Malraux The Absolute Agnostic Or Metamorphosis As Universal Law

Moving beyond merely biographical or textual interpretation, Claude Tannery traces the philosophy of life and art developed by André Malraux. With both sensitivity and expert interpretation he defines the issues—personal and artistic as well as political—that underlie Malraux's writings—including early as well as late works, novels, speeches, and essays. The result is a new and subtle portrait of Malraux.

How do we perdure when we and everything around us are caught up in incessant change? But the course of this change does not seem to be haphazard and we may seek the modalities of its Logos in the transformations in which it occurs. The classic term 'Metamorphosis' focuses upon the proportions between the transformed and the retained, the principles of sameness and otherness. Applied to life and its becoming, metamorphosis pinpoints the proportions between the vital and the aesthetic significance of life. Where could this metaphysical in-between territory come better to light than in the Fine Arts? In this collection are investigated the various proportions between the vital significance of the constructivism of life and a specifically human contribution made by the creative imagination to the transformatory search for beauty and aesthetic values. Papers by: Lawrence Kimmel, Mark L. Brack, Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez, William Roberts, Jadwiga Smith, Victor Gerald Rivas, Max Statkiewicz, Matti Itkonen, George R. Tibbetts, Linda Stratford, Jorella Andrews, Ingeborg M. Rocker, Stephen J. Goldberg, Leah Durner, Donnalee Dox, Catherine Schear, Samantha Henriette Krukowski, Gary Maciag, Kelly Dennis, Wanda Strukus, Magda Romanska, Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Ellen Burns, Tessa Morrison, Sabine Coelsch-Foisner, Gary Backhaus, Daniel M. Unger, Howard Pearce.

This book analyses Malraux's writing from his journalism in Indochina to his novels, art studies and (anti)memorialist essays. Cutting through the established dual biographical image of Malraux as a committed leftwinger and revolutionary novelist turned unconditional Gaullist and diehard anti-Communist at the Liberation, it makes a balanced assessment of Malraux as a non-ideological if elitist artist who shaped his public role as much as he shaped the existence of his heroes both novelistic and real.

Philip F. Williams has published nine books in East Asian studies, including The Great Wall of Confinement (UCal, 2004), and has been Professor of Chinese at Massey University and Arizona State University. --

André Malraux's output, spanning some 55 years, ranges from novels to philosophical essays, studies on the plastic arts and memorialist essays. The present volume is significantly innovative in that it sets out to elucidate this diversity by focusing, for the first time and from a variety of perspectives, on the erosion of boundaries which characterises Malraux's work. This erosion is multi-faceted and includes the crossing of genre boundaries; the appropriation of the literary text as political vehicle; the exploitation of the literary text as historical document; contemporary history as a source of literary texts; the slippage between autobiography and the novel, autobiography and the memorialist essay and between fiction and the memorialist essay. Contributors to this volume explore the complex relationship between fact and fiction underpinning Malraux's writing, and also his life. An understanding of Malraux's determination to ignore boundaries is crucial to the understanding of his life and work. In this respect the present study will interest academics and students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, of French literary and cultural studies.

First published in 2001. This is the first substantial reference work in English on the various forms that constitute "life writing." As this term suggests, the Encyclopedia explores not only autobiography and biography proper, but also letters, diaries, memoirs, family histories, case histories, and other ways in which individual lives have been recorded and structured. It includes entries on genres and subgenres, national and regional traditions from around the world, and important auto-biographical writers, as well as articles on related areas such as oral history, anthropology, testimonies, and the representation of life stories in non-verbal art forms.

Key Writers on Art: The Twentieth Century offers a unique and authoritative guide to modern responses to art. Featuring 48 essays on the most important twentieth century writers and thinkers and written by an international panel of expert contributors, it introduces readers to key approaches and analytical tools used in the study of contemporary art. It discusses writers such as Adorno, Barthes, Benjamin, Freud, Greenberg, Heuser, Kristeva, Merleau-Ponty, Pollock, Read and Sontag.

This book reads the theory of evolution through the roots of words and the codes set up by relations between roots and key-words. Language was historically created in the course of the work dynamic. Today language has a double function. It not only supplies us with our everyday vocabulary and grammar. It also conceals a language within a language, offering clues as to what it means to be human. This book suggests that the evidence of this language within language shows that not only are we related to the great apes biologically as Darwin established, but that culturally we are related to the insects, and specifically to the metamorphic insects. It is this connection that is crucial And defining. Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder of the Theory of Evolution, sensed some spiritual and artistic range to human experience not explained by Darwin`s central theory. They Stared at the Sun shows how the structures in major artistic works fuse with the development of creatures that undergo radical metamorphosis. They also determine the unique place of humans in the quantum cosmos.