Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, 16th-17th Century French Literature - Literary Criticism, Mind, Philosophy of, General & Miscellaneous French Philosophy, Renaissance Philosophy, Modern Philosophy - General & Miscellaneous, Philosophy - Gener

Writing Cogito

Name: Writing Cogito
Author: Hassan Melehy
ISBN: 9780791435717

by Hassan Melehy

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Overview

Combining literary theory and history with detailed textual analysis, Melehy examines a series of events at the outset of modernity involving both literature and philosophy. Through the work of Michel de Montaigne and Rene Descartes, Melehy considers the question of the foundation of the human subject, in the context of contemporary debates in literature and philosophy. Montaigne, through writing, examines the many possibilities of subjective experience, and finds that the subject takes shape in writing. Descartes comes to the subject in search of a principle to circumvent the uncertainty of language - "I think, therefore I am," the cogito. But Descartes, Melehy shows, must continually depend on literary devices, on the properties of language whose effects he is so eager to escape - also deploying the devices to disguise the fact that they permeate his work.

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Booknews

With his in/famous "Cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am."), Descartes and his philosophical peers had difficulty extricating themselves from "the Cartesian web" (as the second chapter is titled) of writing about the one certainly, oneself. Melehy (Romance Languages, U. of Vermont) probes this modern/postmodern dilemma of the subject in relationship to the world, through critical reading of such texts (in the original) as Descartes' "Discourse on the Method" (1637) and "Meditations" (1641), and Montaigne's "Essays" (1580- 1595). The 20th century Derrida-Foucault exchange on Descartes offers an additional prism on the literary implications of subjectivity: multiple "I's," madness vs. reason, and nonlinear time. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.