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The Paradoxes of Posterity (Hardcover)
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The Paradoxes of Posterity (Hardcover)
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The impetus for literary creation has often been explained as an
attempt to transcend the mortality of the human condition through a
work addressed to future generations. Failing to obtain literal
immortality, or to turn their hope toward the spiritual immortality
promised by religious systems, literary creators seek a symbolic
form of perpetuity granted to the intellectual side of their person
in the memory of those not yet born while they write. In this book,
Benjamin Hoffmann illuminates the paradoxes inherent in the search
for symbolic immortality, arguing that the time has come to find a
new answer to a perennial question: Why do people write? Exploring
the fields of digital humanities and book history, Hoffmann
describes posterity as a network of interconnected memories that
constantly evolves by reserving a variable and continuously
renegotiated place for works and authors of the past. In other
words, the perpetual safeguarding of texts is delegated to a
collectivity that is nonexistent at the moment when a writer
addresses it, one whose nature is characterized by impermanence and
instability. Focusing on key works by Denis Diderot,
Etienne-Maurice Falconet, Giacomo Casanova, Francois-Rene de
Chateaubriand, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Hoffmann considers the
authors' representations of posterity, the representation of
authors by posterity, and how to register and preserve works in the
network of memories. In doing so, Hoffmann reveals the three great
paradoxes in the quest for symbolic immortality: the paradoxes of
belief, of identity, and of mediation. Theoretically sophisticated
and convincingly argued, this book contends that there is only one
truly serious literary problem: the transmission of texts to
posterity. It will appeal to specialists in literature, in
particular eighteenth-century French literature, as well as
scholars and students of philosophy and book history.
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