Antoine J. Polgar | Southern New Hampshire University (original) (raw)

Papers by Antoine J. Polgar

In his article Blanchot\u27s Impossible Kafka Antoine J. Polgar challenges Maurice Blanchot\u27s ... more In his article Blanchot\u27s Impossible Kafka Antoine J. Polgar challenges Maurice Blanchot\u27s theory of the impossibility and futility of writing as applied to Kafka\u27s struggles with the demands of writing and life. Polgar questions Blanchot\u27s claims on the basis of close readings of the texts of Kafka\u27s texts and explores traces of correspondence between the life and the texts yet unmentioned in Kafka scholarship. Referring to Blanchot\u27s focus on survival as a metaphor for writing in a meta-commentary on the writer\u27s facticity and the contingency to which literary creation is consigned, Polgar comments on the intense bio-critical interest — which the scholar is cautioned against and often ignores — in Kafka\u27s lived experience. According to Polgar, if the disaster is the truth outside literature, Blanchot\u27s theory that the impossibility of writing defines a philosophy of writing is a thought lacking in equivalence

The Path of Least Time & Other Stories

This book features nine short stories of literary fiction in a quirky mix of genres that camber a... more This book features nine short stories of literary fiction in a quirky mix of genres that camber and swerve between introspective compositions containing social commentary, fantasy, dreams, confessional reflections of imaginary autobiographies, and elements of " sale " (dirty) realism. The stories contrast outward experience and the interior self, the mythical and the elegiac, in a time continuum that encompasses future anachronisms with real endnotes that are part of the overarching fictional narrative.

ORDER NOW FROM: https://www.biblio.com/

Readers are perhaps familiar with the juxtaposition of epigraphs from Kafka's diary and the quote from a 1931 letter from Walter Benjamin to Gershom Scholem selected by Hannah Arendt in her essay on Walter Benjamin. Kafka refers to anyone who cannot cope with life while still alive as "being dead in one's own lifetime and the real survivor." That line is followed by Benjamin's reference to being like one " who keeps afloat on a shipwreck by climbing to the top of a mast to give a signal leading to his rescue…" These references might not explain much. But these stories may have been once dead in their own lifetime too and they still survived shipwreck on the horizons of consciousness, remembering and forgetting. Even as the stories keep afloat, the past rules the present as an eternal spatio-temporal memorial to the past. Throughout these nine stories, the sadness of loss forages between desire, guilt, remembering, secrecy, forgetting, mourning, horror and invention combining imaginary surrenders, survivals and rescues. The stories are set mostly in New York City and New York State over nearly a century that begins in the 1930s and extends past the turn-of-the twentieth century millennium into a dystopic future.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2014

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Jan 1, 2001

This thesis constitutes a critique of postcolonial theory on the grounds that postcolonial theory... more This thesis constitutes a critique of postcolonial theory on the grounds that postcolonial theory is the flawed product of a contradictory philosophical undoing of history.

Books by Antoine J. Polgar

Poetry by French-born American poet - an anachronistic narrative of transatlantic memoir, nostalg... more Poetry by French-born American poet - an anachronistic narrative of transatlantic memoir, nostalgia and a Euro-American sensibility forged out of a convergence of poetic genres and forms; the epic of contemporaneity shaped by the historical imagination, the lyric of experience and elegiac allusion - with the classical rhetoric instruments of apostrophe, imprecation and synecdoche.

In his article Blanchot\u27s Impossible Kafka Antoine J. Polgar challenges Maurice Blanchot\u27s ... more In his article Blanchot\u27s Impossible Kafka Antoine J. Polgar challenges Maurice Blanchot\u27s theory of the impossibility and futility of writing as applied to Kafka\u27s struggles with the demands of writing and life. Polgar questions Blanchot\u27s claims on the basis of close readings of the texts of Kafka\u27s texts and explores traces of correspondence between the life and the texts yet unmentioned in Kafka scholarship. Referring to Blanchot\u27s focus on survival as a metaphor for writing in a meta-commentary on the writer\u27s facticity and the contingency to which literary creation is consigned, Polgar comments on the intense bio-critical interest — which the scholar is cautioned against and often ignores — in Kafka\u27s lived experience. According to Polgar, if the disaster is the truth outside literature, Blanchot\u27s theory that the impossibility of writing defines a philosophy of writing is a thought lacking in equivalence

The Path of Least Time & Other Stories

This book features nine short stories of literary fiction in a quirky mix of genres that camber a... more This book features nine short stories of literary fiction in a quirky mix of genres that camber and swerve between introspective compositions containing social commentary, fantasy, dreams, confessional reflections of imaginary autobiographies, and elements of " sale " (dirty) realism. The stories contrast outward experience and the interior self, the mythical and the elegiac, in a time continuum that encompasses future anachronisms with real endnotes that are part of the overarching fictional narrative.

ORDER NOW FROM: https://www.biblio.com/

Readers are perhaps familiar with the juxtaposition of epigraphs from Kafka's diary and the quote from a 1931 letter from Walter Benjamin to Gershom Scholem selected by Hannah Arendt in her essay on Walter Benjamin. Kafka refers to anyone who cannot cope with life while still alive as "being dead in one's own lifetime and the real survivor." That line is followed by Benjamin's reference to being like one " who keeps afloat on a shipwreck by climbing to the top of a mast to give a signal leading to his rescue…" These references might not explain much. But these stories may have been once dead in their own lifetime too and they still survived shipwreck on the horizons of consciousness, remembering and forgetting. Even as the stories keep afloat, the past rules the present as an eternal spatio-temporal memorial to the past. Throughout these nine stories, the sadness of loss forages between desire, guilt, remembering, secrecy, forgetting, mourning, horror and invention combining imaginary surrenders, survivals and rescues. The stories are set mostly in New York City and New York State over nearly a century that begins in the 1930s and extends past the turn-of-the twentieth century millennium into a dystopic future.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2014

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Jan 1, 2001

This thesis constitutes a critique of postcolonial theory on the grounds that postcolonial theory... more This thesis constitutes a critique of postcolonial theory on the grounds that postcolonial theory is the flawed product of a contradictory philosophical undoing of history.

Poetry by French-born American poet - an anachronistic narrative of transatlantic memoir, nostalg... more Poetry by French-born American poet - an anachronistic narrative of transatlantic memoir, nostalgia and a Euro-American sensibility forged out of a convergence of poetic genres and forms; the epic of contemporaneity shaped by the historical imagination, the lyric of experience and elegiac allusion - with the classical rhetoric instruments of apostrophe, imprecation and synecdoche.