Peter Watson

Bruce W. Watson

Janell Watson

War On The Mind

This book addresses the issues of collecting, consuming, classifying and describing the curiosities, antiques and objets d'art that proliferated in French literary texts during the last decades of the nineteenth century. After Balzac made such issues significant in canonical literature, the Goncourt brothers, Huysmans, Mallarmé and Maupassant celebrated their golden age. Flaubert and Zola scorned them. Rachilde and Lorrain perverted them. Proust commemorated their last moments of glory. Focusing on the bibelot (the modern French term for knick-knack, curiosity or other collectible), Janell Watson shows how the sudden prominence given to curiosities and collecting in nineteenth-century literature signals a massive change in attitudes to the world of goods, which in turn restructured the literary text according to the practical logic of daily life, calling into question established scholarly notions of order. Her study makes an important contribution to the literary history of material culture.

The Collection and Consumption of Curiosities

Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust

Félix Guattari was a French political militant, practicing psychoanalyst and international public intellectual. He is best known for his work with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze on the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia, one of the most influential works of post-structuralism. From the mid-1950s onward, Guattari exerted a profound yet often behind-the-scenes influence on institutional psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, radical politics and philosophy. Guattari's Diagrammtic Thought examines the writings that Guattari authored on his own, both before and during his collaboration with Deleuze, providing a startlingly fresh perspective on intellectual and political trends in France and beyond during the second half of the twentieth century. Janell Watson acknowledges the historical and biographical aspect of Guattari's writing and explores the relevance of his theoretical ideas to topics as diverse as the May 1968 student movement, Lacanian psychoanalysis, neo-liberalism, ethnic identity, microbiology, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, ecology, the mass media, and the subjective dimensions of information technology. The book demonstrates that Guattari's unique thought process yields a markedly Guattarian version of many seemingly familiar Deleuzean notions.

Janell Watson

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