Force : Weil as source for Adrienne Rich's expanding solidarities -- Attention : Annie Dillard waits for God with Weil -- Hunger : Weil's fraught sacrifice in Mary Gordon's fiction -- (De)creation : Simone Weil among the poets.
Summary:
"The French philosopher-mystic-activist Simone Weil (1909-1943) has provoked both passionate admiration and scornful dismissal since her early death and the posthumous publication of her writings. She has also influenced an extraordinary range of literature focused not only on her ideas but also on her person, a fact that has received only very limited scholarly attention. The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil reads Weil's presence in literary prose and poetry, focusing on writers who have devoted decades of attention to Weil, as in the cases of Adrienne Rich, Annie Dillard, and Mary Gordon, and who have written full poetic sequences or books, such as Maggie Helwig, Stephanie Strickland, Kate Daniels, Sarah Klassen, Anne Carson, and Lorri Neilsen Glenn. Given the challenges of Weil's attraction to cruciform Christianity in a secular age, not to mention her theorized and embodied ethic of self-diminishment, the book seeks to understand Weil's enormous appeal to writers-and especially the women who have been her most devoted interlocutors. Ultimately, it argues that writing to Weil, of Weil, and in the tradition of Weil allows these writers to grapple with the linked harms and possibilities of religious belief, self-giving attention, and the kind of moral seriousness required by the ethical and political crises of late modernity, even against the backdrop of a feminist rejection of self-sacrifice. What is risky in Weil is precisely what is worthwhile, the very challenge that compels so many writers to creatively attend to her"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.