The Fabulous Imagination On Montaignes Essays: On Montaigne's Essays

In this exhilarating and learned book on Montaigne’s essays, Lawrence D. Kritzman contemporizes the great writer. Reading him from today’s deconstructive America, Kritzman discovers Montaigne always already deep into a dialogue with Jacques Derrida and psychoanalysis. One cannot but admire this fabulous act of translation.–Hélène Cixous, author of White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text, and Politics

Although other books will help modern readers understand Montaigne’s place in the intellectual context of the sixteenth century, Kritzman’s study achieves something rare in showing how Montaigne’s imagination allowed him to confront the reality of his own everyday life. In this way, the Fabulous Imagination proves itself a historical text, but one that filters historical consciousness through a modern and personal prism. A unique mix of the personal, the historical, and the theoretical, the Fabulous Imagination brings Montaigne’s Essays into focus as only a highly sensitive author with an extensive knowledge of both history and theory can.–Michael Randall “Substance “

Essential reading for any student or scholar of Montaigne’s essays. Lawrence D. Kritzman… consistently balances a profound understanding of Montaigne’s essays with a broad and diverse knowledge of postmodern theory, in the process offering illuminating readings of these texts.–Kathleen Long “The Comparatist “

Kritzman’s powerful insights lead us to understand the Essais in a new light, –Elisabeth Hodges “Sixteenth Century Journal “

Lawrence D. Kritzman is centered on the way Montaigne’s essays are self-contained expositions of ambivalence and unresolved tension about the difficulties of living, negotiating, and being in the world. He brings us back to archaic but vital issues that haunt us: to monsters and nightmares; to fear of impotence; to thoughts about the end of filial lines; to the ways that writing exhumes and thus copes with traumatic memories; to mimicry not as a way of representing the world but as a tactic of diverting, deflecting, and ultimately assuaging its violence. A strong and enduring contribution not only to early modern study but also to the importance of theory insofar as it can be displaced into and out of the works of canonical authors.–Tom Conley, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University

The book offers a summary of the work of a major scholar of French Renaissance studies, and hence a showcase of the reading practices that marked the era in which this work first became prominent.–Hassan Melehy “H-France “

Throughout his career, Lawrence D. Kritzman has demonstrated an intimate knowledge of Montaigne’s essays and an engagement with French philosophy and critical theory. The Fabulous Imagination sheds precious new light on one of the founders of modern individualism and on his crucial quest for self-knowledge.–Jean Starobinski, professor emeritus of French literature, University of Geneva