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Tag: literature
Pages tagged with literature.
21 pages
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Action of Unveiling vs. Action of Governing
Merleau-Ponty's distinction, in Chapter 5 of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), between two orders of historical action: the action of unveiling — the writer's, journalist's, artist's, or philosopher's domain of showing, analyzing, exposi…
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Claude Simon
French novelist (1913–2005), Nobel Prize in Literature 1985. In the wiki's context, the literary source of Merleau-Ponty's expression "flesh of the world" — MP explicitly cites Simon's Le Vent (1957), p. 98 in the 1961 course "Cartesian On…
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Conquering Language (langage conquérant)
Merleau-Ponty's name for speech that sets up a new signification within a "language machine [machine de langage] / apparatus [un appareil]" built from old signs — an apparatus that "sometimes gives more and sometimes less than what one put…
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Denis Diderot
French Enlightenment philosopher (1713–1784), co-editor of the Encyclopédie (1751–72), novelist, dramatist, art critic. The wiki tracks Diderot primarily as the author of Le Neveu de Rameau (1762, published posthumously 1805) — Diderot's d…
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Engagement through Disengagement
Merleau-Ponty's marginal phrase at L6 [80] of Investigations into the Literary Use of Language (1953): "Engagement through disengagement. (the l'Académie Française episode)." Initially glossing Valéry's late acceptance of life (in particul…
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Georg Lukács
Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary theorist, and political figure (1885–1971); author of Die Theorie des Romans (1916), Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (1923 — the single most important work for MP's engagement), Der junge Hegel (19…
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Imposture (three-fold, MP's reading of Valéry)
Merleau-Ponty's name (drawn from Valéry but systematized) for the three constitutive deceptions of literary writing diagnosed in lectures 4–5 of Investigations into the Literary Use of Language (1953): (1) the writer is mastered by what hi…
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Indirect or Objective Lyricism
Ramon Fernandez's term, enthusiastically endorsed by Merleau-Ponty in the 1953 Collège course The Literary Use of Language (Lecture 14): "a way of arousing emotion which involves showing facts, things, without saying their effect." Three e…
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Investigations into the Literary Use of Language
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty; translated with introduction and notes by Bryan Smyth Year: 1953 (course delivered, January 19 – April 22); 2013 (French publication, ed. Zaccarello & Saint Aubert, Métis Presses); 2026 (English translatio…
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Involuntary Literature
Merleau-Ponty's name for what Stendhal "stumbles into" in his Journal (1804–05) — the discovery, "spontaneously and almost unknowingly," of internal monologue as the technique that resolves the life-impasse of cynicism-vs-rapture. Not Roma…
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
German poet, novelist, natural-philosopher (1749–1832); cardinal figure of Weimar Klassik; his works span lyric poetry, drama (Faust I/II), the Bildungsroman (Wilhelm Meister), the philosophical novel (Die Wahlverwandtschaften), and natura…
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Making Visible (Sichtbarmachen)
Paul Klee's 1920 formula from the Schöpferische Konfession (Creative Credo) — "Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible" ("Die Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar") — transformed by Merleau-Pon…
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Marcel Proust
French novelist (1871–1922), author of À la recherche du temps perdu. In the wiki's context, Merleau-Ponty's privileged literary source for phenomenological evidence about love, memory, time, the body's grasp of space-time, and the "Albert…
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Maurice Blanchot
French writer, philosopher, and literary critic (22 September 1907 – 20 February 2003; cremated 24 February 2003). Author of Thomas l'obscur (1941), Aminadab (1942), Le Très-Haut (1948), La part du feu (1949), L'espace littéraire (1955), L…
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Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World: Philosophy and Literature
Author(s): Galen A. Johnson, Mauro Carbone, Emmanuel de Saint Aubert Year: 2020 Type: Book (co-authored, Fordham University Press, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series)
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Plautus
Roman comic playwright (c. 254–184 BCE), author of some 20 surviving comedies including Asinaria, Amphitryon, Miles Gloriosus, Aulularia, Mostellaria, Menaechmi (model for Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors). On the wiki Plautus appears in his…
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Stendhal (Henri Beyle)
French novelist (1783–1842), born Henri-Marie Beyle in Grenoble; principal pseudonym "Stendhal" (after the German town Stendal); reputed to have used over 200 pseudonyms (César Bombet, Jules de Saint-Bertrand, etc.). Author of Le Rouge et…
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Truth is Poetry (le vrai est poésie)
Merleau-Ponty's organizing thesis for the fourteenth lecture of Investigations into the Literary Use of Language (1953): "The truth is in essence poetic, [it] is found only in fiction, – which is not unreal or arbitrary" (L11 [118]). With…
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Voyance
Merleau-Ponty's technical term for the double sight by which vision sees farther than it sees — not a second faculty but the structure of all vision once philosophy takes seriously that "the invisible is the outline and the depth of the vi…
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Writing and Living
Merleau-Ponty's name for the relation between the writer's vocation and the writer's life, and for the quadruple-negation thesis through which the relation is articulated: writing is neither end nor means, neither cause nor effect of life…
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Être humain est un parti / To Be Human Is Also to Take a Side
Stendhal's phrase from the Lucien Leuwen marginalia, picked up by Merleau-Ponty as the closing political-philosophical thesis of Investigations into the Literary Use of Language (1953). The thesis: the writer's engagement is intrinsic to t…