Les Défis de l'æuvre

About the book

With this book on the literary work, which contains contributions from an international conference held at the University of Aarhus, weight is laid on the question of the aesthetic and the poetologic. With focus on the "specific" in literary forms, the work can be seen as a challenge which concerns not only theory-formation but also reading and interpretation. The contents range from historic-systematic considerations over the concept of the work's theoretic legitimacy, to concrete readings of motives in precise works.

The two main sections ("The Paradigm of the Work" and "Revisions and Interpretations") present the work concept as a boundary-concept. On the one hand it is made the object of theoretic and meta-theoretic considerations which, inter alia, concerns "the document and the work", "the poetic genre", or a concept such as "work-effect". On the other hand, the work through exemplary readings is made into an object for reflection over the text theory's interface to philosophy and psychology, together with modern problematics like the subject (biography and text), the picture and text (and the reverse), and the psychological-spiritual in the literary-phenomenological perspective. Through the original contributions in this publication, one is invited to an elucidation of the status of literature and the significance of literature studies today.