On poetry and politics /

This volume collects Paulhan's major essays on language, literature, and politics written and published between 1913 and 1951, a significant span in French politics. To have all these gathered into one volume and translated, as a whole, into English for the first time is helpful. Paulhan works to demonstrate the difficulty of dividing thought from language in the way that spirit is divided from body, giving authority to spirit or thought. In "Rhetoric Rises from Its Ashes," he writes of "that other, purely moral, partisanship that rehearses the conflict of the body and the spirit and in the end demands the body's submission. Thus it is with language, that body of thought." Paulhan had significant impact on late contemporary literary criticism, including structuralism and deconstruction. The editors point to Michael Syrotinski's Defying Gravity: Jean Paulhan's Interventions in Twentieth-Century French Intellectual History (CH, Oct'98, 36-0847) for a discussion of Paulhan's influence on deconstruction and citations of Paulhan's work in Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Although interesting in their own right, these essays enhance the historical perspective on poststructuralist critical theory. They do, however, require background in literary theory and linguistics. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty/professionals. W. F. Williams Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania