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The book is composed of papers and glosses written in 2001–2015 however performing as a homogenous unit with methodological topics of literary history as its focal point. Part of the essays relate to disputable and still unanswered questions of the emancipatory movement in which early 19th century modern Czech literature was formed (e.g.: paradoxes in relations to German literature, the question of bohemism, the ambiguous interpretation of the national identity, etc.). In the broader context of author's scholar work the presented essays show the gradual formation of the concept of paradigmatic interpretation of literary history closely described in her monograph (In the Network of the history of the National revival literature, 2011). Related to this book are also two papers (The Aspect of totality in the Literature of the national revival and Changes in the Representation of Nationality in Nineteenth‑century Literature) that show further methodological potential of the paradigmatic model in tracing historical changes of different cultural phenomena. Theoretical questions of historical reflection also apply to essays focused on specific aspects of works of particular authors (Němcová, Erben, Šalda, Komenský). These mono‑thematic interpretative discursions may be taken as a verification of possibilities that philosophical hermeneutics offers to literary history. The same concept is also featured by the closing essay that with respect to the issue of an individual as both subject and object of history points out the pitfall in relation between science and ideology.

Yannis Loukas is editing his father's autobiography. Going through the family archives, he discovers the manuscript of an aspiring novelist named Loukas Matthaiou. While reading it, Yannis feels as if someone has put to paper his innermost thou

Identifies and investigates international medievalism through three distinct strands:'Internationally Nationalist','Someone Else's Past?', and'Activist Medievalism'.Medievalism - the reception of the Middle Ages - often invokes a set of tropes generally considered'medieval', rather than consciously engaging with medieval cultures and societies. International medievalism offers an additional interpretative layer by juxtaposing two or more national cultures, at least one of which is medieval.'National'can be aspirational: it might refer to the area within agreed borders, or to the people who live there, but it might also describe the people who understand, or imagine, themselves to constitute a nation. And once'medieval'becomes simply a collection of ideas, it can be re-formed as desired, cast as more geographically than historically specific, or function as a gateway to an even more nebulous past.This collection identifies and investigates international medievalism through three distinct strands,'Internationally Nationalist','Someone Else's Past?', and'Activist Medievalism', exploring medievalist media from the textual to the architectural. Subjects range from The Green Children of Woolpit to Refugee Tales, and from Viking metal to Joan of Arc. As the contributors to each section make clear, for centuries the medieval has provided material for countless competing causes and cannot be contained within historical, political, or national borders. The essays show how the medieval is repeatedly co-opted and recreated, formed as much as formative: inviting us to ask why, and in service of what.

This volume brings together explorations of different aspects of Utopia studied from contemporary perspectives. Its main asset is its diversity and the broad scope of themes it covers and discusses. From literary utopias to media and philosophy, it offers a vista of approaches and contexts that testify to the book's interdisciplinary character. In the words of Lyman Towers Sargent, a leading authority on Utopia and Utopian Studies, an interview with whom is at the same time an Introduction to this collection, “Utopia has universal relevance, but the way it is applied and operationalized varies from country to country and over time.” Professor Sargent's observation can also serve as the leitmotif of the book and the current research on Utopia, its endless possibilities and varieties.

An exploration across thirteen essays by critics, translators and creative writers on the modern-day afterlives of Old English, delving into how it has been transplanted and recreated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Old English language and literary style have long been a source of artistic inspiration and fascination, providing modern writers and scholars with the opportunity not only to explore the past but, in doing so, to find new perspectives on the present. This volume brings together thirteen essays on the modern-day afterlives of Old English, exploring how it has been transplanted and recreated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by translators, novelists, poets and teachers. These afterlives include the composition of neo-Old English, the evocation in a modern literary context of elements of early medieval English language and style, the fictional depiction of Old English-speaking worlds and world views, and the adaptation and recontextualisation of works of early medieval English literature. The sources covered include W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Seamus Heaney, alongside more recent writers such as Christopher Patton, Hamish Clayton and Paul Kingsnorth, as well as other media, from museum displays to television. The volume also features the first-hand perspectives of those who are authors and translators themselves in the field of Old English medievalism.

Among the numerous volumes dedicated to the Great War, this book stands out for its ability to trace, in a thorough but concise manner, an overall picture of the literature born from the conflict.After its introductory pages concerning the forms, times and places of war writing, the book focuses on the story of the months of the eve of the war, on the journey to the front and the discovery of the true face of war, on the stories of the trenches, on the accounts of the imprisonment, and on the return home accompanied by disappointment and disorientation. The book, focused on Italy, but rich in references to European literature, is a journey through history and the human soul, between hopes and fears, illusions and massacres. It is the story of an event that divided the collective history of Europe and individual lives. It is the account, passionate and exciting, of the literary writings born from trauma.

Česko-portugalská kolektivní monografie vychází u příležitosti stého výročí narození Františka Listopada. Básník, spisovatel, novinář, pedagog, divadelní a filmový režisér se narodil v Praze jako Jiří Synek. Za války se skrýval a působil v odboji, změnil si jméno na František Listopad. Po událostech února 1948 emigroval do Francie, po dalších deseti letech do Portugalska, kde pod jménem Jorge Listopad zůstal až do konce života. Po Sametové revoluci se ovšem často vracel do České republiky a snažil se působit jako spojovací článek obou kultur a obou jazyků. Jednotlivé články se věnují různým aspektům Listopadovy tvorby divadelní, básnické, esejistické, stejně jako jeho pohnutému životu.

Narrative constitutes an integral part of human existence, being omnipresent in our ordering of the world and the ways in which we transmit both knowledge and experience. Narrative construction has challenged the supremacy of empirical fact and has questioned our ability to know the past Aas it really was. Examining a wide range of texts, from ancient Greece and medieval Britain to contemporary America, Asia, Australia, Britain and the Caribbean, the essays in this volume address the inconsistencies in master narratives to reveal that all representations of the past, like knowledge, are situated.

'Samir Dayal's book Resisting Modernity is provocative. Provocative because it undoes the allures of propulsion toward modernity at the same time that it refrains from a retreat into an idyllic and elusive pre-colonial past. Drawing on a wide body of postcolonial studies scholarship emanating from South Asia and on psychoanalytic theory, Dayal complicates our understanding of three prominent Indian figures—Ramakrishna Paramahansa, Rabindranath Tagore, and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi—active in the decades before independence from British colonial rule. He sees them as resisting the modernist rhetoric of sovereignty and rational nationalism prevalent in those years. Through his focus on these protagonists, Dayal illuminates how their critique of the nationalist project of the pre-independence years was at once strategic and limiting, inclusive and exclusionary, empowering and potentially debilitating.'--Rajini Srikanth, University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is the author of The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America (Temple, 2006), co-editor of the award winning anthology Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America (Rutgers, 1996) and co-editor of the collection of critical essays A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America (Temple, 1998).'Resisting Modernity is an admirable endeavor that opens up modernity to possibilities of postcolonial/subaltern re-recognition. Dayal's conjunctural readings of the gendered, affective as well as cognitive performances of Ramakrishna, Tagore, Gandhi, and Ambedkar are richly symptomatic of the human condition under colonial modernity. A welcome addition to the genre of the global interrogation of modernity.'---R. Radhakrishnan, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (Minnesota, 1996) and Theory in an Uneven World (Blackwell, 2003).

The Shattered Mirror: Irish Literature and Film, 1990-2005 is a response to changing representations of Irish identity. Interrogating the period of the'Celtic Tiger'in Ireland, which was accompanied by widespread social change, the book draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis to explore issues such as prosperity, Europeanism, Diaspora, multi-culturalism, decline in religious faith and gender norms. Examining three writers and filmmakers in each section on narrative, drama and film, The Shattered Mirror argues that, in this fifteen years, Irish identity has changed radically.

Alice Buzdugan untersucht in diesem Buch die kulturpolitischen Dimensionen des literarischen Werks zweier rumäniendeutscher Autoren und Kulturvermittler, die das Bild vom Donau-Karpatenraum in Deutschland im 20. Jahrhundert entscheidend geprägt haben: Adolf Meschendörfer (1877–1963) und Oscar Walter Cisek (1897–1966). Im Zentrum stehen die nationale Selbstverortung der beiden ungleichen Schriftsteller, konkurrierende Ästhetiken des Stadtmotivs insbesondere in den Romanen »Unbequeme Liebe« (1932) von Cisek und »Die Stadt im Osten« (1931) von Meschendörfer sowie die Wechselwirkungen zwischen der rumänischen, deutschen und rumäniendeutschen Literatur der Zwischenkriegszeit. Wie Buzdugan in ihrem umfassenden Vergleich erstmals aufzeigt, verwendeten Cisek und Meschendörfer ähnliche literarische Mittel sowie vergleichbare nationale, ethnische und soziale Stereotype, um ihre Prosa für ihre jeweiligen kulturpolitischen Ziele einzusetzen.

This book offers an introduction to the breadth and diversity of the literary and non-literary work of John Buchan (1875–1940). It stakes a claim for him as an engaged interpreter of twentieth-century modernity, and provides evaluative readings of his output. In addition to demonstrating how Buchan's work complicates the reductive view of early twentieth-century literature as neatly cordoned-off into “low” and “high” forms of production, this book discusses his theories of empire and imperialism, his account of historiography, and his response to the First World War. In addition to his many roles as a journalist, propagandist, war reporter, editor, civil servant, and statesman, Buchan was a committed literary critic, philosopher, and writer of history. This book explores the many connections between his work and such modernists as Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis, and it situates Buchan as an intellectual figure who provided a distinctive set of readings of his modern times. Running throughout is a consideration of Buchan's fascination with binaries, doubles, and duality, which his work variously upholds and investigates. It ends with a discussion of Buchan's most famous work—The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)—in relation to paranoia and pathology.

Thanks to its historical, theoretical, and methodological dimensions, this book is unique, both in Europe and in the USA. It brings together researchers from across Europe to explain how comparative literature works, both on an institutional and a technical level, in the country in which they teach. The contributions also define the characteristics of European comparative literature on a continental level. From Austria to Ukraine, by way of Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Ireland, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, and Switzerland, this book offers an expansive panorama, placing great emphasis on usually “invisible” countries. Moreover, it relates both to the postcolonial and post-Soviet present and to the future of comparative literature: it is a handbook, but also a laboratory.

“Writing Minervas” – that is how Libuše Heczková refers to Czech women literary critics at the turn of the 20th century. She focuses especially on the critic and feminist Eliška Krásnohorská and on those who followed in her steps – Teréza Nováková, Žofie Pohorecká, Pavla Buzková, and other literary personalities like Anna Pammrová or Artuš Drtil. She also traces the destinies of Czech emancipation magazines in which such literary critique flourished: Ženské listy, Ženský svět, Ženská revue, Ženský obzor and Ženské směry. She attempts to clarify the circumstances under which women entered this – as certain period statements called it – “unfeminine” literary discipline. The activities of the “Writing Minervas” thus radically cast in to doubt the “physiological feeble-mindedness” attributed to women at that time.

Islam and the West are often identified as two distinct civilizations with conflicting characteristics. Assuming that a clash between Islam and the West is not inevitable, this study demonstrates that the divide is fabricated on both sides by Narratives of Disparity (NoDs) which are often built on historical narratives. The interplay of history and fiction in NoDs is exhibited on four novels published in Britain after 9/11, covering the most frequently used tropes: the postcolonial experience, counterterrorism, eurocentrism, traditionalism, honour killings and sexual autonomy.

Die Gegenwartsliteratur der'Sinti und Roma'ist vielseitig und keineswegs so sehr durch eine orale Erzähltradition geprägt, wie es ihr lange Zeit abwertend unterstellt worden ist. Mit Hilfe eines Analyseinstrumentariums, das Phänomene der konzeptuellen Mündlichkeit und literaturwissenschaftliche Methoden kombiniert, wird eine subtile und selbstreflektierte Auseinandersetzung mit der eigenen Tradition deutlich. In vielen Texten von'Sinti und Roma'und Jenischen zeigt Franziska Krumwiede-Steiner, wie sehr darin Themen und Probleme der modernen globalen Kultur gespiegelt werden.

E kötet Müller Péter egyetemi tanárnak születésének 60. évfordulójára készült. Meglepetésnek szánták mindazok, akik a kötetben egy-egy írással szeretnék megbecsülésüket kifejezni iránta, ahogyan a munka kiadására vállalkozó szerkesztő és kiadó is. A könyvben – stílszerűen – két felvonásra osztva követik egymást az írások a kortárs színház és a színháztörténet majd’ minden szegmenséből...

Centring the Margins is a collection of reviews and essays written between 2001 and 2014 of writers from Canada, the United States, the UK, and Europe. Most are neglected, obscure, or considered difficult, and include Mati Unt, Ornela Vorpsi, S.D. Chrostowska, Blaise Cendrars and Joseph McElroy, among others.

This volume delves deeply into the role played by stories and storytelling in shaping, controlling and mapping present-day Spain, and examines fiction in various manifestations and genres, especially written and filmic. It contrasts such stories and their context with the past, investigating the differences and similarities between spatially and geographically varying narrations in order to tease out the link between the time of telling and the act of living. Throughout the book, scholars look separately at this phenomenon, and their findings reveal a close bond between events occurring in the real world and the relating of fictional stories. Particularly in Spain, the geographic space of interest here, storytelling is used both as catharsis and didactically. Authors and filmmakers find inspiration in everyday occurrences, and, while there is nothing unusual in that, the interest here lies in the consequent transformation of these occurrences into fascinating stories that attempt to make sense of chaotic events, connect those events temporally, and explore the meaning of the consequent coherence. Stories are at the very essence of humanity, be they fictional or based on everyday reality. This collection focuses specifically on Spain where easily identifiable features of history (such as the Spanish Civil War, the Franco Dictatorship, transition, democracy, and the global economic crisis) have had a major impact on everyday life. The narratives emerging show clear evidence of that impact, with an emphasis on such themes as the significance of memory, the impossibility and instability of such memory, the chaotic nature of life, and the place of the nation/state in the psyche of the individual, with emerging themes investigating the role of solidarity and empathy in the empowerment of the individual. This volume is informed by the shift that occurred in the twentieth century towards a world of unstable parameters, whereby whatever knowledge that is received must be questioned as to the extent of its authenticity since that knowledge is always affected by memory, experience, and time, all subjective phenomena in themselves.

This book is a response to Friedrich Nietzsche's provocative question: How much and how does ressentiment condition our daily life? During the twentieth century we witnessed veritable eruptions of this insidious emotion, and we are still witnesses of its proliferation at various levels of society. This book aims to explore, according to René Girard's mimetic theory, the anthropological and social assumptions that make up ressentiment and to investigate its genesis. The analysis of ressentiment shows that this emotion evolves from mimetic desire: it is an affective experience that people have when a rival denies them opportunities or valuable resources (including status) that they consider to be socially accessible. It is a specific figure of mimetic desire that is typical of contemporary society, where the equality that is proclaimed at the level of values contrasts with striking inequalities of power and access to material resources. This dichotomy generates increasing tension between highly competitive and egalitarian mimetic desires and growing social inequalities. The ressentiment is ambiguous, and its ambiguity is that of mimetic desire itself, which we cannot dismiss from our lives. In that it provides occasions of conflict and baseness, ressentiment can fuel violence, discord, and injustice, but it also can open opportunities for growth and justice, and for inventing institutions that are better adapted to the transformations of our contemporary society.

This book deals with changing conditions and conceptions of authorship in the long eighteenth century, a period often said to have witnessed the birth of the modern author. It focuses not on authorial self-presentation or self-revelation but on an author's interactions with booksellers, collaborators, rivals, correspondents, patrons, and audiences. Challenging older accounts of the development of authorship in the period as well as newer claims about the “public sphere” and the “professional writer,” it engages with recent work on print culture and the history of the book. Methodologically eclectic, it moves from close readings to strategic contextualization. The book is organized both chronologically and topically. Early chapters deal with writers – notably Milton and Dryden – at the beginning of the long eighteenth century, and later chapters focus more on writers -- among them Johnson, Gray, and Gibbon -- toward its end. Looking beyond the traditional canon, it considers a number of little-known or little-studied writers, including Richard Bentley, Thomas Birch, William Oldys, James Ralph, and Thomas Ruddiman. Some of the essays are organized around a single writer, but most deal with a broad topic – literary collaboration, literary careers, the republic of letters, the alleged rise of the “professional writer,” and the rather different figure of the “author by profession.”

Textiles have long provided metaphors for storytelling: a compelling novel “weaves a tapestry” and we enjoy hearing someone “spin” a tale. To what extent, however, should we take these metaphors seriously? Arras Hanging: The Textile That Determined Early Modern Literature and Drama reveals that in the early modern period, when cloth-making was ubiquitous and high-quality tapestries called arras hangings were the most valuable objects in England, such metaphors were literal. The arras in particular provided a narrative model for writers such as Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, who exploited their audience's familiarity with weaving to engage them in highly idiosyncratic and “hands on” ways. Specifically, undescribed or “blank” tapestries in the period's fiction presented audiences with opportunities to “see” whatever they desired, and thus weave themselves into the story. Far more than background objects, literary and dramatic arras hangings have much to teach us about the intersections between texts and textiles at the dawn of print, and, more broadly, about the status of visual art in post-Reformation England.

Bad Books reconstructs how the eighteenth-century French author Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne and his writings were at the forefront of the development of modern conceptions of sexuality and pornography. Although certain details are well known (for example, that Rétif's 1769 treatise on prostitution, Le Pornographe, is the work from which the term pornography is derived, or that he was an avid foot and shoe fetishist), much of this story has been obscured and even forgotten including how the author actively worked to define the category of obscenity and the modern pornographic genre, and how he coined the psycho-sexual term “fetish” and played a central role in the formation of theories of sexual fetishism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus this book is also about literary history and how it is written: it explores how Rétif, perceived as a bad author in both senses of the term, and his contributions were glossed over or condemned, such that the originality of his texts has still not been fully established.Placing Rétif's novels and short stories in dialogue with his autobiographical writings as well as with contemporary and modern critical commentaries, the various chapters of the book examine the author's repeated testing of the limits of censorship to define and redefine the boundaries of obscenity; his advancement of the modern form and definition of pornography through a focus on intimacy and (female) pleasure; his detailed narrative explorations of foot and shoe fetishisms that were later appropriated by the sexologists; and his development of theories of eugenics and reproduction in his utopian science fiction.The history of Rétif's texts and their reception reveals an evolution in the criteria of what is considered to be “good” or “worthy” literature—a category once defined purely on moral grounds that is increasingly seen in cultural terms. Bad Books corroborates the recent resurgence of interest in the author by showing the import of his texts, which not only designate a number of firsts in the histories of sexuality and pornography, but which also illuminate some of the defining moments in the history of French literary studies.

Women Warriors in Romantic Drama examines a recurring figure that appears in French, British, and German drama between 1789 and 1830: the woman warrior. The term itself,'woman warrior,'refers to quasi-historical female soldiers or assassins. Women have long contributed to military campaigns as canteen women. Camp followers ranged from local citizenry to spouses and prostitutes, and on occasion, women assisted men in combat. However, the woman warrior is a romantic figure, meaning a fanciful ideal, despite the reality of women's participation in select scenes of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The central claim of this book is the woman warrior is a way for some women writers (Olympe de Gouges, Christine Westphalen, Karoline von Günderrode, and Mary Robinson) to explore the case for extending citizenship to women. This project focuses primarily on theater for the reason that the stage simulates the public world that female dramatists and their warriors seek to inhabit. Novels and poetry clearly belong to the realm of fiction, but when audiences see women fighting onstage, they confront concrete visions of impossible women. I examine dramas in the context of their performance and production histories in order to answer why so many serious dramas featuring women warriors fail to find applause, or fail to be staged at all. Dramas about women warriors seem to sometimes contribute to the argument for female citizenship when they take the form of tragedy, because the deaths of female protagonists in such plays often provoke consideration about women's place in society.Consequently, where we find women playing soldiers in various entertainment venues, farce and satire often seem to dominate, although this book points to some exceptions. Censorship and audience demand for comedies made producing tragedies difficult for female playwrights, who battled additional obstacles to fashioning their careers. I compare male (Edmund Eyre, Heinrich von Kleist) and female writers'dramatizations of the woman warrior. This analysis shows that the difficult project of getting audiences to take women warriors seriously resembles women writers'struggles to enter the ostensibly male domains of tragedy and the public sphere.

Technologies of Empire looks at the ways in which writers of the long eighteenth century treat writing and imagination as technologies that can produce rather than merely portray empire. Authors ranging from Adam Smith to William Wordsworth consider writing not as part of a larger logic of orientalism that represents non-European subjects and spaces in fixed ways, but as a dynamic technology that organizes these subjects and transforms these spaces. Technologies of Empire reads the imagination as an instrument that works in tandem with writing, expanding and consolidating the networks of empire. Through readings across a variety of genres, ranging from Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France to Maria Edgeworth's Irish fiction and Wordsworth's epic poetry, this study offers a new account of writing's role in empire-building and uncovers a genealogy of the romantic imagination that is shot through by the imperatives of imperialism.

This book is a collection of wonderful and thoughtful essays that explore the theme of beautiful sanctuaries in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European literature. The book focuses especially on selected works by Percy Shelley, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Henrik Ibsen, and James Hilton. These sanctuaries of light, natural beauty, and tranquility comfort, nurture, and soothe the heart, mind, and soul of the individual, and inspire creative expression.

Combines the techniques of fiction and nonfiction in order to tell the story of the love between Susette Gontard ('Diotima') and the poet Friedrich Holderlin.In this entirely unique approach to the life of Friedrich Hölderlin, The Recalcitrant Art combines the techniques of fiction and nonfiction as it examines the love between the poet and Susette Gontard (“Diotima”).On the left-hand or verso pages of the book appear Susette Gontard's letters, presented here in English translation for the first time, with an introduction and afterword by Douglas F. Kenney. On the right-hand or recto pages appear Sabine Menner-Bettscheid's scholarly responses to Kenney and fictional responses to Susette. Menner-Bettscheid gives life to an entire series of voices: Hölderlin's pious mother, Susette's calculating husband, Jacob, the Gontard's oldest child, Henry, the popular novelist Sophie LaRoche, and the Greek gardener and rabbit-keeper at the Gontard's summer home in Frankfurt all come to be heard. Douglas F. Kenney, by contrast, sticks to historical documentation and literary analysis.David Farrell Krell is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. He has written many books, including the SUNY Press titles Archeticture: Ecstasies of Space, Time, and the Human Body; Nietzsche: A Novel; and Son of Spirit: A Novel.

This book examines Eastern philosophies of meditative silence in the context of Western rhetoric and discourse theory, arguing that silence is an authentic mode of knowing. Rather than an emptiness that is nihilistic, the void of meditative silence is, according to the author, a fullness in which meaning occurs. Kalamaras calls for a rethinking of the implications of such a concept of silence on contemporary theories of composition and the teaching of writing.George Kalamaras is Assistant Professor of English and Associate Director of Writing at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. His articles on composition have appeared in Composition Studies and English Education. He has also published two collections of poetry, Heart Without End and Beneath the Breath, and is the recipient of a 1993 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. For several years he has been a practitioner, in the Hindu tradition, of both Raja and Hatha Yoga.

This Companion, designed as an authoritative biographical and critical guide to Burns, is in six sections. Part I places Burns in context with a Chronology,'The Burns Circle'and a Topography. Part II looks at the Burnsian issues of religion, politics, philosophy, drink, drama and sex. Part III an essay on Burns as a poetic phenomenon, is sure to provoke debate about the relevance of Burns to his time and ours. Part IV examines twenty-five poems, eighteen verse epistles and twenty-six songs as well as commenting on the letters, political ballads and Common Place Books. A Select Bibliography (Part V) and four Appendixes (Part VI) are followed by a glossary of Scots words, and index of poems and a general index.

The author reads Rimbaud, Mallarme. Holderlin, and Trakl in relation to philosophy, and in particular to Heidegger.~ Is the age of poets past, or are we just on the verge of its coming in a farewell to poetry? When Rimbaud claims:'One must be absolutely modern!'what does he ask for? Is modernity really already finished, before it has even fully arrived?~ Is this the paradox of our present time? What if, as Mallarme said, a present does not exist?~ Is there any place for what Heidegger called'building, dwelling, thinking?'Why did Heidegger himself in the end need an ultimate God, after the failure of his political expectations?~ To keep questioning is already a way of responding. Perhaps the traditional philosophical gesture is not sufficient. If language, culture, and the history of the West have come to the point of no return as shown by Auschwitz, everything has to be rethought-- without a'turn'or a return.Marc Froment-Meurice has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Irvine, and at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of Les Intermittences de la raison; La chose meme; and Tombeau de Trakl, among other works.