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"Montaigne, Michel de, 1533-1592 Criticism and interpretation"
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Montaigne after Theory, Theory after Montaigne
Essayist Michel de Montaigne is one of the most accessible and widely read authors in world literature. His skepticism and relativism, and the personal quality of his writing, make him a perennial favorite among readers today.Montaigne After Theory / Theory After Montaignepursues the idea that theory has altered the scholarly understanding of Montaigne, while Montaigne's ideas have simultaneously challenged the authority of the various interpretive doxa collectively known as \"theory.\"
Montaigne's life and writings have drawn myriad interpretations. While some scholars of his work focus on the content of the writings to define the man, others stress his playful use of language. Montaigne's complex and multifaceted works provide fertile ground for exploring themes of wide-ranging significance within the field of literary theory, including the relationship between biography and theory; the critique of modernism; a critical history of the confessional mode of writing; sexuality and gender; and the theory of practice. The essays in this collection move beyond the current stalemate in Montaigne criticism by revisiting questions about the role of theory in literary studies and by opening up a dialogue on the validity and limitations, or use and abuse, of theory in Montaigne studies.
eBook
Wisdom of Animals
Throughout Western civilization, animals have decorated heraldic
shields, populated medieval manuscripts, and ornamented baroque
pottery. Animals have also been our companions, our correctives,
and our ciphers as humanity has represented and addressed issues of
authority, cultural strife, and self-awareness as theological,
moral, and social beings. In The Wisdom of Animals:
Creatureliness in Early Modern French Spirituality , Catharine
Randall traces two threads of thought that consistently appear in a
number of early modern French texts: how animals are used as a
means for humans to explore themselves and the meaning of
existence; and how animals can be subjects in their own right.
In her accessible, interdisciplinary study, Randall explores the
link between philosophical and theological discussions of the
nature and status of animals vis-à-vis the rest of existence,
particularly humans. In doing so, she provides the early modern
backdrop for the more frequently studied modern and postmodern
notions of animality. Randall approaches her themes by way of
French confessional and devotional literature, especially the works
of Michel de Montaigne, Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas, St. François
de Sales, and Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant. From these, she elicits
contrasting perspectives of animality: rational vs. mystical,
representational vs. sacramental, religious vs. secular, and
Protestant vs. Jesuit Catholic perspectives.
eBook
From Montaigne to Montaigne
Two previously unpublished lectures charting the renowned anthropologist's intellectual engagement with the sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne In January 1937, between the two ethnographic trips he would describe inTristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss gave a talk to the Confédération générale du travail in Paris. Only recently discovered in the archives of the Bibliothèque national de France, this lecture, \"Ethnography: The Revolutionary Science,\" discussed the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, to whom Lévi-Strauss would return in remarks delivered more than a half-century later, in the spring of 1992. Bracketing the career of one of the most celebrated anthropologists of the twentieth century, these two talks reveal how Lévi-Strauss's ethnography begins and ends with Montaigne-and how his reading of his intellectual forebear and his understanding of anthropology evolve along the way.
Published here for the first time, these lectures offer new insight into the development of ethnography and the thinking of one of its most important practitioners. Essays by Emmanuel Désveaux, who edited the original French volumeDe Montaigne à Montaigne, and Peter Skafish expand the context of Lévi-Strauss's talks with contemporary perspectives and commentary.
eBook
Essaying montaigne
John O’Neill reads Montaigne’s Essays from their central principle of friendship as a communicative and pedagogical practice operative in society, literature and politics. The friendship between Montaigne and La Boétie was ruled neither by plenitude nor lack but by a capacity for recognition and transitivity. As an essayist Montaigne is an exemplary practitioner of a technique of difference and recognition that puts all certainties of history, philosophy and culture in the balance of weighted comparison. The essayist reveals how every absolute subjectivity or authority is shaken by its internal weakness once we move inside the contrastive structure of domination in politics, gender and race. O’Neill’s reading of the Essays strives to be faithful to the phenomenology of their embodied practices of reading-to-write-to re-read and re-write. From this standpoint he engages the principal critical readings of the Essays over the last century that have examined with great brilliance their history, structure and psychology. Whether the structure is evolutionary, structuralist, Marxist or psychoanalytical, O’Neill provides close readings of Montaigne’s literary critics. By bringing to bear the ethico-critical practice of ‘essaying’ to resist the subjection of the Essays to dominant criticism, O’Neill reminds readers that Montaigne’s appeal is in how he survived bloody cultural war with a balance of modesty and tolerance, invoking compromise where others practice violence.
eBook
