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13 - Deleuze and literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2012

Daniel W. Smith
Affiliation:
Purdue University, Indiana
Henry Somers-Hall
Affiliation:
Manchester Metropolitan University
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Summary

In Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 Deleuze offered a relatively comprehensive philosophical approach to film. Unfortunately, he produced no comparable work on literature, despite having shown a deep and lasting interest in the art. Besides producing monographs on Marcel Proust (1964; 2nd aug. edn. 1970; 3rd aug. edn. 1976), Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1967), and Franz Kafka (1975), he wrote long essays on Pierre Klossowski (1965), Michel Tournier (1967), Émile Zola (1967), Carmelo Bene (1979), Herman Melville (1989), and Samuel Beckett (1992), and in The Logic of Sense (1969) used Lewis Carroll’s works as a leitmotif throughout the book. Indeed, allusions to writers are so abundant that Dominique Drouet’s index of Deleuze’s literary references runs to 279 entries. In a 1988 interview, Raymond Bellour and François Ewald noted the absence of a literary counterpart to the cinema books, even though literature “is everywhere present in your work, running parallel, almost, to the philosophy,” and asked if literature were too close to philosophy for him to undertake such a work. Deleuze answered that literature posed no special difficulty for him, and that in fact he had “dreamed about bringing together a series of studies under the general title ‘Essays Critical and Clinical,’ [but] it’s just that I haven’t had the chance to do the book I’d like to have done about literature” (N 142–43). Deleuze’s last book, of course, bore the title Essays Critical and Clinical (1993), but its heterogeneous studies of writers and philosophers hardly lays out a general and detailed philosophy of literature.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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