num_pages: 150
description: Modern history is haunted by the disasters of the centuryâ€”world wars, concentration camps, Hiroshima, and the Holocaustâ€”grief, anger, terror, and loss beyond words, but still close, still impending. How can we write or think about disaster when by its very nature it defies speech and compels silence, burns books and shatters meaning?   The Writing of the Disaster reflects upon efforts to abide in disasterâ€s infinite threat. First published in French in 1980, it takes up the most serious tasks of to describe, explain, and redeem when possible, and to admit what is not possible. Neither offers consolation. Maurice Blanchot has been praised on both sides of the Atlantic for his fiction and criticism. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas once remarked that Blanchot's writing is a "language of pure transcendence, without correlative." Literary theorist and critic Geoffrey Hartman remarked that Blanchot's influence on contemporary writers "cannot be overestimated."
language: English
title: The Writing of the Disaster/L'Ecriture Du Desastre
titlecomplete: The Writing of the Disaster/L'Ecriture Du Desastre
genres: France, History, Philosophy, Literary Criticism, Literature, Writing, French Literature, Poetry, Nonfiction, Theory
ratings_count: 714
publisher: University of Nebraska Press