The Stelliferous Fold: Toward a Virtual Law of Literature's Self-Formation - Hardcover

Gasché, Rodolphe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0823234347 ISBN 13: 9780823234349

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2011

Synopsis

This book seeks to develop a novel approach to literature beyond the conventional divide between realism/formalism and history/aestheticism. It accomplishes this not only through a radical reassessment of the
specificity of literature in distinction from one of its others―namely, philosophy―but above all by taking critical issue with the venerable concept of the “text” and its association with the artisanal techniques of weaving and interlacing. This conception of the text as an artisanal fabric is, the author holds, the unreflected presupposition of both realist, or historicist, and reflective, or “deconstructive,” criticism.

Gasché argues that “the scenes of production” within literary works, created by their authors yet independent of those authors’ intentions, stage a work’s own production in virtual fashion and thus accomplish for those works a certain ideal ontological status that allows for both historical endurance and creative interpretation.

In Gasché’s construction of these scenes, in which literary works render visible within their own fabric the invisible conditions of their autonomous existence, certain images prevail: the fold, the star, the veil. By showing that these literary images are not simply the opposites of concepts, he not only puts into question the common opposition between literature and philosophy but shows that literary works perform a way of “argumentation” that, in spite of all its difference from philosophical conceptuality, is on a par with it.

The argument progresses through close readings of literary works by Lautréamont, Nerval, de l’Isle Adam, Huysman, Flaubert, Artaud, Blanchot, Defoe, and Melville.

About this title

About the Author:

Rodolphe Gasché is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Eugenio Donato Professor of Comparative Literature at SUNY, Buffalo. The most recent of his books are The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy and Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept.

Review:

An important moment for the field of comparative literature. (―Branka Arsic University of Albany, SUNY)

“An important intellectual event . . . Gasché develops a distinctive theory
of literature or way to read literary works.”

(―J. Hillis Miller University of California, Irvine)

About this edition

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0823234347
• ISBN 13: 9780823234349
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 406