Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction

This is a guide to the life and work of the French intellectual Georges Bataille, best known as the author of the celebrated erotic novel, The Story of the Eye. Benjamin Noys introduces Bataille as a writer out of step with the dominant intellectual trends of his day - surrealism and existentialism - and shows that it was his very marginality that accounted in large part for his subsequent importance for the post-structuralists and the counterculture, in Europe and in the United States. Treating Bataille's work as a whole rather than focusing, as other studies have done, on aspects of his work (i.e. as social theory or philosophy), Noys' study is intended to be sensitive to the needs of students new to Bataille's work while at the same time drawing on the latest research on Bataille to offer new interpretations of Bataille's oeuvre for more experienced readers. This is the first clear, introductory reading of Bataille in English - challenging current reductive readings, and stressing the range of disciplines affected by Bataille's work, at a time when interest in Bataille is growing.

Author: Benjamin Noys
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
Published: 05/20/2000
Pages: 176
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.48h x 5.38w x 0.46d
ISBN: 9780745315874

About the Author
Stephen Nugent is the head of the Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, a song writer (with Ian Dury) and the author (with Humphrey Ocean) of Big Mouth: The Amazon Speaks (Fourth Estate, 1990). Cris Shore is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Auckland (New Zealand). His most recent publications are: Up Close and Personal: On Peripheral Perspectives and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge', Oxford/New York: Berghahn (co-edited with Susanna Trnka, 2013) and 'The Sage Handbook of Social Anthropology'.

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