Book,
The Space of Literature: A Translation of "L'Espace litteraire"
University of Nebraska Press, (December 1989)
Abstract
Maurice Blanchot, the eminent literary and cultural critic, has had a vast
influence on contemporary French writers—among them Jean Paul Sartre and
Jacques Derrida. From the 1930s through the present day, his writings have
been shaping the international literary consciousness.
\_The Space of Literature\_, first published in France in 1955, is central to
the development of Blanchot's thought. In it he reflects on literature and the
unique demand it makes upon our attention. Thus he explores the process of
reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, all the while
considering the relation of the literary work to time, to history, and to
death. This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method
or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate
meditation upon the literary experience, informed most notably by studies of
Mallarmé, Kafka, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Blanchot's discussions of those writers
are among the finest in any language.
