My Fantoms

My Fantoms
Author: Theophile Gautier
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2008-08-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 159017271X

Romantic provocateur, flamboyant bohemian, precocious novelist, perfect poet—not to mention an inexhaustible journalist, critic, and man-about-town—Théophile Gautier is one of the major figures, and great characters, of French literature. In My Fantoms Richard Holmes, the celebrated biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, has found a brilliantly effective new way to bring this great bu too-little-known writer into English. My Fantoms assembles seven stories spanning the whole of Gautier’s career into a unified work that captures the essence of his adventurous life and subtle art. From the erotic awakening of “The Adolescent” through “The Poet,” a piercing recollection of the mad genius Gérard de Nerval, the great friend of Gautier’s youth, My Fantoms celebrates the senses and illuminates the strange disguises of the spirit, while taking readers on a tour of modernity at its most mysterious. ”What ever would the Devil find to do in Paris?” Gautier wonders. “He would meet people just as diabolical as he, and find himself taken for some naïve provincial…” Tapestries, statues, and corpses come to life; young men dream their way into ruin; and Gautier keeps his faith in the power of imagination: “No one is truly dead, until they are no longer loved.”

The Works of Théophile Gautier, Vol. 1 of 24 (Classic Reprint)

The Works of Théophile Gautier, Vol. 1 of 24 (Classic Reprint)
Author: Gautier Gautier
Publisher: Forgotten Books
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2017-12-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780484880107

Excerpt from The Works of Theophile Gautier, Vol. 1 of 24 Paris proclaimed the downfall of the Empire and the establishment of the Third Republic; the Empress fled from the Tuileries, passing through the Louvre, and helped to escape by an American dentist, Dr. Evans, to that England which has invariably been the refuge of all Frenchmen fleeing from their land, from the Bourbon Charles X and the Orleanist louis-philippe to the unspeakable Rochefort, and the champion of Dreyfus and justice. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Subjects of Terror

Subjects of Terror
Author:
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 394
Release: 1998-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0804765219

Subjects of Terror uses a reading of the French Romantic poet Gérard de Nerval to elucidate and critique a death-based ideology of subjectivity that has remained in force from Kant to Lacan. This model, despite variations, is distinguished by three principal characteristics: that the subject is the self-sameness of individual experience, that as such it functions like language (or, more specifically, like writing), and that this self-sameness is the annihilation of all individual experiences. Theorized by Hegel, Heidegger, Kojève, and Lacan, this abstract and ultimately impersonal notion of the self was not merely theoretical, however. It was, for example, long instantiated and enforced by the guillotine. Even in its more intimate and less spectacular forms, it provoked strong affective responses, as is evidenced by writers of the Romantic period, from Hugo to Mallarmé, Zola, and Nietzsche. As part of this affective reaction, Nerval's writings exemplify not only how this negative self-construction determines self-understanding but also how it determines self-experience, or, in other words, the way it feels to be a self in this cultural and historical context. That feeling is, fundamentally, terror, and the context is still in many ways our own. The book demonstrates that Nerval's works constitute an aesthetic resistance to that ideology of terror and as such helped open the way for the ethical models of subjectivity that will appear in Kristeva, Aulagnier, and Levinas. Although for two centuries, social, theoretical, and aesthetic forces have coerced individuals into experiencing the world through the morbid filter of their own absolute destruction, the author argues through Nerval for the possibility of an alternate, open-ended model of experience based on the libidinization of language itself.

Bulletin ...

Bulletin ...
Author: University of St. Andrews. Library
Publisher:
Total Pages: 650
Release: 1918
Genre:
ISBN:

T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot
Author: James E. Miller Jr.
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 494
Release: 2008-03-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0271045477

Late in his life T. S. Eliot, when asked if his poetry belonged in the tradition of American literature, replied: “I’d say that my poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England. That I’m sure of. . . . In its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America.” In T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, James Miller offers the first sustained account of Eliot’s early years, showing that the emotional springs of his poetry did indeed come from America. Miller challenges long-held assumptions about Eliot’s poetry and his life. Eliot himself always maintained that his poems were not based on personal experience, and thus should not be read as personal poems. But Miller convincingly combines a reading of the early work with careful analysis of surviving early correspondence, accounts from Eliot’s friends and acquaintances, and new scholarship that delves into Eliot’s Harvard years. Ultimately, Miller demonstrates that Eliot’s poetry is filled with reflections of his personal experiences: his relationships with family, friends, and wives; his sexuality; his intellectual and social development; his influences. Publication of T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet marks a milestone in Eliot scholarship. At last we have a balanced portrait of the poet and the man, one that takes seriously his American roots. In the process, we gain a fuller appreciation for some of the best-loved poetry of the twentieth century.

In Search of the Lost World: The Modernist Quest for the Thing, Matter, and Body

In Search of the Lost World: The Modernist Quest for the Thing, Matter, and Body
Author: Tsaiyi Wu
Publisher: Vernon Press
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2023-05-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1648896294

From a historical perspective, the book studies how modernist artists, as the first generation who began to rethink intensively the legacy of German Idealism, sought to recreate the self so as to recreate their relationships with the material world. Theoretically, the book converses with the topical de-anthropocentric interests in the 21st century and proposes that the artist may escape human-centeredness through the transformation of the self. Part One, “Artificiality,” begins the discussion with the fin-de-siècle cult of artificiality, where artists such as Theophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, J.K. Huysmans, and Gustave Moreau dedicate themselves to love stony sphinxes, marble statues, and inorganic appearances. The cult of artificiality is a mischievous subversion to Hegel’s maxim that inwardness is superior to matter. In the cult of artificiality, art is superior to nature, though art is no longer defined as immaterial imagination but rather reconfigured as mysterious appearances that defy signification and subjugate the feeling heart. Part Two, “Auto-philosophical Fiction,” discusses the genre where the artists (Marcel Proust, Walter Pater, and Virginia Woolf) set philosophical ideas in the laboratory of their lives and therefore translate their aesthetic ideals—the way they wish to relate to the world—into a journey of self-examination and self-cultivation. In Pater’s novel 'Marius the Epicurean', the hero explores how a philosophical percept may be translated into sentiments and actions, demonstrating that literature is a unique approach to truth as it renders theory into a transformative experience. Exploring the latest findings of empiricist psychology, the artists seek to escape the Kantian trap by cultivating their powers of reception and to register passing thoughts and sensations. Together, the book argues that de-anthropocentrism cannot be predicated upon a metaphysics that presumes universal subjectivity but must be a form of aesthetic inquiry that recreates the self in order to recreate our relationships with the world.