The Writer Writing: Philosophic Acts in Literature - Rilegato

Thomas, Francis-Noel

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0691069557 ISBN 13: 9780691069555

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 1993

Riassunto

In an age of authorless, contextless, deconstructed texts, The Writer Writing offers an inquiry into the rich and complex phenomenon of understanding the written word by reconsidering a fundamental concept about agency: writing is an action whose agent is an individual writer. On the most local level, this book offers parallel analyses of Marcel Proust and Bernard Shaw, two writers who made insistent and oddly similar claims about their texts as acts, two contemporaries whose fundamental similarities have been masked by critical technology.
On the most global level, it examines the philosophic act of explanation, showing that it is both a constitutive human activity - part of everyday life - and an activity that connects texts as diverse as Saint Joan and A la recherche du temps perdu. It separates for analysis writers' philosophic acts of explanation from their rhetorical acts of persuasion and their poetic acts of representation. The Writer Writing presents a timely and systematic case for reconsidering the genuine originality of individual writers' conceptions of writing as a human activity.

Su questo libro

Contenuti:

	List of Illustrations
	Foreword
	Preface
	Acknowledgments
Ch. 1	The Writer Writing	3
Ch. 2	'Intentions' and 'Purposes'	19
	Interpretation and Actions	19
	Intention and Historical Interpretation	27
	Purpose and Literary Art	36
Ch. 3	'Parody' or the Imitation of Disciplines	46
Ch. 4	Explanations	57
	"Scientific" Explanation	59
	"Processive" Explanation	63
Ch. 5	Bernard Shaw: Historical Explanation	72
	"A Frankly Doctrinal Theatre"	72
	G.B.S.	75
	G.B.S. in the Theater	79
	G.B.S. as Historian	83
	Saint Joan: The Argument and Function of the Preface	86
	The Scope of the Play	91
	The Play of Saint Joan: Structure and Mechanism	93
	The Epilogue	102
Ch. 6	Marcel Proust: Psychological Explanation	104
	The Book and the Man	104
	"Psychology in Space and Time"	110
	The Syllabus of Errors	113
	The Triumph of the Will	121
	The Historical Author, the Narrator, and Their Books	126
Ch. 7	Historical Interpretation: The Face of the Muse and the Baker's Daughter	133
	Notes	155
	Index	175

Dalla quarta di copertina:

"This lucid, vigorously written book is a refreshing demonstration of the sophistication of common sense.The Writer Writing makes a persuasive case for the reinstatement of the writer's intention, the living author, and the stubborn individuality of the particular literary text, at the heart of interpretation. Francis-Noël Thomas is an important new voice in the rising chorus of objections to the critical orthodoxies that have dominated academic literary studies over the past quarter-century."--Robert Alter, University of California, Berkeley

"In this deeply original book, Francis-Noël Thomas engages the actions of writers writing. He has allowed the artists themselves, not a theory that supersedes them, to yield access to diverse experiences that could not have been predicted by even the shrewdest of theorists. In his hands, the `old-fashioned' notion that art works are individual projects of individual artists inviting us intodiverse worlds feels refreshingly new."--adapted from the foreword

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Princeton Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0691069557
• ISBN 13: 9780691069555
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 183