|
Showing 1 - 15 of
15 matches in All Departments
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.
Benjamin Hoffmann’s Posthumous America examines the literary
idealization of a lost American past in the works of French writers
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For writers such as
John Hector St. John de Crèvecœur and Claude-François de
Lezay-Marnésia, America was never more potent as a driving ideal
than in its loss. Examining the paradoxical American paradise
depicted in Crèvecœur’s Lettres d’un cultivateur américain
(1784); the “uchronotopiaâ€â€”the imaginary perfect society set
in America and based on what France might have become without the
Revolution—of Lezay-Marnésia’s Lettres écrites des rives de
l’Ohio (1792); and the political and nationalistic motivations
behind François-René Chateaubriand’s idealization of America in
Voyage en Amérique (1827) and Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1850),
Hoffmann shows how the authors’ liberties with the truth helped
create the idealized and nostalgic representation of America that
dominated the collective European consciousness of their times.
From a historical perspective, Posthumous America works to
determine when exactly these writers stopped transcribing what they
actually observed in America and started giving imaginary accounts
of their experiences. A vital contribution to transatlantic
studies, this detailed exploration of French perspectives on the
colonial era, the War of Independence, and the birth of the
American Republic sheds new light on the French fascination with
America. Posthumous America will be invaluable for historians,
political scientists, and specialists of literature whose
scholarship looks at America through European eyes.
Benjamin Hoffmann's Posthumous America examines the literary
idealization of a lost American past in the works of French writers
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For writers such as
John Hector St. John de Crevecoeur and Claude-Francois de
Lezay-Marnesia, America was never more potent as a driving ideal
than in its loss. Examining the paradoxical American paradise
depicted in Crevecoeur's Lettres d'un cultivateur americain (1784);
the "uchronotopia"-the imaginary perfect society set in America and
based on what France might have become without the Revolution-of
Lezay-Marnesia's Lettres ecrites des rives de l'Ohio (1792); and
the political and nationalistic motivations behind Francois-Rene
Chateaubriand's idealization of America in Voyage en Amerique
(1827) and Memoires d'outre-tombe (1850), Hoffmann shows how the
authors' liberties with the truth helped create the idealized and
nostalgic representation of America that dominated the collective
European consciousness of their times. From a historical
perspective, Posthumous America works to determine when exactly
these writers stopped transcribing what they actually observed in
America and started giving imaginary accounts of their experiences.
A vital contribution to transatlantic studies, this detailed
exploration of French perspectives on the colonial era, the War of
Independence, and the birth of the American Republic sheds new
light on the French fascination with America. Posthumous America
will be invaluable for historians, political scientists, and
specialists of literature whose scholarship looks at America
through European eyes.
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.
First published in French in 1792, Letters Written from the Banks
of the Ohio tells the fascinating story of French aristocrat
Claude-François de Lezay-Marnésia and the utopia he attempted to
create in what is now Ohio. Looking to build a perfect society
based on what France might have become without the Revolution,
Lezay-Marnésia bought more than twenty thousand acres of land
along the banks of the Ohio River from the Scioto Company, which
promised French aristocrats a fertile, conflict-free refuge. But
hostilities between the U.S. Army and the Native American tribes
who still lived on the land prevented the marquis from taking
possession. Ruined and on the verge of madness, Lezay-Marnésia
returned to France just as the Revolution was taking a more radical
turn. He barely escaped the guillotine before dying a few years
later in poverty and desperation. This edition of the Letters,
introduced and edited by Benjamin Hoffmann and superbly translated
by Alan J. Singerman, presents the work for the first time since
the beginning of the nineteenth century—and the first time ever
in English. The volume features a rich collection of supplementary
documents, including texts by Lezay-Marnésia’s son, Albert de
Lezay-Marnésia, and the American novelist Hugh Henry Brackenridge.
This fresh perspective on the young United States as it was
represented in French literature casts new light on a captivating
and tumultuous period in the history of two nations.
|
You may like...
The Creator
John David Washington, Gemma Chan, …
DVD
R325
Discovery Miles 3 250
Tenet
John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, …
DVD
R53
Discovery Miles 530
|