This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.
Chronological in character, the book seeks to evaluate the evolution of Camus's lifelong preoccupation with sociopolitical justice, as expressed in a range of nonfictional genres (essays, journalism, articles, speeches, notebooks, and personal correspondence), where the writer's own concerns come directly to the fore.".
Reviewing the previous scholarship for seventeen of the most important poems in Alcools, this book provides a detailed analysis of each work and includes a state-of-the-art survey of current Apollinaire criticism. Besides acquainting readers with the existing scholarship, the book considers all the interpretations that have been proposed and indicates profitable directions to pursue. Each poem is subjected to a rigorous, line-by-line analysis that engages in a succession of dialogues with previous critics. The studies themselves are arranged in roughly chronological order, beginning with the “Rhénanes” in 1901-1902 and concluding with “Zone” in 1912. Although each chapter is basically conceived as an independent unit, readers are able to follow the evolution of Apollinaire’s aesthetics from his first mature creations through his subsequent experiments with fantastic, hermetic, visionary, and cubist poetry. At the same time, they witness Apollinaire’s personal evolution from his infatuation with Annie Playden through a period of deep depression, his love affair with Marie Laurencin, and the aftermath of that relationship.
This literary history examines Guillaume Apollinaire's reception and influence in the Western hemisphere during the early twentieth century. Ir identifies and reconstructs major literary and art historical paths of development, about which surprisingly little is known. In particular, it discusses Apollinaire's reception and formative influence in North America, England, Germany, Spain, Argentina, and Mexico, and includes important documents by Apollinaire himself that have not appeared in print until now. "Bohn brings together a worldwide network of writers, artists, and critics to reveal the role and centrality of Apollinaire as the icon of Parisian modernism, cult figure of the avant-garde, poet with a new series of techniques, esthetician of the New, innovator of modern culture, and literary and cultural arbiter of his generation. "This is Rezeptionsesthetik in its most intense form. It is the definitive reference book for checking on who had any dealings with Apollinaire, the man or his work, and French modernism in English, German, Spanish or Catalan linguistic and cultural domains in both the Old and New Worlds. Bohn's translations from the various languages he commands are superb and prove that he is always working from source material. His text is simply a tour de force, a virtuoso performance". -- Seth L. Wolitz, University of Texas, Austin "Given the centrality of French poetry for European and New World poetry since Baudelaire, one simply cannot overstate Apollinaire's role in the evolution of the most advanced poetry written throughout Europe and North and South America since circa 1900. However, no one before has tracked his impact on avant-garde circles outsideFrance with so much attention to the specifics involved. Bohn has emerged as the dean of Apollinaire studies in North America; thus everything he has to say about the poet has the ring of absolute authority". -- Robert W. Greene, State University of New York, Albany
This study examines the relations between the work of the Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad and the French Nobel Prize winner André Gide. Gide's translation of Conrad's Typhoon is read as a work belonging paradoxically to the oeuvres of both writers, where their respective preoccupations meet with illuminating results. Focusing also on other major works by Conrad and Gide, the study suggests that the intertextual and personal interaction between these two masters of 20th Century fiction was governed by processes of identification and projection, conflict between master and disciple and a consequent resistant reading of texts, and confrontation with linguistic and cultural heterogeneity. Issues of translation theory, psychoanalysis and intertextuality are brought together to offer a glimpse of a possible dialogue between literature and ethics. This study will be of interest to students and researchers in English, French and Comparative Literature.
"French journalist, polemicist, and novelist Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) is perhaps best known through Robert Bresson's film adaptation of Journal d'un cure de campagne (winner of the Grand prix du roman de l'Academie francaise published in English as Diary of a Country priest), Francis Poulenc's operatic adaptation of Dialogues des Carmelites, his first novel Sous le soleil de Satan, and the essay Grands cimetieres sous la lune." "Michael Tobin's study is part literary criticism, part biography. Tobin follows Bernanos and his family from France to Spain during the Civil War and then to Brazil and North Africa. He also provides a thematic synthesis of Bernanos's novels and his extensive body of non-fiction, demonstrating that one fundamental theological truth - the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ - was the unifying factor in Bernanos's entangled political and social criticism and the engine of his creative imagination." "Recent English translations of some of Bernanos's novels have sparked renewed interest in his work in North America. Georges Bernanos includes Tobin's translation of essential texts that have never before appeared in English." --Résumé de l'éditeur.
Max Jacob, central figure of early 20th-century Parisian bohemia along with Picasso and Apollinaire, was active at the emergence of Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism. But in spite of his close connections with modernism - epitomized by his seminal book of prose poems Le Cornet a des (1916) - Jacob remains a marginal figure. His Breton-Jewish otherness, conversion to Catholicism, and death under the Nazis in 1944 adds to the enigma and shifts the critical focus further still. But Jacobs poetic playfulness - his many-faceted irony, wordplay, narrative heterogeneity, tragi-comedy, self- reflexivity and polyphony - may begin to offer insights into his esprit createur, which, true to the (post)modernist vision, is not to be found in the usual ways. For the aim of Max Jacob, connoisseur of traditional storytelling as well as spearhead of the literary vanguard, is to jolt the unconscious, the energetic kernel of creativity.
Forming a pair with the voice, the gaze is a central structuring element of Samuel Beckett’s creation. And yet it takes the form of a strangely impersonal visual dimension testifying to the absence of an original exchange of gazes capable of founding personal identity and opening up the world to desire. The collapse of conventional reality and the highlighting of seeing devices—eyes, mirrors, windows—point to the absence of a unified representation. While masks and closed spaces show the visible to be opaque and devoid of any beyond, light and darkness, spectres—manifestations without origin—reveal a realm beyond the confines of identity, where nothing provides a mediation with the seen, or sets it within perspective. Finally, Beckett’s use of the audio-visual media deepens his exploration of the irreducibly real part of existence that escapes seeing. This study systematically examines these essential aspects of the visual in Beckett’s creation. The theoretical elaborations of Jacques Lacan—in relation with corresponding developments in the history and philosophy of the visual arts—offer an indispensible framework to understand the imaginary not as representation, but as rooted in the fundamental opacity of existence.
Although internationally renowned as a novelist, journalist, and essayist, Nobel Prize-winning author François Mauriac (1885-1970) never established a reputation as a poet. Yet it was Maurice Barrès’s favourable review of his first collection of verse, Les Mains jointes, that launched Mauriac’s career in 1910. He went on to publish three further collections of poems and insisted to the end of his life that, despite critical neglect of his verse, he remained first and foremost a poet. This book offers the first ever in-depth exploration of the whole of Mauriac’s verse output. After a chapter tracing his general conception of poetry and comparing his ideas to those of other poets and theorists, each of Mauriac’s verse collections is analysed in turn, as are many of his poems that were published exclusively in literary journals. A final chapter explores the significant relationship between Mauriac’s verse and his novels, revealing the multiple connections between these two series of texts. This volume will appeal to those with an interest in twentieth-century French poetry and, more generally, to those interested in the relationship between verse and prose.
