Short Voyages to the Land of the People by Jacques Rancire

Short Voyages to the Land of the People by Jacques Rancire

This book analyzes a range of texts that seek, in different ways, to represent "the people." Rancière approaches these texts as travel narratives or ethnographies whose authors have traveled not to distant or exotic lands but across class lines. In this truly comparative study, he examines Wordsworth's poetry, the utopian discourse of the Saint-Simoniens, the correspondence and theater of Büchner, Claude Genoux's Mémoires d'un enfant de la Savoie, Michelet's theories of history, the prose and poetry of Rilke, and the performance of Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini's postwar film Europe 51.

Rancière examines the various forms of displacement that affect his subjects, enabling each to become foreign to the sites and trajectories commonly known as reality.

He argues convincingly that "the people" have no proper signification in the texts under consideration, instead, they function as points of reality upon which the voyager can drape a conceptual framework shaped by the circumstances not of the other, but of the self.

"This is an important work for a number of reasonsThe depth of Ranciere's knowledge, the brilliance of his insights, and the passionate commitment with which he pursues the questions raised by the texts under consideration, all combine to make it a challenging and rewarding intellectual experience." -Karl A. Britto,University of California, Berkeley

Jacques Rancière is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. His most recent book in English is Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780804736817
ISBN 10	0804736812
Title	Short Voyages to the Land of the People
Author	Jacques Rancière
Series	Atopia: Philosophy Political Theory Aesthetics
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Stanford University Press
Year published	2003-03-05
Number of pages	152
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.