Bloomsbury Academic Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy: Chance and Choice

Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy focuses on chance and scripted encounters as sites of tensions and alliances where new forms, ideas, meanings, interpretations, and theories can emerge. By moving beyond the realm of traditional hermeneutics, Jérôme Brillaud and Virginie Greene have compiled a volume that vitally illustrates how reading encounters represented in artefacts, texts, and films is a vibrant and dynamic mode of encountering and interpreting. With contributions from esteemed academics such as Pierre Saint-Amand, Natasha Lee and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, this book is a multidisciplinary collaboration between scholars from a range of disciplines including philosophy, literature, musicology and film studies. It uses examples chiefly from French culture and covers the Early Modern era to the twentieth century while providing a thorough and representative array of theoretical and hermeneutical approaches. Review An impressive collection of some of the most talented scholars in French and European Studies. The authors formulate a concept of "encountering" as alternatively a "falling into place" and as a "convergence" - concepts that get to the heart of what good criticism does, namely to "take the risk of meeting anew." Encounters with God, encounters with eighteenth-century women writers, encounters with music and the visual arts, encounters with others - the range of topics and first-rate scholarship attests to Christie McDonald's enduring influence and inspiration on literary and cultural studies.Patrick M. Bray, Associate Professor of French, University College London, UKThe reader will find in this book not only a marvelous catalogue of encounters in and with a variety of cultural productions and their rich contexts, but also a thick, interactive map of human encounters, anchored by nodal points both intellectual and affective.Lia Nicole Brozgal, Associate Professor, European Languages and Transcultural Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, USAWritten in honor of Christie McDonald, whose work has analyzed encounters from Rousseau to Proust to Derrida, the fascinating essays in this collection do much more than celebrate a remarkable career; they theorize the concept of the encounter, which lies at the heart of the creative process and at the very foundation of what we do as critics and scholars.Maurice Samuels, Betty Jane Anlyan Professor of French, Yale University, USA About the Author Jérôme Brillaud is Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Manchester. His research is primarily on early modern French culture with a focus on philosophy. He is the author of Sombres Lumières (2011) and A Philosophy of Simplicity (2019). Virginie Greene is Professor of French at Harvard University. She is a specialist in medieval literature with strong interests in history and philosophy and Proust and his times. She is the author of Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and Philosophy and Le Sujet et la Mort dans La Mort Artu.