“catherine porter”

Bringing sex and philosophy together on a blind date, Anne Dufourmantelle's provocative study uses this analogy to uncover and examine philosophy's blind spot. Delightful and startling comparisons spring from the date: both sex and philosophy are dangerous, both are socially subversive, and both are... More

This is a collection in translation of recent essays by Tzvetan Todorov, one of the most eminent of today's literary critics. The essays concentrate on the idea of genre, literary or otherwise, and ask such questions as: What is literature? What is genre? Which are the major literary genres? In the ... More

This is a collection in translation of recent essays by Tzvetan Todorov, one of the most eminent of contemporary literacy critics. In the first section of this volume Todorov proposes definitions for the notions of literature, discourse and genre.This is a collection in translation of recent essays ... More

In a series of brilliant snapshots, each a distinct bit of a larger story, Maurice Sartre's "Histoires Grecques" spans the grand narrative of Greek culture over a thousand years and a vast expanse of land and sea. From Homer to Damascius, from recent discoveries in Kandahar to an account of the murd... More

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, ... More

"This is a beautifully crafted book. In it, Claude Rosental proceeds to demonstrate that, as for all scientific and intellectual pursuits, the production and evaluation of theorems depend on conventions and networks that are eminently social. Rosental is widely regarded as one of the most promising ... More

Socrates is an elusive figure, Sarah Kofman asserts, and he is necessarily so since he did not write or directly state his beliefs. "With Socrates", she writes in her introduction, "we will never leave fiction behind". Kofman suggests that Socrates's avowal of ignorance was meant to be ironic. Later... More