Because of their range, brilliance, and singularity, the ideas of the philosopher-critic-historian Michel Foucault have gained extraordinary currency throughout the Western intellectual community. This book offers a selection of seven of Foucault's most important published essays, translated from the French, with an introductory essay and notes by Donald F. Bouchard. Also included are a summary of a course given by Foucault at College de France; the transcript of a conversation between Foucault and Gilles Deleuze; and an interview with Foucault that appeared in the journal Actuel. Professor Bouchard has divided the book into three closely related sections. The four essays in Part One examine language as a "perilous limit" of what we know and what we are. The essays in the second part suggest the methodological guidelines to which Foucault subscribes, and they record, in the editor's words, "the penetration of the language of literature into the domain of discursive thought." The material in the last section is more obviously political than the essays. It treats language in use, language attempting to impart knowledge and power. Translated by the editor and Sherry Simon into fluent and lucid English, these essays will appeal primarily to students of literature, especially those interested in contemporary continental structuralist criticism. But because of the breadth of Foucault's interests, they should also prove valuable to anthropologists, linguists, sociologists, and psychologists.

Ernest Hemingway has long been recognized as one of the most important and influential fiction writers of the twentieth century. Despite receiving many accolades during his lifetime, including the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, his work also attracted a good deal of criticism. Some critics felt that his characters lacked depth; others, especially feminists, objected to his emphasis on hyper-masculine subject matter, such as warfare, bullfighting, and hunting. This fresh reevaluation of Hemingway's career takes a new and different perspective from that of traditional Hemingway critics. The author draws on the postmodernist writings of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Edward Said (who was greatly influenced by Foucault's thought). From this perspective, he underscores Hemingway's self-conscious focus on his career as a writer, and the ways in which he addressed critical responses to his works. He makes frequent reference to Hemingway's correspondence to highlight key turning points in Hemingway's career, takes issue with the early tendency to reduce Hemingway's works to the "biographical," and shows how Hemingway's innovations resulted from a variety of factors, most notably his preoccupation with his literary career. The early chapters trace Hemingway's specific view of literary modernism and its effect on his writing. The later chapters show how he disowned his earliest allegiance and developed a distinct "political" point of view--not one to be confused with party affiliations or political slogans but his own individualistic point of view. In addition, the author pays more attention than most critics have to those works that were largely ignored or devalued when published, especially Death in the Afternoon and Across the River Into the Trees. This thoughtful, in-depth study of the career of a 20th-century literary icon shows that there is still a great deal in Hemingway's work that deserves serious critical reflection.