The Fabulous Imagination - On Montaigne′s Essays

Erscheinungsjahr 2012
ISBN: 978-0-231-11993-1
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 240 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 166 mm x 225 mm, Gewicht: 334 g

More than three hundred years before the advent of psychoanalysis, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) embarked on a remarkable quest to see and imagine the self from a variety of vantages. He explored the significance of monsters, nightmares, and traumas; the fear of impotence; the fragility of gender; and the anticipation of death. For Montaigne, imagination lies at the core of an internal universe influencing both the body and the mind. "The fabulous imagination" can be curative, enabling the mind's "I" to sustain itself in the face of hardship. Tracing Montaigne's development of the Western concept of the self, Lawrence D. Kritzman begins with his study of the fragility of gender and its relationship to the peripatetic movement of a fabulous imagination. He then follows with the essayist's examination of the act of mourning and the power of the imagination to overcome the fear of death, and Montaigne's views on philosophy, experience, and the connection between self-portraiture, ethics, and oblivion.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kritzman, Lawrence

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Romanische Literaturen Französische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Montaigne Is TheoryPart I. Monster Theory1. Montaigne's Fantastic Monsters and the Construction of Gender2. Representing the Monster: Cognition, Cripples, and Other Limp Parts in "Des boyteux" (III, 11)Part II. Death Sentences3. Montaigne's Fraternity: La Boétie on Trial4. Montaigne on Horseback, or the Simulation of Death5. The Anxiety of Death: Narrative and Subjectivity in "De la diversion" (III, 4)6. Excavating Montaigne: The Essayist on TrialPart III. Philosophical Impostures7. The Socratic Makeover: The Ethics of the Impossible in "De la phisionomie" (III, 12)8. Romancing the Stone: "De l'experience" (III, 13)NotesWorks CitedIndex

Über Autor(innen)

Lawrence D. Kritzman is John D. Willard Professor of French, ComparativeLiterature, and Oratory at Dartmouth. He has been visiting professor at Harvard, Stanford, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes (Paris) and is the author of several books on the French Renaissance. He is also editor of the Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought and the Columbia University Press series European Perspectives.