Best french literary criticism books according to redditors
We found 37 Reddit comments discussing the best french literary criticism books. We ranked the 8 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 37 Reddit comments discussing the best french literary criticism books. We ranked the 8 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
In general, academic philosophy of religion is dominated by theistic philosophers, so there aren't many works defending atheism and atheistic arguments in the professional literature.
But there are still a few notable books:
I didn't add him because others have already mentioned him, but everything written by Graham Oppy is fantastic IMO. He is maybe the leading atheist philosopher in the field of philosophy of religion. A good place to start with his writings is his 2013 paper on arguments for atheism.
I like Camus a lot, but his prose is super hard to read sometimes. I don't really like Nietzsche; he's a massive fucking dick. I like Camus leagues more because Camus explains things and leads you to his conclusion while Nietzsche just preaches and rambles on about how much he hates this or that and how stupid this or that is.
Not all of these called themselves philosophers, but here's some I like:
I'm not stoic by any means, but I love Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. I think it's interesting how someone could write musings that are relevant millennia later.
John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, but he has a ton of prose too. Here's a book full of it along with annotations and modernized grammar. Milton wasn't the most satisfactory person, but his writing is incredible.
I haven't read this myself, but a friend of mine really liked Man's Search for Meaning by Frankl. Some of his friends called him pretentious for reading the book though (I wasn't one of them).
If you like Camus, you'll probably like Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism. Again, I haven't read it myself, but it was also recommended to me because I like Camus.
Jean-Paul Marat was a journalist during the French Revolution, but his writings sometimes crossed into philosophical territory. He was a huge populist, and I love his work when he's not calling for the deaths of hundreds of people. You can read some of it here.
I'm huge into theology, so I love Thomas Aquinas. He wrote a lot about theology and Christianity and was a major Christian apologist. He also dabbled in theodicy. Smart man.
And to mix it up, here's one I haven't checked out but is top on my list: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's Selected Works. She was a writer and a nun from Spain who was self-taught--all qualities you usually don't find in philosophers, so she'll be a unique read.
According to this link Columbus basically fucked up all the calculations, including using the wrong units and vastly overestimating how big Asia was.
>Washington Irving’s overly imaginative A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus notwithstanding, it was widely known by the 15th Century that the Earth is spherical. The question was, how big is the sphere? In 200 BCE, after all, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth to within one percent of its actual girth. He figured that one degree of latitude was equal to 59.5 nautical miles.
In making his own calculation, however, Columbus preferred the values given by the medieval Persian geographer, Abu al Abbas Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Kathir al-Farghani (a.k.a. Alfraganus): one degree (at the equator) is equal to 56.67 miles. That was Columbus’s first error, which he compounded with a second: he assumed that the Persian was using the 4 856-foot Roman mile; in fact, Alfraganus meant the 7 091-foot Arabic mile. (This is, of course, the sort of confusion of units that sent the Mars Climate Orbiter into its terminal swan dive in September 1999.)
>
>Taken together, the two miscalculations effectively reduced the planetary waistline to 16,305 nautical miles, down from the actual 21,600 or so, an error of 25 percent.
And then there was the third error. “Not content with whittling down the degree by 25 percent,” Morison writes, “Columbus stretched out Asia eastward until Japan almost kissed the Azores.” Through a complicated chain of reasoning that mixed Ptolemy, Marinus of Tyre, and Marco Polo with some “corrections” of his own, Columbus calculated that he would find Japan at 85º west longitude (rather than 140° east)—moving it more than 8,000 miles closer to Cape St. Vincent.
>
>All in all, he figured, the Indies were just 68 degrees west of the Canary Islands. Calculated travel distance: 3080 nautical miles. Actual distance from Tenerife to Jakarta: 7313 nautical miles. Margin of error: 58 percent.
Voltaire's Bastards by John Ralston Saul is pretty much based on demonstrating how reason, when place above all other virtues, can lead to terrible things.
The book's main argument is that the virtues temper each other out, and that any one of them pushed to the extreme is destructive. He then proceeds to demonstrate how reason has led to aberrations in many aspects of society, and does so in a very convincing way. It's a long read (took me a year, on and off), but it's worth it.
There was a pretty good book from years back that I read recently that kinda breaks down the arcing history of how we got to the point where the military has to be maintained because it's become such a part of the economy. Subsidies, factories, employment, contractural employment, research and dev, all kinds of stuff tied to it. This is a chapter or two in the whole book, but goddamn was my mind blown.
Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West by John Ralston Saul
Book
E-book
It more or less takes the history of reason and logic and shows how it's gotten misused.
Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:
amazon.com
amazon.co.uk
amazon.ca
amazon.com.au
amazon.in
amazon.com.mx
amazon.de
amazon.it
amazon.es
amazon.com.br
amazon.nl
amazon.co.jp
amazon.fr
Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
I currently look here: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, amazon.com.au, amazon.in, amazon.com.mx, amazon.de, amazon.it, amazon.es, amazon.com.br, amazon.nl, amazon.co.jp, amazon.fr, if you would like your local version of Amazon adding please contact my creator.
Sartre presented a lecture called "Existentialism and Humanism," which can now be found in print as Existentialism is a Humanism. It's almost like an Existentialism manefesto, per se. The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus is a good treatise on existentialism (Absurdism, really, but it'll do).
I would not hesitate to start reading fiction novels that have Existentialist themes. Camus' The Stranger, Sartre's Nausea, and Dostyevsky's Notes From the Underground are just a few that will find your studies well.
As for secondary literature, the only text I can knowledgeably recommend is Existentialism For Dummies, as I'm currently working my way through it. It's actually not as bad as you might think coming from the "For Dummies" series. It doesn't go too in-depth, and ideas are very concise and oftentimes humorous.
I have also heard good things about David Cogswell's Existentialism For Beginners, though I have never read it myself.
If your niece feels comfortable with this level of writing and philosophical examination, it is almost imperative to read Kierkegaard's Either/Or and Fear and Trembling, Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, and Sartre's Being and Nothingness, among others. It is good to have some background understanding of Kant and perhaps have a few essays by Schopenhauer under your belt leading up to the more rigorous academics like Heidegger and Hegel.
Good luck, and happy reading!
Thanks. I actually ordered Meditations right after I read Epictetus. Is this the other book? How do you apply reason when you talk to people and look at tasks you need to do so it's not so overwhelming?
well thats for another time, but the absolute expert on it is John Ralston Saul - Voltaires Bastards https://www.amazon.com/Voltaires-Bastards-Dictatorship-Reason-West/dp/0679748199
It looks a ton of this stuff has been translated into English.
Ousmane Sembene's God's Bits of Wood is the story of a railroad workers strike told from the workers' perspective, and the community tensions that are exposed during the strike. Almost all of his movies are also up on Amazon, and they're all worth checking out. He's not known as the father of African cinema for nothing.
Aminata Sow Fall's The Beggar's Strike is about a city trying to clean up its homeless/beggar population, who retaliate by going on strike, which causes chaos since giving alms to the needy is a requirement in Islam (and the city's elite were fulfilling their divinely mandated charity by giving to the striking beggars).
Tahar Ben Jelloun's The Sand Child is less about leftist class politics and more a meditation on gender identity and gender roles in Arabic society. It's the story of a father who after having seven straight daughters decides to raise his eighth daughter as a son.
Aime Cesaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land is a book-length poem that's a mediation on blackness and colonialism and arguably the defining work of the Negritude movement.
Neither Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnificent or Maryse Conde's [Crossing the Mangrove] (https://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Mangrove-Maryse-Conde/dp/0385476337/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1501603791&sr=1-3&keywords=maryse+conde) are particularly focused on leftist class politics but they're still fascinating for their explorations of Creole identity. They're both murder mysteries; the Chamoiseau novel is basically a police procedural and the Conde one is a mystery that's slowly unspooled through the eyes of various villagers.
>I didn't know continental vs analytical terms are outdated.
Dated perhaps isn't the right term, but just know that they do have certain limits.
As for post-WWII philosophy, there's a lot, but I'm going to let you know that much of it can't be well-understood without a basic understanding of Heidegger, much of whose thought was pre-WWII. His best known work is Being and Time, but it's one of the most challenging texts in the western canon. For an easier introduction to prep you for it, I'd recommend some of his early lecture material, such as The Hermeneutics of Facticity and The History of the Concept of Time. This could just be me, but I've found his lectures to be generally easier than his primary texts. If you want to trace the development of his thought, much of which was post-WWII, the Basic Writings anthology has a number of essays by him. While nothing really eclipsed Being and Time, much of his later thought is still studied. I'd say the most significant work of his later career was his Contributions to Philosophy, which took the form of briefer aphorisms and anecdotes, more similar to Nietzsche in style, but still grounded in much of his own thought and terminology.
If you want to move away from Heidegger, some of the big texts would be Gadamer's Truth and Method (Gadamer was a student of Heidegger's, so the former's thought is very deeply influenced by the latter), Sartre's two texts Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is a Humanism (note the similarity to Sartre's title with Heidegger's Being and Time, and also note that Heidegger would respond rather critically to Sartre's Existentialism with an essay in the Basic Writings), and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (a key feminist work heavily influenced by Sartre and Heidegger).
Beyond this my knowledge is a bit scattered, as I've only just completed undergrad. I really would recommend David West's text as a decent overview that will guide you in what the key texts are, as well as good secondary sources. I've not brought up Derrida, who was also huge, as well as Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Michel Foucault and Charles Taylor just to name a few. On top of those, there's a ton of pre-WWII stuff that's hugely important for understanding these thinkers, such as the ideas of Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, and the whole field of psychoanalysis (Freud, Jung and Lacan). Then there's postmodernism, postcolonialism, the various strands of feminism, and tons more. The more I type, the more I'm just reminding myself how little I know about this area (even though it's the area I'm most interested in).
Let me know if there's anything more you need to know or if you want to know a decent secondary source.
Note: This comes from my interpretation and quotes from "A Commentary on The Stranger" by Jean-Paul Sartre, which can be found in the book Existentialism is a Humanism also by Jean-Paul Sartre.
> In The Myth of Sisyphus... Camus provided us with a precise commentary on his work: his hero was neither good nor bad, neither moral nor immoral. Such categories do not apply to him. He belongs to a very particular species for which the author reserves the name "absurd."
Sartre goes on to explain that "absurd" as used in Camus' work represents both a factual state and the lucid awareness that some people acquire from that state. By this reading, Meursault is Camus' attempt to throw us headfirst into the feeling of the "absurd".
>"For the absurd man, the ideal is the present and the succession of present moments before an ever-conscious spirit." Confronted with this "quantitative ethic," all values collapse. Projected into this world, the absurd man, rebellious and irresponsible, has "nothing to prove."
>And now we fully understand the title of Camus's novel. The stranger he wants to portray is precisely one of those terrible "idiots" who shock a society by not accepting the rules of its game. He lives among strangers, but he is a stranger to them too.
>Meursalt does not seem to be indignant about his death sentence. He was happy, he did as he liked, and his happiness does not seem to have been affected by any inner gnawing so frequently mentioned by Camus in his essay, which stems from the blinding presence of death. His very indifference often seems like indolence, for instance on that Sunday when he stays home out of pure laziness, and admits to having been "a little bored." The character thus remains singularly impenetrable, even from a vantage point of the absurd... He is there before us, he exists, and we can neither understand nor quite judge him. In a word, he is alive, but his fictional density is the only thing that can make him acceptable to us.
I hope some of that helps! I really enjoyed reading Sartre's commentary on The Stranger and I felt as though it made me appreciate Camus's work more than my first reading. Somewhere inside the commentary Sartre explains that Meursalt is much less a key player in the events of the story as an impartial observer and that to truly live the "absurd" is simply to experience it. He likens the events in the book to our looking in on them through a window in which we can see what is happening, but are completely cut off from the context and meaning of such events.
I haven't read The Myth of Sisyphus yet, but Sartre claims that it amounts to Camus's spelling out of his theory of the absurd. The Stranger attempts to expose us to the "feeling" of the absurd, while TMoS attempts to expose us to the "idea" of the absurd in a much more philosophical way. If you're interested in Camus's ideas, I would probably have to second his recommendation.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism
Existentialism is a humanism, by Jean Paul Sartre. Very short, easy to understand, and (speaking personally) quite life-affecting.
"Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards"
—Jean-Paul Sartre
From Existentialism and Humanism (later published in English as Existentialism is a Humanism)
Here are the ones I have and that I recommend:
​
SPANISH
​
The Story of Spanish: https://www.amazon.com/Story-Spanish-Jean-Benoit-Nadeau/dp/1250049040
​
The History of Spanish: A Student's Introduction: https://www.amazon.com/History-Spanish-Students-Introduction/dp/1316507947 (available now from: https://www.bookdepository.com/History-Spanish-Diana-L-Ranson/9781316507940)
​
A History of the Spanish Language through Texts: https://www.amazon.com/History-Spanish-Language-through-Texts/dp/0415707129
​
A Brief History of the Spanish Language: (but it's really not brief) https://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Spanish-Language-Second/dp/022613394X
​
La maravillosa historia del espa?ol https://www.amazon.com/maravillosa-historia-del-espa/dp/8467044276
​
A History of the Spanish Language https://www.amazon.com/History-Spanish-Language-Ralph-Penny/dp/0521011841
​
The Evolution of Spanish https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Spanish-Linguistic-Thomas-Lathrop/dp/1589770145
​
Los 1001 años de la lengua española https://www.amazon.com/lengua-española-ESTUDIOS-LITERARIOS-Spanish/dp/968166678X
​
FRENCH
​
The Story of French: https://www.amazon.com/Story-French-Jean-Benoit-Nadeau/dp/0312341849
​
A History of the French Language https://www.amazon.com/History-French-Language-Peter-Rickard/dp/041510887X
​
French Inside Out: The Worldwide Development of the French Language in the Past, the Present and the Future https://www.amazon.com/French-Inside-Out-Worldwide-Development/dp/0415076706
​
The French Language: present and past https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0729302083
​
Thank you for the recommendation. I also posted this question to /r/askphilosophy and ended up buying the book "Rene Girards Mimetic Theory" by Wolfgang Palavar. Thread and amazon link to the book are below.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/6dk8dy/recommended_rene_girard_readings_on_mimetic_desire/?utm_content=title&utm_medium=user&utm_source=reddit&utm_name=frontpage
https://www.amazon.com/Girards-Mimetic-Studies-Violence-Mimesis/dp/1611860776
Here's a good introduction:
https://www.amazon.com/Girards-Mimetic-Studies-Violence-Mimesis/dp/1611860776
I agree with you on the second point you make 100%; and it is a huge failing of the video. But the rise of the middle class after the renaissance and age of reason is more complicated than black death --> church looses its grip. The BD was huge but there was more too it. Nevertheless religion as the 'key' institute did cede to modern systems of governance which if you look at the last 500 years puts the average westerner in a pretty good spot health / wealth / education wise. The fist quarter of Voltaire's Bastards makes a pretty decent account of it (not a bad book IMhumbleO).
If you are interested in Watts' idea of nothingness you might be interested in the philosophy of Existentialism. If you want this idea put in layman's terms Existentialism is a Humanism is a great place to start. Honestly though, I would steer away from Alan Watts, although he is interesting, after reading a few of his books his philosophy seems rather empty and repetitive... Kierkegaard, Camus, and Sartre are all very interesting reads. Despite our resentful convo you should check them out.
Kierkegaard makes for dense reading, real dense.
Existentialism is a Humanism by Sartre is my go-to recommendation for an entrance into Existentialism. It's actually a lecture, so it reads like an essay; it's short, so it is manageable; and it is significantly less dense than Kierkegaard. "Existence precedes essence". Such a simple and wonderful idea that needn't scare or lead to malaise.
Edit (to include links):
Wall of text version
Affordable paperback version
Your tone betray's a sense of certainty about what you think you know, and that can be a trap friend. Imagine the things you could learn if you gave others the opportunity to say something new and to follow them down path's that you assume to be sloppy or lazy.
I just came across something in one of Barthes' late lectures that you may find surprising.
Maybe he had earned the right to be sloppy and lazy by virtue of his corpus of work, whereas grad students like us are forced to cower at the expectations of academia and disciplinary boundaries lest we try and say something different
http://imgur.com/DcIhsLG