Investigations Into the Literary Use of Language
Product details
- ISBN 9780810149816
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 May 2026
- Publisher: Northwestern University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A closely annotated translation of Merleau-Ponty's lecture notes on literary language
Investigations into the Literary Use of Language presents an annotated translation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's lecture notes from one of the two courses that he gave during his inaugural year teaching at the Collège de France. In his notes from the concurrent course, The Sensible World and the World of Expression, Merleau-Ponty contends that our embodied perceptual engagement with the sensible world already involves the same spontaneity that underlies cultural expression. Approaching it from the other side, he revisits here the analysis of language that he had undertaken in the unfinished manuscript The Prose of the World.
Focusing on the work of Paul Valéry (1871–1945) and Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle, 1783–1842), Merleau-Ponty explores how the spontaneity of literary language sheds light on the relation between lived experience and language more broadly, and how cultural expression remains grounded in embodied perceptual experience in a way that is homologous yet irreducible to it. Specifically, Merleau-Ponty shows how Stendhal had already overcome Valéry's skepticism concerning literary sincerity by effectively incorporating what the latter called the linguistic "implex"—in effect, language as institution—and thus achieving a "total style" of improvisational spontaneity in which the "conquering function" characteristic of the literary use of language gives shape to an immanent model of political engagement.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) is the author of Adventures of the Dialectic, Child Psychology and Pedagogy, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays, Institution and Passivity, Nature, The Primacy of Perception, The Prose of the World, Sense and Non Sense, The Sensible World and the World of Expression, Signs, and The Visible and the Invisible, all published by Northwestern University Press.
Bryan Smyth is an instructional assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Mississippi. He is the translator of Merleau-Ponty's The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953 (Northwestern University Press).
