This chapter engages various philosophical attempts to define and delimit the essay, and to use the form to do a kind of philosophy that became increasingly urgent in the shadow of twentieth-century atrocities. The author considers theories of the essay by Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Walter Pater, and others.

In 1980, Paul Zumthor published Parler du moyen age, an elegant little book on the state of the discipline and the task of the medievalist, tracing a history of medieval studies from its pre-war romanticism and positivism up to Zumthor’s own view from the horizon of the late 1970s. Through this retrospective, Zumthor in part recounts the transformation of the field by medievalists like Auerbach, Curtius, and Spitzer, but also positions himself as a kind of bridge between that generation of medievalists whose most influential works came out in the years immediately following WWII and the work of medievalists today, with the rise of post-structuralism, for instance, breaking in between. One of the central concerns of the book is precisely this movement between eras, not only between postwar medievalism and its romantic heritage, but also between the present moment of a reader and the objects of the past being read. Such concerns with interpretation across historical distance have a long and crucial history in the field of hermeneutics, which reached its peak between the 1960s and 1980s. Following Zumthor’s lead, therefore, this chapter will look backwards, performing a genealogy of philosophical and literary hermeneutics that traces Zumthor’s engagement with this tradition – particularly his engagement with Hans Robert Jauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and his friend Roland Barthes – and attends to the place of the medieval in it.

In elections the fiction of popular sovereignty makes its strongest approach to reality, as actual people ostensibly go about selecting from among themselves the few to whose government they consent. In many elections the ostensible comes close to the actual, the fiction momentarily approaches the fact, and our belief in the sovereignty of the people – or our willingness to suspend disbelief – is heightened. But not always.

It is striking how many of Shakespeare’s erotic plays have war either as their setting or are born out of a recent state of violent conflict. Troilus and Cressida and Antony and Cleopatra fall most clearly into the former camp, but think also of comedies like Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where eros emerges from a newly forged peace only to constitute a new battleground of its own. This chapter probes the conjunction of war and eros that appears in almost half of Shakespeare’s plays, first through a broad survey of his corpus and then through studies of The Two Noble Kinsmen, Troilus and Cressida, and Romeo and Juliet. It argues that, far from merely contingent, theatrical conjunctions, Shakespeare provides us a deep conceptual study of the connection between eros and violence, both the potential violence of sexuality and the unsettling underlying sexuality of war.

Since the 1970s, autofiction has come to occupy a place somewhere between the novel and autobiography, disturbing the boundaries of both these forms. Given the proliferation of concepts of autofiction, this chapter does not offer a formal definition, but rather a summary of the development of its forms, the intellectual and social conditions that accompanied this development, and its effects in redrawing the literary landscape. Two broad generations of autofictional writers can be observed: the earlier generation participated in an ‘impersonal’ form of writing in the 1950–60s, then a ‘return of the subject’ in the 1970s, including Roland Barthes’s exploration of more subjective writing, Serge Doubrovsky’s invention of the term ‘autofiction’ in 1977, and similar experiments from nouveaux romanciers such as Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The later generation were less marked by the theoretical concerns of their predecessors, and more immersed in the media. Hervé Guibert’s unclassifiable, hybrid works heralded this new generation, and the genre came to greater prominence still with Christine Angot’s work in the 1990s. The dispute between Marie Darrieussecq and Camille Laurens in 2007 illuminates how autofiction had altered the literary landscape, and Chloe Delaume’s work exemplifies some of the latest directions in autofiction.

The introduction examines the pre-history of the elegiac ideal of a life of love. Although Latin love elegy and tender depictions of lovers in Roman wall painting may be described as Augustan phenomena, their roots lay in the ethical and aesthetic transformations that marked the Republican era. From the construction of luxury villas along the Italian coast to the emergence of a more personal style of poetry, we see in this period a new valuation of private life and a growing concern with individual experience among Rome’s aristocracy. Catullus’ poems to Lesbia represent the apogee of this turn toward the intimate and the private. In his verses we see for the first time the fusion of domus (home) and amor (erotic passion) – concepts long seen as mutually exclusive. Catullus’ domestication of erotic passion thus prefigures the elegists’ rejection of Augustan morality and their own construction of an alternative worldview. The poets’ witty appropriation of familial and marital terms also points to the codification of amatory experience in Roman literature and, later, in art. In both images and texts, erotic tenderness manifests itself through a series of metonymies that render love an experience that can be recognized, learned, remembered, and recounted.

Much of the difficulty encountered by Mahler’s compositions during his lifetime can be attributed to their referential qualities: references, allusions, quotations, or borrowings from the widest varieties of music, from popular (“lowbrow”) military marches or ländlers to cultivated (“highbrow”) compositions such as Brahms’s, Tchaikovsky’s, or Wagner’s. That this propensity embodied modernist impulses has become increasingly clear in the intervening century, as the problematized nature of originality across the various arts ca. 1900 has received critical attention. A closer look at the history and evolving meaning of the term “intertextuality” here advances that process, by highlighting the differences between older formalist interpretive traditions and “translinguistic” practices, which recognize that (in the words of Julia Kristeva) “any text constitutes itself as a mosaic of quotations, any text is an absorption and transformation of another text.” Paradoxically, tactics for discovering new and relevant intertexts illuminate constructions of meaning that are unique to Mahler’s works.

Chapter 4 studies what have come to be known as Duras’s “erotic texts:” L’Homme assis dans le couloir (1980) and La Maladie de la mort (1982). In these brief but provocative works, Duras combines the lurid sensationalism of the tabloids with the transgressive philosophy and literature of writers such as Sade or Bataille. After a close reading of the intricate interplay between gender, violence, and erotics, this chapter argues that Duras takes advantage of these audacious texts as springboards to expose her own personal sexual scandals in the media and to make provocative public remarks about sexuality more broadly. She even goes so far as to deride homosexuality as a diminished form of desire as she attacks Roland Barthes, among others, in a series of unsettling homophobic remarks in the media.

This chapter begins by describing some of the main lines of influence on Coetzee, including major literary figures, philosophical and theological traditions, and a range of South African writers and thinkers. It distinguishes the psychoanalytic and philosophical registers in which the concept of intertextuality has been discussed by such figures as Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, as well as (more implicitly) by writers including Fyodor Dostoevsky and Samuel Beckett. Most broadly, it develops an argument that Coetzee was not simply influenced by this way of thinking about the nature and value of literature. Instead, his fiction can be understood as a complex engagement with both the imaginative power and the moral problems that it generates.

This chapter introduces the reader to literary representations of food as well as the literary facets of culinary texts ranging from early modern receipt books and nineteenth-century cookbooks to contemporary culinary memoirs and food blogs. It highlights the complexities of food culture and foregrounds the role that food has played in the formation of racial identities, gendered bodies, national tastes, cultural memory, and social capital. Tracing the rich range of historical and theoretical approaches to literary food studies that have emerged over the past two decades, it offers an overview of how food and its literature came to be taken seriously by literary scholars. Finally, this section establishes the parameters of the Companion, and provides a chapter-by-chapter introduction to its contents.