Absent without leave
Subtitle: French literature under the threat of war
By: Denis Hollier ; translated by Catherine Porter.
Contributors: Porter, Catherine.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Cambridge, Mass
Language: eng
Number of pages: 239
Subjects: French literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism.
Description: They were not the "Banquet Years," those anxious wartime years when poets and novelists were made to feel embarrassed by their impulse to write literature. And yet it was the attitude of those writers and critics in the 1930s and 1940s that shaped French literature - the ideas of Derrida, Foucault, de Man, Deleuze, and Ricoeur - and has so profoundly influenced literary enterprise in the English-speaking world since 1968.

This literary history, the prehistory of postmodernism, is what Denis Hollier recovers in his interlocking studies of the main figures of French literary life before the age of anxiety gave way to the era of existentialist commitment.

George Bataille, Michel Leiris, Roger Caillois, Andre Malraux, the early Jean-Paul Sartre are the figures Hollier considers, writers torn between politics and the pleasures of the text. They appear here uneasily balancing the influences of the philosopher and the man of action. These studies convey the paradoxical heroism of writers fighting for a world that would extend no rights or privileges to writers, writing for a world in which literature would become a reprehensible frivolity.
Notes: Includes bibliographic references (p. [195]-231 and index.