded in the irreducibly bookish process of textual display.
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853239963
- eISBN:
- 9781846313059
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853239963.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
This chapter examines the views of rival critics concerning the style, composition, and sense of Michel de Montaigne's Essays. One such critic is Y.-J. Pouillou, who rejects both a moralist reading ...
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This chapter examines the views of rival critics concerning the style, composition, and sense of Michel de Montaigne's Essays. One such critic is Y.-J. Pouillou, who rejects both a moralist reading and an aesthetic reading of the Essays. The chapter also analyses ideological reading in the context of Anthony Wilden's interpretation of friendship in the Essays and René Etiemble's account of the essay ‘Of Coaches’. It shows that the relationship between Montaigne and Étienne de La Boétie is critical to the question of political independence in fundamental, yet seemingly opposed ways. In addition, rival readings by Richard Regosin and Alfred Glauser are considered.Less
This chapter examines the views of rival critics concerning the style, composition, and sense of Michel de Montaigne's Essays. One such critic is Y.-J. Pouillou, who rejects both a moralist reading and an aesthetic reading of the Essays. The chapter also analyses ideological reading in the context of Anthony Wilden's interpretation of friendship in the Essays and René Etiemble's account of the essay ‘Of Coaches’. It shows that the relationship between Montaigne and Étienne de La Boétie is critical to the question of political independence in fundamental, yet seemingly opposed ways. In addition, rival readings by Richard Regosin and Alfred Glauser are considered.
