© Columbia University Press
The Fabulous Imagination: On Montaigne's Essays
June, 2009
Cloth, 240 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-11992-4
$29.50
/ £20.50
"Lawrence D. Kritzman is centered on the way Montaigne's essays are self-contained expositions of ambivalence and unresolved tension about the difficulties of living, negotiating, and being in the world. He brings us back to archaic but vital issues that haunt us: to monsters and nightmares; to fear of impotence; to thoughts about the end of filial lines; to the ways that writing exhumes and thus copes with traumatic memories; to mimicry not as a way of representing the world but as a tactic of diverting, deflecting, and ultimately assuaging its violence. A strong and enduring contribution not only to early modern study but also to the importance of theory insofar as it can be displaced into and out of the works of canonical authors." — Tom Conley, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University
"This is one of the few books on Montaigne that fuses analytical skill with humane awareness of why Montaigne matters." — Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities, Yale University
"In this exhilarating and learned book on Montaigne's essays, Lawrence D. Kritzman contemporizes the great writer. Reading him from today's deconstructive America, Kritzman discovers Montaigne always already deep into a dialogue with Jacques Derrida and psychoanalysis. One cannot but admire this fabulous act of translation." — Hélène Cixous, author of White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text, and Politics
"Throughout his career, Lawrence D. Kritzman has demonstrated an intimate knowledge of Montaigne's essays and an engagement with French philosophy and critical theory. The Fabulous Imagination sheds precious new light on one of the founders of modern individualism and on his crucial quest for self-knowledge." — Jean Starobinski, professor emeritus of French literature, University of Geneva