Description
Book SynopsisExpectation is a major volume of Jean-Luc Nancy's writings on literature, written across three decades but, for the most part, previously unavailable in English.
More substantial than literary criticism, these essays collectively negotiate literature's relation to philosophy. Nancy pursues such questions as literature's claims to truth, the status of narrative, the relation of poetry and prose, and the unity of a book or of a text, and he addresses a number of major European writers, including Dante, Sterne, Rousseau, Hölderlin, Proust, Joyce, and Blanchot.
The final section offers a number of impressive pieces by Nancy that completely merge his concerns for philosophy and literature and philosophy-as-literature. These include a lengthy parody of Valéry's La Jeune Parque, several original poems by Nancy, and a beautiful prose-poetic discourse on an installation by Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani that incorporates the Faust theme.
Opening with a substantial Introdu
Trade Review
"Expectation stages a courtship between philosophy and literature that has never been presented with such wit, grace, and finesse. What's more, this intense courtship leads to a marriage blessed with specific offspring: Nancy's book offers both an epithalamium and a pregnant poetics, a poetics of awakening and emergence-poetics as obstetrics ushering in new 'senses' in and of the world, plus strong and luminescent poems never seen in English before." -- from Jean-Michel Rabate's Introduction
Table of Contents
Introduction Cornerstones 1: Cone 2: Baldwin 3: Mbembe 4: Derrida, Agamben, Wynter Questions 5: What is Black Tradition? 6: What is Black Organizing? 7: For What Are Blacks to Hope? 8: For What Are Whites to Hope? Exempla 9: The Revelation of Race: On Steve Biko 10: The Racial Messiah: On Huey P. Newton 11: The Post-Racial Saint: On Barack Obama 12: The Race of the Soul: On Gillian Rose Afterword: The Birth of the Black Church Bibliography
