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Michel Leiris
This is the first full-length study in English of Michel Leiris's work. Frequently cited as a central figure in contemporary French culture, Seán Hand explores Leiris's participation in some of the most striking intellectual and artistic movements of the twentieth century; surrealism, ethnography and existentialism. Hand locates his writing in these different contexts in relation to the major artistic, political and philosophical concepts of the period. He goes on to argue that Leiris's multi-volume autobiography stands as the model form of self-enquiry in the twentieth century.
Alter Ego
"Alter Ego is the first monograph in English on the critical writings of Michel Leiris (1901-90). A groundbreaking autobiographer and pioneering ethnographer, Leiris also produced important criticism on art, opera, jazz and literature, which acts as a key commentary on twentieth-century intellectual movements and demonstrates vividly the constant refashioning and reformulation of contemporary ideas and aesthetics. Hand defines and situates Leiris's core themes, analyses his criticism in each of the art areas examined, and delineates the model that emerges of a contrapuntal and heterogeneous critical identity."
Manhood
"Not only one of the frankest of autobiographies, but also a brilliantly written book, Leiris' Manhood mingles memories, philosophic reflections, sexual revelation, meditations on bullfighting, and the life-long progress of self-discovery."—Washington Post Book World "Leiris writes to appall, and thereby to receive from his readers the gift of a strong emotion—the emotion needed to defend himself against the indignation and disgust he expects to arouse in his readers."—Susan Sontag, New York Review of Books
The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat
Short fragments and essays that explore how a seemingly irrelevant aesthetic detail may cause the eruption of sublimity within the mundane. That the nude painted by Manet (in a painting so conceptually new that it created a scandal in its day) achieves so much truth through such a minor detail, that ribbon that modernizes Olympia and, even more than a beauty mark or a patch of freckles would, renders her more precise and more immediately visible, making her a woman with ties to a particular milieu and era: that is what lends itself to reflection, if not divagation! —from The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat In The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat, Michel Leiris investigates what Lydia Davis has called...
Broken Branches
"Michel Leiris has had a substantial influence on French culture for many years--as a poet and a member of the surrealists, as an art critic, and as an anthropologist. His great contributions to modern letter are his works of confessional autobiography, the best known of which, MANHOOD (North Point, 1984), has been described by the eminent poet and translator Richard Howard as "one of the central texts of what we call modernity." In Brisées Leiris has gathered together short nonfiction pieces written throughout his career. The wide range of topics Leiris addresses in these fifty-one essays gives testimony to the vast arena of his curiosity. Here are essays on Joan Miró, Arnold Schoenberg, the Fox Movietone Follies, Jean Arp, ethnography, Fred Astaire, alchemy, Erik Satie's humor, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Eluard, Claude Lévi-Strauss, "Mouth Water," Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, "Man and His Insides," opera, Georges Bataille, and others." -- Publisher's description
Phantom Africa
One of the towering classics of twentieth-century French literature, Phantom Africa is a singular and ultimately unclassifiable work: a book composed of one man's compulsive and constantly mutating daily travel journal--by turns melodramatic, self-deprecating, ecstatic and morose--as well as an exhaustively detailed account of the first French state-sponsored anthropological expedition to visit sub-Saharan Africa. In 1930, Michel Leiris was an aspiring poet drifting away from the orbit of the Surrealist movement in Paris when the anthropologist Marcel Griaule invited him to serve as the 'secretary-archivist' for the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, a major collecting and ethnographic journey that tra...
Francis Bacon
The work of Francis Bacon (1909-1992) has a strength and vitality that has seen him rightfully hailed as one of the greatest twentieth-century artists. Francis Bacon is a superbly illustrated concise monograph that provides readers with an informative yet in-depth survey of the artist¿s entire career ¿ from his earliest forays into the art world, to his death in Madrid in 1992.
Correspondence
In the autumn of 1924, just before André Breton published the Manifeste du surréalisme, two young men met in Paris for the first time. Georges Bataille, 27, starting work at the Bibliothèque Nationa≤ Michel Leiris, 23, beginning his studies in ethnology. Within a few months they were both members of the Surrealist group, although their adherence to Surrealism (unlike their affinities with it) would not last long: in 1930 they were among the signatories of 'Un cadavre,' the famous tract against Breton, the 'Machiavelli of Montmartre,' as Leiris put it. But their friendship would endure for more than 30 years, and their correspondence, assembled here for the first time in English, would continue until the death of Bataille in 1962. Including a number of short essays by each of them on aspects of the other's work, and excerpts on Bataille from Leiris' diaries, this collection of their correspondence throws new light on two of Surrealism's most radical dissidents.
Nights as Day, Days as Night
Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Autobiography. Translated from the French by Richard Sieburth, with a foreword by Maurice Blanchot. Hailed as an important literary document and contemporary pleasure by Lydia Davis, NIGHTS AS DAY, DAYS AS NIGHT is a chronicle of Michel Leiris's dreams. But it is also an exceptional autobiography, a distorted vision of twentieth-century France, a surrealist collage, a collection of prose poems. Leiris, author of the seminal autobiography Manhood, here disrupts the line between being asleep and awake, between being and non-being. He captures the profound strangeness of the dreamer's identity: that anonymous creature who stirs awake at night to experience a warped ...
Scraps
The second volume of Michel Leiris’s hugely influential four-volume autobiographical essay, available to English-language readers in a brilliant and sensitive translation by Lydia Davis One of the most versatile and beloved French intellectuals of the twentieth century, Michel Leiris reconceives the autobiography as a literary experiment that sheds light on the mechanisms of memory and on the way the unconnected events of a life become connected through invented narrative. In this volume, the second in his four-volume epic autobiographical enterprise, Leiris merges quotidian events with profound philosophical self-exploration. He also wrangles with the disillusionment that accompanies his own self-reflection. In the midst of struggling with his own motives for writing an autobiographical essay, he comes to the revelation that life, after all, has aspects worth remembering even if moments of beauty are bookended by misery. Yet what can be said of human life, of his own life, when his memory is unreliable, his eyesight is failing, and his mood is despairing?
