Jean Paulhan – författare

Paulhan's seminal work in English for the first time

Jean Paulhan was a legendary editorial figure of twentieth-century French literature, assisting and publishing many of the most important writers of his lifetime. He was also the author of several volumes of fiction and numerous essays dealing with literature, art, rhetoric, and language. Yet he published his own work in a manner that deliberately kept it inconspicuous, or as Maurice Blanchot put it, "in the margins." A critics' critic, he gave his texts the same scrupulous attention he gave to others, and was recognized as a discreet master. But when he was sufficiently upset or angry, as he was when French politics endangered the intellectual freedom of French writers and writing, he published ferociously. This volume is the first English translation of these major essays, presenting in one book the development of his thinking on his most studied subject: how language works, or, to echo Blanchot again, how literature is possible. Much of contemporary literary theory finds its modern antecedents in Paulhan's essays. He reflected on large questions such as the philosophy and psychology of literature, while at the same time showing a concern for detail and aesthetic accomplishment. He constantly emphasized the act of reading as an activity and literature as the engagement and provocation of such activity. Beloved by writers because he took the problems of writing with the utmost seriousness, his own personal style was marked by self-effacement and irony.

Jean Paulhan’s Lettre aux directeurs de la Résistance was an important and contentious statement about the influence of communism in intellectual and literary circles. On publication in 1952, the pamphlet revived debates over collaboration with the Nazi authorities that had dominated French society since the Liberation, and that still have important echoes today.In this new edition, John Flower provides a full contextualising introduction. He also examines Paulhan’s evolution during the period and assesses his postion alongside that of other key figures: in particular Mauriac and Camus. The volume makes an important contribution to our understanding of this turbulent period and provides a documentary history of the post-war political and literary debates in Paris.

Jean Paulhan (1884–1964) stand als Chefredakteur der Nouvelle Revue Française fünfzig Jahre lang im Mittelpunkt des literarischen und intellektuellen Lebens in Frankreich. Sein eigenes literarisches und essayistisches Werk aber, zu dem die hier erstmals auf Deutsch vorliegenden ethnographischen Texte zählen, gilt es noch zu entdecken. Paulhans Untersuchungen madagassischer Sprichwörter (ohabolana) und Gedichte (hain-teny) inspirierten nicht nur die französischen Surrealisten und das Collège de Sociologie. Sie bilden auch die wichtigste Quelle der literaturtheoretischen Reflexionen, die 1936 in Paulhans Hauptwerk Die Blumen von Tarbes mündeten. Nachdem Paulhan von 1908 bis 1910 als Lehrer in der damaligen französischen Kolonie Madagaskar gelebt hatte, kam er über dreißig Jahre hinweg in immer neuen Essays und Vorträgen auf seine Erfahrungen mit der Sprache und Kultur dieses Landes zurück. Die vorliegende Sammlung seiner ethnographischen Abhandlungen erlaubt die andauernde Faszination der oralen Dichtung Madagaskars und ihre Bedeutung für Paulhans Wiederentdeckung der Rhetorik nachzuvollziehen. Dabei sind seine Essays nicht allein als Zeugnisse seiner kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit den ethnozentristischen Theorien der Ethnologie seiner Zeit von andauerndem Interesse. Als geradezu frappierend aktuell erweist sich die Verwobenheit narrativer und reflexiver Elemente in Paulhans Auseinandersetzung mit der epistemologischen Problematik eines Zugangs zu fremdkulturellen Sprach- und Denkformen.