The Station Hill Blanchot Reader [Paperback]

Maurice Blanchot (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1998

This essential reader from Station Hill (Blanchot's longtime publisher in the United States) is six books in one, and the first and only collection of Maurice Blanchot's celebrated fiction and critical/philosophical writing. Regarded both on the European continent and in America as one of the truly great authors of French Post-Modernism, Blanchot's reputation and readership in English has already established him as a modern classic. The Blanchot Reader brings together a substantial collection of critical and philosophical writings (The Gaze of Orpheus) and the only edition in print in English of his major works of fiction (Thomas the Obscure, Death Sentence, Vicious Circles, The Madness of the Day, When the Time Comes and The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me). General readers and students alike will seek out these essential works by the writer Susan Sontag referred to as "an unimpeachably major voice in modern French literature." Maurice Blanchot is now recognized as a major twentieth century philosopher whose influence extends to the works of Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, Lacan and others.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In their ongoing effort to bring the mysterious, influential French thinker and writer to the attention of American readers, the publishers at Station Hill have, since 1978, employed uniformly excellent translators (Paul Auster, Lydia Davis and Robert Lamberton) to turn out eight of Blanchot's books (The Madness of the Day; The Infinite Conversation; etc.). This volume combines six of Blanchot's works of fiction along with a gaggle of essays of literary criticism. Readers seeking the feel of his fiction in this collection should start with the novel Death Sentence, whose structure depends (like that of a musical work) not on any one story but on two series of storiesAone of women who are ill, the other of apartments. Blanchot's narrator becomes the point of mysterious convergence in which death and architectural space receive a lover's linkage. Another work, Thomas the Obscure, offers a more conventional plotAa man at a resort has an affair with a womanAbut the story is ornamented with extraordinary hallucinatory episodes: Thomas gets quite literally stared down by a book he is reading. In The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me the fundamental conditions of dialogue are allegorized in a series of odd remarks exchanged between the narrator and a perhaps imaginary companion. Blanchot takes his literary orientation from his friend Georges Bataille, from Lautr?amont and from Rimbaud. His fiction writing dispenses with character and action to explore philosophical mysteries, trafficking in the nature of their inexpressibility; as a fiction writer, Blanchot is, above all, a great philosopher. It's no surprise, then, that his obsession with language and incommunicability is best understood in his much-celebrated essays. Those here (mostly from Station Hill's ealier collection, The Gaze of Orpheus) are reminders of Blanchot's lucid intelligence: the same readers baffled by his fiction will find him a brilliant reader of literature and a patient guide through the labyrinths of dread, death and language. His insights into Kafka, Rilke and Proust are not to be missed.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

French novelist and critic Blanchot is considered, both in Europe and in America, one of the leading authors of French postmodernism. He belongs to the generation of intellectuals who came of age during the 1930s and flourished during the postwar years. Considered by many a "modern classic," Blanchot was one of the first French intellectuals to take a keen interest in issues of language and meaning. To an extent, his descriptions of extreme situationsAcatastrophe, death, imprisonment, exile, and revolutionAanticipated the later interest of the existentialists. This monumental reader brings together a significant portion of his work: six books of fiction and critical and philosophical writing. Some of them, including Thomas the Obscure, Death Sentence, Vicious Circles, and The Madness of the Day, are only here available in English (the afterword is dedicated entirely to "publishing Blanchot in America"). Highly recommended for large collections and essential for literary ones.AAli Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, NY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: Barrytown/Station Hill Press, Inc.; 1 edition (September 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1886449171
• ISBN-13: 978-1886449176
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #792,837 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent source of Blanchot's fiction and early thought, February 19, 2010

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N. A. Crawford - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Station Hill Blanchot Reader (Paperback)

This reader does as well as a job as I can imagine at abbreviating Maurice Blanchot's corpus into one volume. The essays are mostly of his early thought on literature and the fiction is that of his most important short works. Preventing the need for lots of very little, not so cheap editions of Blanchot's fiction alone makes this reader a staple for anyone interested in Blanchot. The essays are helpful, but in no way stand in for the works from which they come. If you want to engage Blanchot's thought, The Space of Literature and The Infinite Conversation will take you far beyond what staying with this reader could do. Unfortunately, the essays only present early Blanchot, before he shifted his thought from literature to writing. But still, having Thomas the Obscure, The Moment of My Death, and Madness of the Day in one volume is enough for me. If you have had no experience with Blanchot, then these essays would be a good way to test the water. If it is to your liking, just be sure to move on quickly into his actual work and not consider these essays to be sufficient in themselves.

Oh, and as a side note, a lot of Blanchot's fiction isn't light reading. Thomas the Obscure is extremely heavy. As in, 5 or 10 pages only in one sitting, heavy. Heavier than Ulysses, heavy. His fiction basically doesn't provide the reader her common, comfortable places for footing. The reader instead falls into the writing, as it were. Immensely beautiful and engaging--don't let this be a deterrent--but it does demand effort from its reader. It goes without saying that if you're interested in Blanchot, you're willing at least in part to do some of this work, but here it also means that there's much more to be gained from the effort.