literature

“Fixers”, or dragomans, are vital intermediaries and interpreters for both journalists and soldiers in hostile terrain, and play a central role in a network of relationships and transfers. In the Middle Ages they embodied the need for otherness, and continue to do so today.

The first English translator of Spinoza’s Ethics was a woman, and not any woman: the great novelist George Eliot who, before taking to writing fiction, had translated Feuerbach, David Strauss—and Spinoza. Her beautiful translation had remained unpublished until now. It has nothing to envy of the ones that followed.

In this new biography of Susan Sontag, Benjamin Moser draws on hundreds of interviews and on the writer’s restricted archives to offer a fascinating portrait of a woman driven to extremities both personal and intellectual.

How does big data contribute to our understanding of Hugo, Balzac or Flaubert? A great deal, because far from being a mechanical accumulation of data on literary texts, the digital humanities transform our relationship to works and the way we read them.

Minority sexualities give rise to much discourse, which is more widely ranging than it is broadly disseminated. As much as the question of their actual practice, these sexualities raise the issue of how to talk about them. Halfway between essay and fiction, Marco Vidal offers some potential avenues to explore.

Do animals have a moral life in the same way as humans do? The philosopher Alice Crary argues that they are visible bearers of moral qualities, as literature suggests. But can values be the object of empirical observation?

A meticulous historical enquiry reveals the liberties taken by the author of Journey to the End of the Night in recounting his war experience. These flattering inventions made it possible for him to disseminate his pamphlets in the 1930s and clear his name in the purge.

Just one year after Philip Roth’s announcement that he was retiring from fiction making, Claudia Roth Pierpoint’s Roth Unbound offers a review of his long and versatile career as a writer of subversive fictions and American counterlives.

Between literary and sociological experimentation, the publication of the email exchange that led to the book by Howard S. Becker and Robert R. Faulkner on jazz repertoires reveals the secrets of the creative process.

In a new biography, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings recount the decisive moments of Walter Benjamin’s life – his work on tragic drama and allegory, his friendship with Gershom Scholem and Bertolt Brecht, his flight from Germany in 1933 and subsequent years in Paris –, focusing on his fascination with the messianic meaning of the everyday.

Despite its recent return to the stage, Cardenio’s play remains a literary ghost. In his latest book, Roger Chartier sheds light on this title without a text, tracing clues that lead from Cervantes to Shakespeare and from one genre to another. Along the way, he manages to date the birth of the Foucauldian author function.

After being readmitted to French literary heritage following the international success of Suite française (2004), Irène Némirovsky’s work provides a unique insight into the intellectual landscape of the inter-war period, particularly with regard to the crisis of the novel, the new mal du siècle and the Jewish literary renaissance. However, Angela Kershaw’s recent book on the author shows the difficulties involved in reading and understanding a book once the Holocaust has changed our perception of it.

Since the 18^th century, India has been portrayed in contradictory ways. While scholarly knowledge is based on the philological study of texts, literary Orientalism expresses its fascination for a society well-known to preserve the values of order and hierarchy. For Roland Lardinois the anthropology of Louis Dumont illustrates the ambiguity of these discourses.

Through the remarkable story of the journey of 264 Japanese miniatures, a world-renowned ceramicist retraces the rise and fall of his family, the Ephrussi, rich Jewish bankers with a dynasty which spread across Europe from Odessa and Paris to Vienna. His book is an example of how history can lie at the heart of literature.

Two books devoted to slander during the Age of Enlightenment highlight the explosive nature of speech and literature when they are given free rein. The attacks aimed at the King and Marie-Antoinette quickly started to pose a threat to the new democratic power. Then, how can we ensure that the principles of the freedom of press are compatible with the protection of individual reputations?

Who or what is responsible for your condition? The rich? Destiny? Yourself? The American writer William T. Vollmann posed this question to poor people in every corner of the world. Part social survey, part moralistic essay, Poor People examines how poverty is measured and represented, reaching troubling insights into the dark side of poverty – for those living it and those observing it alike.

What do Henry and William James have in common, besides being brothers ? Perhaps to have shared the same vision of pragmatism. David Lapoujade’s book renews the comparison between the work of the writer and the philosopher with a Deleuzian analysis, just as effective as biographical approaches.