Why I Have Not Written Any Of My Books
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Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books
Author: Marcel Benabou
language: en
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Release Date: 1998-03-01
Marcel Bénabou is quick to acknowledge that his own difficulty in writing has plenty of company. Words stick and syntax is stubborn, meaning slips and synonyms cluster. A blank page taunts and a full one accuses. Bénabou knows the heroic joy of depriving critics of victims, the kindness of sparing publishers decisions, and the public charity of leaving more room in bookstore displays. Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books (Pourquoi je n’ai écrit aucun de mes livres) provides both a respectful litany of writers’ fears and a dismissal of the alibis offered to excuse them.
Jacob, Menahem, and Mimoun
Author: Marcel Benabou
language: en
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Release Date: 2001-09-01
1998 National Jewish Book Award Winner for Autobiography/Memoir "A dry wit and surprising pathos infuse this "family epic," which turns out to be "merely" the telling of Benabou's failed attempt at creating his literary masterpiece. . . The reader shares his initial hopefulness as he details his younger self's ambitious plans for a family epic, founded in memory, supplemented by ever-growing mountains of scholarly documentation . . . and formally grounded in a literary model of the past that, ultimately, eludes him. In telling the stories of his three selected ancestors, Jacob, Menahem, and Mimoun, Benabou notices that his youthful project has not disappeared. He's decided to let his book tell itself; he'll merely hitch himself to the story and go along for the ride in this artistic tour-de force, by turns playful and serious."--Kirkus Reviews Jacob, Menahem, and Mimoun delves into Marcel Bénabou's uncommon family history while reflecting on the mysteries of memory, the past, and writing. Born in Morocco in 1939 to a Jewish family, Bénabou left his home at age seventeen to study ancient history in Paris. Bénabou's memoir returns to his childhood in Morocco--to his parents, their home, and the Jewish community in Meknes. At the same time he accounts for all that has changed, including his very different life in Paris and the disappearance of the world of his childhood. He notes how he has turned from his family's wish that he become a rabbi to his absorption, as an adult, in several millennia of secular literature. And he worries about how his "family epic"--an epic meant to include the history of Morocco's Jews--has become a book about himself and his inability to write the great book he has long imagined--the book one owes oneself and the world. The impossibility of fully recovering the past hovers over his memories. And the impossibility of writing a book about that past is also there--an impossibility that Bénabou acknowledges, delineates, and, in a real if also provisional sense, transcends. In his inspired attention to that impossibility, Bénabou has written a book that transforms absence into presence and the past into rich matter for the present. Marcel Bénabou lives in Paris and pursues his current positions as professor at the University of Paris and as the permanent provisional secretary of Oulipo, that unsettling association of indefatigably innovative writers. Steven Rendall is a professor in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Distinguo: Reading Montaigne Differently and the translator of many books including Jürgen Habermas's Berlin Republic (Nebraska 1997). Warren Motte is a professor of French at the University of Colorado. He is the author of several books including Playtexts: Ludics in Contemporay Literature (Nebraska 1995).
The A to Z of Postmodernist Literature and Theater
Author: Fran Mason
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Release Date: 2009-07-23
Postmodernist literature embraces a wide range of forms and perspectives, including texts that are primarily self-reflexive; texts that use pastiche, burlesque, parody, intertextuality and hybrid forms to create textual realities that either run in opposition to or in parallel with an external reality; fabulations that develop both of these strategies; texts that ironize their relationship to reality; works that use the aspects already noted to more fully engage with political or cultural realities; texts that deal with history as a fiction; and texts that elude categorization even within the variety already explored. For example, in fiction, a postmodernist novel might tell a story about a writer struggling with writing (only, perhaps, to find that he is a character in a book by another writer struggling to write a book). The A to Z of Postmodernist Literature and Theater examines the different areas of postmodernist literature and the variety of forms that have been produced. This is accomplished through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and several hundred cross-referenced dictionary entries on individual postmodernist writers, the important postmodernist aesthetic practices, significant texts produced throughout the history of postmodernist writing, and important movements and ideas that have created a variety of literary approaches within the form. By placing these concerns within the historical, philosophical, and cultural contexts of postmodernism, this reference explores the frameworks within which postmodernist literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century operates.