Fifty years after its publication in English, René Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1965) has never ceased to fascinate, challenge, inspire, and sometimes irritate, literary scholars. It has become one of the great classics of literary criticism, and the notion of triangular desire is now part of the theoretical parlance among critics and students. It also represents the genetic starting point for what has become one of the most encompassing, challenging, and far-reaching theories conceived in the humanities in the last century: mimetic theory. This book provides a forum for new generations of scholars and critics to reassess, challenge, and expand the theoretical and hermeneutical reach of key issues brought forward by Girard’s book, including literary knowledge, realism and representation, imitation and the anxiety of influence, metaphysical desire, deviated transcendence, literature and religious experience, individualism and modernity, and death and resurrection. It also provides a more extensive and detailed historical understanding of the representation of desire, imitation, and rivalry within European and world literature, from Dante to Proust and from Dickens to Jonathan Littell.
Title PageCopyright PageContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart One. Theoretical ConsiderationsJealousy and Novelistic Knowledge - Maria DiBattistaDesiring Proust: Girard against Deleuze - Alessia RicciardiWithin and Beyond Mimetic Desire - Luca Di BlasiOn Girard’s Biblical Realism - Karen S. FeldmanCreative Renunciation: The Spiritual Heart of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel - Wolfgang PalaverPart Two. Mimetic Hermeneutics in HistoryThe Desire to Be You: The Discourse of Praise for the Roman Emperor - Marco FormisanoRené Girard and (Medieval) Sanctity: A Reappraisal - Bill BurgwinkleDubbiosi Disiri: Mimetic Processes in Dante’s Comedy - Manuele Gragnolati and Heather WebbFor a Comparative Topography of Desire: Mimetic Theory and the World Map - Rosa MucignatNobody’s Fault: Dickens, René Girard, and the Novel -David Quint“Let Us Carve Him as a Feast Fit for the Gods”: Girard and Unjust Execution in Nineteenth-Century Narrative - Jan-Melissa SchrammDostoyevsky’s Metaphysical Theater: The Underground Man and the Masochist in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel and Resurrection from the Underground - Yue ZhuoDeceit, Desire, Violence, and Death in the Short Stories of Georges Bernanos - Brian SudlowMimetic Desire in Otherworldly Narratives - Laura WittmanDesire, Deceit, and Defeat in the Work of Roberto Arlt - Jobst WelgeRecantation without Conversion: Desire, Mimesis, and the Paradox of Engagement in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Petrolio - Christoph F. E. HolzheyJonathan Franzen’s Novelistic Conversion - Trevor Cribben MerrillMimetic Desire and Monstrous Doubles in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones - Robert BuchAppendix. Literature and Christianity: A Personal View - René GirardContributorsIndex
