Fordham University Press Expectation: Philosophy, Literature

Review “Expectation stages a courtship between philosophy and literature that has never been presented with such wit, grace, and finesse. What’s more, this intense courtship leads to a marriage blessed with specific offspring: Nancy’s book offers both an epithalamium and a pregnant poetics, a poetics of awakening and emergence―poetics as obstetrics ushering in new ‘senses’ in and of the world, plus strong and luminescent poems never seen in English before.” Author: from Jean-Michel Rabaté's IntroductionAmong Nancy's many distinguished writings, Expectation demands recognition. Source: Choice Product Description Expectation is a major volume of Jean-Luc Nancy’s writings on literature, written across three decades but, for the most part, previously unavailable in English.More substantial than literary criticism, these essays collectively negotiate literature’s relation to philosophy. Nancy pursues such questions as literature’s claims to truth, the status of narrative, the relation of poetry and prose, and the unity of a book or of a text, and he addresses a number of major European writers, including Dante, Sterne, Rousseau, Hölderlin, Proust, Joyce, and Blanchot.The final section offers a number of impressive pieces by Nancy that completely merge his concerns for philosophy and literature and philosophy-as-literature. These include a lengthy parody of Valéry’s “La Jeune Parque,” several original poems by Nancy, and a beautiful prose-poetic discourse on an installation by Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani that incorporates the Faust theme. Opening with a substantial Introduction by Jean-Michel Rabaté that elaborates Nancy’s importance as a literary thinker, this book constitutes the most substantial statement to date by one of today’s leading philosophers on a discipline that has been central to his work across his career. From the Author Jean-Luc Nancy (Author) Jean-Luc Nancy is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. His wide-ranging thought is developed in many books, including Expectation: Philosophy, Literature; The Possibility of a World; The Banality of Heidegger; The Disavowed Community; and, with Adèle Van Reeth, Coming (all Fordham). Robert Bononno (Translator) Robert Bononno has translated more than two dozen books, both fiction and nonfiction, and numerous shorter pieces. His translation of René Crevel’s My Body and I was a finalist for the 2005 French-American Foundation Prize. He received NEA grants in 2002 and 2010 and has taught translation and terminology at New York University and the City University of New York Graduate Center. About the Author Jean-Luc Nancy is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. His wide-ranging thought is developed in many books, including Expectation: Philosophy, Literature; The Possibility of a World; The Banality of Heidegger; The Disavowed Community; and, with Adèle Van Reeth, Coming (all Fordham).Robert Bononno has translated more than two dozen books, both fiction and nonfiction, and numerous shorter pieces. His translation of René Crevel’s My Body and I was a finalist for the 2005 French-American Foundation Prize. He received NEA grants in 2002 and 2010 and has taught translation and terminology at New York University and the City University of New York Graduate Center.Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has written or edited more than thirty-five books on modernism, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.