Blanchot'S Epoch

Description: As a writer of fiction, a literary critic, thinker and political commentator, Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) fulfilled and exhausted some of his century's most pressing challenges. The twentieth century, then, may be thought to have been Blanchot's epoch. As he himself was aware, however, no epoch is properly contemporary with itself. If he speaks of his own age from a place firmly embedded in the struggles and transformations which marked it, therefore, he also writes from a place which exceeds the confines of that epoch, and where history in the received sense gives way to a totally different mode of time. Where then does Blanchot's writing leave the twentieth century, and in what ways does it ask to be read at the beginning of this new century, this new millennium? In the centenary year of his birth, the contributors to this volume consider these questions from a variety of approaches, and address the significance of Blanchot's writing for the times to come. Table of Contents: Introduction, Leslie Hill and Michael Holland; Maurice Blanchot, 1907-2003, Jean-Luc Nancy; Responses and Interventions (1946-98), Maurice Blanchot; The Time of His Life, Michael Holland; R/M, 1953, Christophe Bident; From the Star to the Disaster, Kevin Hart; Blanchot in The International Review, Christopher Fynsk; A Green Blanchot: Impossible? Timothy Clark; 'Not In Our Name': Blanchot, Politics, the Neuter, Leslie Hill; Index: Paragraph 30 (2007). Author Biography: Michael Holland is University Lecturer in French and Fellow of St Hugh's College, University of Oxford