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"A series of fascinating, and frequently uncanny, meditations."--Year's Work in English Studies. "Authoritative analysis of the creative act... The translator's introduction is as excellent as the translation itself."--Library Journal.
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Maurice Blanchot, the eminent literary and cultural critic, has had a vast influence on contemporary French writers-among them Jean Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida. From the 1930s through the present day, his writings have been shaping the international literary consciousness. The Space of Literature, first published in France in 1955, is central to the development of Blanchot's thought. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to death. This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of Mallarmé, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Blanchot's discussions of those writers are among the finest in any language. Ann Smock's fluent translation retains the tone and sense of the French; her introduction situates Blanchot in the French and American cultural spectrum and outlines the history of his critical concerns. Ann Smock, an associate professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley, also translated Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster for the University of Nebraska Press in 1986.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Blanchot, the pinnacle of "the philosophy of literature",
This review is from: The Space of Literature: A Translation of "L'Espace Litteraire" (Paperback)
Blanchot is, quite simply, the most original, coherent and compelling philosopher of literature since neo-Platonic times. He should also be accorded the title of "father of the philosophy of literary composition." This is Blanchot's master work, in the sense that it is both his most generally accessible text and also the text to which one is most likely most often to return. It makes lucid sense of questions which, before he wrote, should never have been asked in the academic realm (for example, "Why does a writer write? And what can we learn from his inability to give us a constant answer? Can a writer read his own work in the same way as every other reader? What does it mean to write a journal? Is it possible to be a writer, and yet, like Joubert, write nothing? Is it possible that reading is a task requiring as much inspiration as that of writing? Why does the writer find it so hard to accept a book as complete, and what is the real "completeness" of his texts? How does posterity affect the true achievement of a writer?") These are entirely superficial summaries, but they should give a flavour of the kind of questions he addresses. What is significant is that his ground of enquiry is uniquely his own; and anyone who aspires to write or read "seriously" in our time must battle, sooner or later, the questions he raises; his answers are both so lucid and compelling that they cannnot help but alter forever the way we view writers and readers, writing and reading, desire and aesthetics. A great part of Blanchot's gift is that he rationalises the psychology of reading and writing; he dissolves texts into the ambition, desire, credulity, desperation and insight of their authors. There could be no more faithful a "writer's writer", and Levinas, Bataille, Cixous and many others have paid homage both to his analytical gifts and his preternatural integrity. Blanchot provides almost effortlessly what was sought so hard by latter day 20thC critics from the Expressivists to the New Critics - a coherent account of how and why we write and read. To understand such things is worth more than an academic understanding of the most esoteric Deconstructionist because it puts us in touch with our most subjectively human qualities. Even at his most recondite and abstruse, Blanchot "satifies" in the same way as the most personally beloved of authors. His thoughts and ideas pass into our words and speech; his philosophy governs our hopes and fears. "The Space of Literature", for those who respond to it, must assume its own place in our canon, as the text before which all other texts are judged. To read and assent to it is to comprehend all that is important in "close reading"; accordingly, for the undergraduate or graduate of canonical literature, this book alone is probably worth more than any other work of scholarship, since it explains and questions the bases upon which all literary scholarship is possible.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews) 32 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Space of Absence,
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Space of Literature: A Translation of "L'Espace Litteraire" (Paperback)
Better to read this than to read ten manuals on the subject of writing.Blanchot evokes the non-presence of death in writing, writing's necessary complicity with death. This death, however, is not the Hegelian death that would negate and finalize the subject (cf Arendt), fixing it in a form on which judgement could finally be passed. No, true to his essay on the absence of any right to death (which appears in _The Work of Fire_ and _The Station Hill Blanchot Reader_), this death never occurs. This death is never present, happens at no particular time, and happens to no one (see also _The Writing of the Disaster_). It cannot be said to happen or occur at all. It is never present, and being so, shares with writing the latter's most unearthly, strange quality - the absense of the writer and of that about which has been written. In addition to being the most profound book on writing about which I can write with any knowledge, this is also Blanchot's most coherent and accessible set of essays. They possess something of a centrality of purpose and, together, make up something of a book, rather than the collections which make up the remainder of his critical and quasi-critical work. This may be a failing in the eyes of most Blanchotophiles, but it provides a bridge from the normal style of scholarly exposition to his more challenging investigations, and can be recommended as a first approach for the reader who is unfamiliar with his work. Nevertheless, some prior acquaintance with Rilke, Mallarme, Hoelderlin, and Kafka will be of immeasurable aid. Most importantly, this one stands as its own example of writing that utterly lacks completion, that is haunted throughout with a palpable sensation of absence, a sensation that is at once as appealing as it is astonishing and unsettling. 1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Remarkably Valuable Text for 20th Century French Philosophy,
By A. L. - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Space of Literature: A Translation of "L'Espace Litteraire" (Paperback)
Ann Smock's qualities as a translator shine through in Blanchot's earlier theoretical work, wherein one encounters a variety of themes that preoccupy him for the remainder of is literary life. Except for "Literature and the Right to Death", this is--in my opinion--the best starting point for anyone who is newly discovering Blanchot, but it remains significant and important for even the most well-read Blanchot scholars!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best Blanchot study,
By S. Meimaris - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Space of Literature: A Translation of "L'Espace Litteraire" (Paperback)
A great classic on the subtle workings of the minds of poets and writers and on poetry and writing in general. Like the title aptly puts it, it is a study of the interior space of Literature through studies of great poets like Mallarme, Rilke, Novalis and Holderlin and author-philosophers like Nietzsche and Kafka. Extremely perceptive approach with all the extreme analyses that characterize French thought. Mostly philosophical and intended for Poetry and Philosophy buffs. Excellent translation.
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