Description
Book SynopsisEncounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy focuses on chance and scripted encounters as sites of tensions and alliances where new forms, ideas, meanings, interpretations, and theories can emerge. By moving beyond the realm of traditional hermeneutics, Jérôme Brillaud and Virginie Greene have compiled a volume that vitally illustrates how reading encounters represented in artefacts, texts, and films is a vibrant and dynamic mode of encountering and interpreting.With contributions from esteemed academics such as Christie McDonald, Pierre Saint-Amand, Susan Suleiman, and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, this book is a multidisciplinary collaboration between scholars from a range of disciplines including philosophy, literature, musicology, and film studies. It uses examples chiefly from French culture and covers the Early Modern era to the twentieth century, while providing a thorough and representative array of theoretical and hermeneutical approaches.
Trade ReviewAn impressive collection of some of the most talented scholars in French and European Studies. The authors formulate a concept of “encountering” as alternatively a “falling into place” and as a “convergence” – concepts that get to the heart of what good criticism does, namely to “take the risk of meeting anew.” Encounters with God, encounters with eighteenth-century women writers, encounters with music and the visual arts, encounters with others – the range of topics and first-rate scholarship attests to Christie McDonald’s enduring influence and inspiration on literary and cultural studies. * Patrick M. Bray, Associate Professor of French, University College London, UK *
Written in honor of Christie McDonald, whose work has analyzed encounters from Rousseau to Proust to Derrida, the fascinating essays in this collection do much more than celebrate a remarkable career; they theorize the concept of the encounter, which lies at the heart of the creative process and at the very foundation of what we do as critics and scholars. * Maurice Samuels, Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French, Yale University, USA *
The reader will find in this book not only a marvelous catalogue of encounters
in and
with a variety of cultural productions and their rich contexts, but also a thick, interactive map of human encounters, anchored by nodal points both intellectual and affective. * Lia Nicole Brozgal, Associate Professor, European Languages and Transcultural Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, USA *
Table of ContentsList of Plates Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Encountering the Divine: On the Cognition of God in Early French Christian Humanism,
Jacob Vance, New England Conservatory, USA 2. Event and Invention: Reading Montaigne and Rousseau Through Deleuze,
Tom Conley, Harvard University, USA 3. Encountering Venture: Dissonance, Deceit, Autobiography,
Pierre Saint-Amand, Yale University, USA 4. Colonial Encounters of “La Belle et la Bête”,
Kylie Sago, Harvard University, USA 5. Missed Connections: Literary History and Saint-Aubin’s
Le Danger des liaisons, Sanam Nader-Esfahani, Amherst College, USA 6. Rejected Encounters with Women Writers: The Case of
Les Pensées errantes, Caleb Shelburne, Harvard University, USA 7. Encountering Women Writers and their Texts: Louise de Keralio’s Pioneering Anthology,
Vicki Mistacco, Wellesley College, USA 8. Châtelet, Lavoisier, Charrière: Negotiating the Borderlands of the Republic of Letters,
Ian Van Wye, Independent Scholar 9. Women’s Fictions and Translations in Support of Enlightenment Values,
Monique Moser-Verrey, Université de Montréal, Canada 10. Stowe meets Thomas: What is Literary Property?
Gary Wihl, Washington University, USA 11. Form Encounters Sense: the Semiological Dimensions of Wagnerian Anti-Semitism,
Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Université de Montréal, Canada 12. “Un autre moi-même”: Between the Self and the Other in Proust’s Correspondence,
François Proulx, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA 13. Ekphrasing as Encounter: “Try Say” with Georges Didi-Huberman and Hélène Cixous,
Ginette Michaud, Université de Montréal, Canada 14. Caring for Encounters,
Verena Conley, Harvard University, USA 15. Private Lives, Public History: Encountering the Filmmaker István Szabó,
Susan Rubin Suleiman, Harvard University, USA 16. Creation and Re-creation Across Cultures and Disciplines: Tahitian Encounters from Bougainville to Gauguin and Beyond,
Christie McDonald, Harvard University, USA
