The Imperative to Write by Jeff Fort

The Imperative to Write by Jeff Fort

Is writing haunted by a categorical imperative? Does the Kantian sublime continue to shape the writer’s vocation, even for twentieth-century authors? What precise shape, form, or figure does this residue of sublimity take in the fictions that follow from it—and that leave it in ruins? This book explores these questions through readings of three authors who bear witness to an ambiguous exigency: writing as a demanding and exclusive task, at odds with life, but also a mere compulsion, a drive without end or reason, even a kind of torture. If Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett mimic a sublime vocation in their extreme devotion to writing, they do so in full awareness that the trajectory it dictates leads not to metaphysical redemption but rather downward, into the uncanny element of fiction. As this book argues, the sublime has always been a deeply melancholy affair, even in its classical Kantian form, but it is in the attenuated speech of narrative voices progressively stripped of their resources and rewards that the true nature of this melancholy is revealed.

"Jeff Fort writes with energy and verve, ambitiously tackles some formidably difficult works, and treats in this study an extensive and important corpus of some key figures in literary modernism" -- -Alain Toumayan University of Notre Dame "The Imperative to Write examines three formidably difficult and fascinating writers of the last century: Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett. Jeff Fort analyzes the exigency to write in each of the three, and produces a powerful study of these major authors. A 'tour de force' of close reading." -- -Kevin Hart University of Virginia "In this ambitious and wide-ranging book, Jeff Fort addresses some of the most enduring and intractable issues affecting modern literature." -- -Leslie Hill University of Warwick

Jeff Fort is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Imperative to Write (2014) and translator of more than a dozen books, by Jean Genet, Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780823254699
ISBN 10	0823254690
Titel	The Imperative to Write
Autor	Jeff Fort
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Hardback
Verlag	Fordham University Press
Erscheinungsjahr	2014-03-03
Seitenanzahl	440
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
Hinweis	Nicht verfügbar