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The impetus for literary creation has often been explained as an
attempt to transcend the mortality of the human condition through a
work addressed to future generations. Failing to obtain literal
immortality, or to turn their hope towards the spiritual
immortality promised by religious systems, literary creators seek a
symbolic form of perpetuity granted to the intellectual side of
their person in the memory of those not yet born while they write.
In this book, Benjamin Hoffmann illuminates the paradoxes inherent
in the search for symbolic immortality, arguing that the time has
come to find a new answer to the perennial question: Why do people
write?
Exploring the fields of digital humanities and book history,
Hoffmann describes posterity as a network of interconnected
memories that constantly evolves by reserving a variable and
continuously renegotiated place for works and authors of the past.
In other words, the perpetual safeguarding of texts is delegated to
a collectivity not only nonexistent at the moment when a writer
addresses it, but whose nature is characterized by impermanence and
instability. Focusing on key works by Denis Diderot,
Étienne-Maurice Falconet, Giacomo Casanova, François-René de
Chateaubriand, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Hoffmann considers the
authors' representations of posterity, the representation of
authors by posterity, and how to register and preserve works in the
network of memories. In doing so, Hoffmann reveals the three great
paradoxes in the quest for symbolic immortality: the paradoxes of
belief, of identity, and of mediation.
Theoretically sophisticated and convincingly argued, this book
contends that there is only one truly serious literary problem: the
transmission of texts to posterity. It will appeal to specialists
in literature, in particular eighteenth-century French literature,
as well as scholars and students of philosophy and book
history.