They said it before us: Presence of the classics.
The Beautiful Letters| N° d'inventaire | 30371 |
| Format | 16 x 23 |
| Détails | 208 p., paperback. |
| Publication | Paris, 2024 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782251455143 |
Thirty-six years after Jean Paulhan's book entitled In The Flowers of Tarbes or Terror in Letters , which in 1900 analyzed a phenomenon permeating the literary avant-garde, the idea of literature as a place of absolute subjectivity, André Gide recalled that man is not an island and that it is by yielding to the "influence" of foreign forces that he has a chance of discovering something new in himself. At the same time, after philology had given pride of place to the search for sources, criticism was going to develop a broader theory, baptized with the name of intertextuality, positing that any text can be read as the integration and transformation of one or more hypo-texts.
Among the vast field of influences that irrigates the literary world in the multiple forms that the relationship between text and text can take, there is a vein whose matrix function has long been recognized: it is the Classical tradition , explored by Gilbert Highet in a masterwork published in 1957 and covering large swathes of Greco-Latin influence on European literature. In a field limited to what the philosopher Rémi Brague called, in 1992, the "Roman Way", the author of this book, inspired by Dante's words celebrating the author of the Aeneid , "this source which opens such a great river of language" ( Inferno , I, 79), wanted to offer not an inventory but, as an incentive, a list of the forces at work in this process of creative appropriation of a heritage.
Thirty-six years after Jean Paulhan's book entitled In The Flowers of Tarbes or Terror in Letters , which in 1900 analyzed a phenomenon permeating the literary avant-garde, the idea of literature as a place of absolute subjectivity, André Gide recalled that man is not an island and that it is by yielding to the "influence" of foreign forces that he has a chance of discovering something new in himself. At the same time, after philology had given pride of place to the search for sources, criticism was going to develop a broader theory, baptized with the name of intertextuality, positing that any text can be read as the integration and transformation of one or more hypo-texts.
Among the vast field of influences that irrigates the literary world in the multiple forms that the relationship between text and text can take, there is a vein whose matrix function has long been recognized: it is the Classical tradition , explored by Gilbert Highet in a masterwork published in 1957 and covering large swathes of Greco-Latin influence on European literature. In a field limited to what the philosopher Rémi Brague called, in 1992, the "Roman Way", the author of this book, inspired by Dante's words celebrating the author of the Aeneid , "this source which opens such a great river of language" ( Inferno , I, 79), wanted to offer not an inventory but, as an incentive, a list of the forces at work in this process of creative appropriation of a heritage.