Realism and Its Vicissitudes

Robert Harvey is Distinguished Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook where he chairs the Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory. He has written extensively on Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marguerite Duras, Marcel Duchamp, and Michel Deguy and has translated Lyotard, Deguy, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Paul Ricœur. His most recent books are Witnessness: Beckett, Levi, Dante and the Foundations of Ethics, Les Écrits de Marguerite Duras, and De l’exception à la règle. Harvey is a major co-editor of the prestigious Pléiade edition of the complete works of Marguerite Duras. He served as Program Director at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris (2001–2007). Patrice Nganang, writer and scholar, is Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Theory at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Nganang has published collections of poetry: elobi and L’apologie du vandale; novels: La Saison des prunes, Temps de chien, and La Joie de vivre, which constitute a cycle depicting city life, Mont plaisant and La Saison des prunes, a cycle about wars from a Cameroonian point of view; and short novellas: L’Invention du beau regard and La Chanson du joggeur. His publications also include three collections of essays: La Principe dissident, Manifeste d’une nouvelle littérature africaine: Pour une écriture preemptive and Contre Biya: Procès d’un tyran. In addition, his columns appear regularly in Cameroonian and international newspapers such as Jeune Afrique and Le Monde. His novel Mont plaisant is scheduled to appear in English.

Contents: John Krapp: The Present King of France is Bald – David Anshen: Sandy Petrey’s Unacknowledged Contribution to Historical Materialism – Thoma J. J. Altizer: Revolution and God – Kathryn M. Grossman: Victor Hugo as Realist in Notre-Dame de Paris – Armine Kotin Mortimer: Legality, Narrative Order, and Vagabondage in Balzac’s Ferragus – Dick Howard: André Gorz and the Philosophical Foundation of the Political – E. Ann Kaplan: Sontag Between America and Europe – Herman Lebovics: Ministering to the Culture – Claire Burrows: Desperate Artist – Lori Repetti: A Note on English Loan Words in American Italian and Standard Italian.