Books New & Forthcoming
Singularities: Extremes of Theory in the Twentieth Century by Thomas PEPPER is recently published by Cambridge University Press (1997), 285pp. This contains a chapter on Blanchot (see Contents). See Publisher’s Blurb for description.
Timothy CLARK has a forthcoming book: The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing, Manchester: University of Manchester Press [distributed in USA: New York: St. Martin’s Press], will appear this JUNE (1997). ISBN: 0-7190-5064-2. In correspondence Professor Clark says: “The book offers a revaluation of writers’ recurrent accounts of composition as a crisis of subjectivity and provides a critical account of theories of inspiration since the Enlightenment. The main critical presences behind this book are Blanchot (also the subject of a separate chapter) as well as Walter Ong, and Derrida. The book situates Blanchot as the ambivalent culmination and undoing of a Romantic tradition of valorising the process of composition as access to unique forms of human possibility.” Contents; Read the Publisher’s Blurb for more details;
Leslie HILL‘s Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary has appeared from Routledge. ISBN/ISSN: 0-415-09173-X (hb); ISBN/ISSN: 0-415-09174-8 (pb). Contents; See the author’s Abstract for more details as well as the publisher’s Blurbs.
Gerald L. BRUNS, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. ISBN: 0801854717; Contents; Absract
Andrew BENJAMIN‘s article, “Blanchot’s Bataille,” has appeared in Other Than Identity: The
Subject, Politics and Art, ed. Juliet Steyn, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997, pp. 9-31.
Kevin HART has collected some of his essays under the title The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and Friends. Publication information to follow.
Maurice BLANCHOT, Friendship, tr. Elizabeth ROTTENBERG, Stanford: Stanford University Press; JUNE, 1997.
Gary D. MOLE. Levinas, Blanchot, Jabès: Figures of Estrangement, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, forthcoming in JULY, 1997.
Jeffrey DeShell just published The Peculiarity of Literature: An Allegorical Approach to Poe’s Fiction (Farleigh Dickinson UP, 1987) which contains a chapter (pp. 113-44) entitled “Death Sentence: Translating, Dying, Writing.” From the Preface: “The chapter provides a collsion of sorts between a few of Poe’s stories and Blanchot’s L’Arret de Mort. The chapter begins by examining the inseperable relationship between truth and Being which grounds Western metaphysics. If fiction is indifferent to truth, then it must “exist” in a place outside or beyond Being. We use the figure of death to represent to ourselves what lies outside or beyond Being. Writing, then, is intimately tied to a certain death, or to be more precise,a certain dying. It is this intimacy between writing and dying that both Poe and Blanchot make explicit.”
A Blanchot Reader, ed. George QUASHA, tr. Paul Auster, Barrytown Ltd: Barrytown, NY, forthcoming July 1997.
Blanchot’s Death Sentence is being reissued by Barrytown Ltd. in August, 1997. ISBN 1886449414; Paper Text; $12.95.
Dissertations in Progress
Barbara DE GIUSTI is writing a thesis entitled “From Blanchot to Kafka: Between
Language and Existence. The Night-Journey of an Exiled.”