The Object of Literature

by Pierre Macherey , With Michael Sprinker

• ISBN13: 9780521476782
• ISBN10: 052147678X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-03-31
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This new book by Pierre Macherey is his first dealing with literature and theory since his seminal A Theory of Literary Production. Continuing the project of Althusserian theory, Macherey engages in a series of close exegeses of classical texts in French literature and philosophy, from the late eighteenth century down to the 1970s, that explore the historically variable but thematically similar ways in which literary texts represent philosophical ideas. Rejecting the simple notion that literature deploys philosophical topoi in an unmediated manner, Macherey shows the conceptual sophistication - and broad intellectual influence - that literary art has displayed in the modern period. At once a theoretical meditation of great originality and a historical work of scrupulous scholarship, The Object of Literature will entrench Pierre Macherey's already considerable reputation as one of the most significant contemporary theoreticians of literature.

Table of Contents

Foreword

What is literature thinking about?

Roads to History

A cosmopolitan imaginary: the literary thought of Mme. de Stal

George Sand's Spiridion: a pantheist novel

The Hegelian musings of Raymond Queneau

Into the Depths

On Victor Hugo: figures of the man from below

Georges Bataille: materialism inverted

A rhetoric of the abyss: Cline's magic metro

All Must Pass Away

Sade and the order of disorder

Flaubert's non-realism

Foucault reads Roussel: literature as philosophy

Towards a literary philosophy

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