Out of this World: Gnostic Encounters in Modern French Literature and Thought: 96 (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures)

Chaouat, Bruno

ISBN 10: 180596576X / ISBN 13: 9781805965763

Published by Liverpool University Press, 2026

About this Item

2026. paperback. . . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9781805965763

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Out of this World: Gnostic Encounters in Modern French Literature and Thought: 96 (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures)
• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Publication Date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 180596576X
• ISBN 13: 9781805965763
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.

The 20th century is one of “great derangement.” The idea that History has any meaning or direction has been challenged by two world wars, totalitarianism, and genocides, and now by pandemics, artificial intelligence, and the environmental crisis. The experience of the absurd is tangible and widespread. Times of cultural and material transitions further anxiety and disorientation. In the 1950s philosopher Hans Jonas suggested that cultural and geopolitical disorientation had fostered the re-emergence of cosmologies known as “gnostic” at the dawn of the Christian era. Out of This World revisits French modernity through the prism of this ancient cosmology. How to escape this world, this body? How can one invent a world parallel to this one? How do language and literature strive for a heterotopia that empties out the world and replaces it with words? From the mass graves of the First World War to transhumanist utopias, from Louis-Ferdinand Céline to Michel Houellebecq, this book focuses on the modern and postmodern vexed relation to the world, body, and Creation, a major theme in gnostic metaphysical rebellion.

About the Author

Bruno Chaouat is Professor of French at the University of Minnesota.