The Writer Writing: Philosophic Acts in Literature

(Hardback)

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In an age of authorless, contextless, deconstructed texts, Francis-Noel Thomas argues that it is time to re-examine a fundamental but neglected concept of literature: writing is an action whose agent is an individual. Addressing both general readers and scholars, Thomas offers two cases, Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan and Marcel Proust's A la recherche

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"This lucid, vigorously written book is a refreshing demonstration of the sophistication of common sense. The Writer Writing makes a persuasive case for the reinstatement of the writer's intention, the living author, and the stubborn individuality of the particular literary text, at the heart of interpretation. Francis-Nol Thomas is an important new voice in the rising chorus of objections to the critical orthodoxies that have dominated academic literary studies over the past quarter-century."Robert Alter, University of California, Berkeley
"In this deeply original book, Francis-Nol Thomas engages the actions of writers writing. He has allowed the artists themselves, not a theory that supersedes them, to yield access to diverse experiences that could not have been predicted by even the shrewdest of theorists. In his hands, the `old-fashioned' notion that art works are individual projects of individual artists inviting us into diverse worlds feels refreshingly new."adapted from the foreword