The Beauty that Saves: Essays on Aesthetics and Language in Simone Weil

Forsideomslag
Mercer University Press, 1996 - 229 sider
The Beauty That Saves, a collection of essays by many of the most prominent American and European scholars on Weil, begins with a foreword by well-known writer Vladimir Volkoff who discusses, in a very moving manner, "What Simone Weil Means to Me". An introductory essay by Eric O. Springsted highlights the general character of Weil's thought and introduces the specific problematic of this collection. The first section addresses the subject of Weil on language. A key to understanding Weil's aesthetic is grasping how she understood language and its various usages. From within that understanding is contained a point d'appui of her philosophical thought as a whole. Her universe of meaning, its hierarchies, its subjection to necessity, its mystical intimacies, is not something she simply wrote about, it is contained in the way she wrote. With Weil's language established, the second section deals with Weil's explicit reflections on aesthetics, including essays on her sacramental imagery, morality and literature, music, and her classical reading of tragedy. As these essays point out, her aesthetic demands a moral and religious reading of the universe. The third section presents a number of specific Weilan readings of art, where what has been discussed in previous essays receives concrete application and illustration through essays on Weil and Wallace Stevens, music, and Georges Bernanos.

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Indhold

Introduction
1
SIMONE WEIL ON LANGUAGE
11
Contradiction Mystery and the Use of Words in Simone Weil
13
The Language of the Marketplace and the Language of the Nuptial Chamber The Theological Significance of a Distinction in the Philosophy of Lan...
31
Simone Weil and the Limits of Language
39
The Nature of Narrative in Simone Weils Vision of History The Need for New Historical Roots
55
Trésor eparpillé The Treasure of Scattered Texts in Works by René Char and Simone Weil
69
SIMONE WEIL ON AESTHETIC THEORY
83
Simone Weil and Music
123
WEILIAN INTERPRETATIONS OF ART
149
Simone Weil and Wallace Stevens The Notion of Decreation as Subtext in An Ordinary Evening in New Haven
151
The Character of Don Giovanni in Mozarts Opera
173
The Love of God and Human Suffering Simone Weil and Georges Bernanos
185
Simone Weil and Shakespeares Fools
197
Bibliography
217
Notes on the Contributors
221

Sacramental Tension Divine Transcendence and Finite Images in Simone Weils Literary Imagination
85
Simone Weil on Morality and Literature
99
The Tragic Poetics of Simone Weil
109

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