The Stelliferous Fold

This book seeks to develop a novel approach to literature beyond the conventional divide between realism/formalism and history/aestheticism. It accomplishes this not only through a radical reassessment of the specificity of literature in distinction from one of its others?namely philosophy?but above all by taking critical issue with the venerable concept of the “text” and its association with the artisanal techniques of weaving and interlacing. This conception of the text as an artisanal fabric is the author holds the unreflected presupposition of both realist or historicist and reflective or “deconstructive” criticism.Gasché argues that “the scenes of production” within literary works created by their authors yet independent of those authors’ intentions stage a work’s own production in virtual fashion and thus accomplish for those works a certain ideal ontological status that allows for both historical endurance and creative interpretation.In Gasché’s construction of these scenes in which literary works render visible within their own fabric the invisible conditions of their autonomous existence certain images prevail: the fold the star the veil. By showing that these literary images are not simply the opposites of concepts he not only puts into question the common opposition between literature and philosophy but shows that literary works perform a way of “argumentation” that in spite of all its difference from philosophical conceptuality is on a par with it.The argument progresses through close readings of literary works by Lautréamont Nerval de l’Isle Adam Huysman Flaubert Artaud Blanchot Defoe and Melville.