Description
Frank's sympathetic and critical engagement with recent French thought (which is all too often received in a violently polarized fashion) is an insightful, thorough, and groundbreaking engagement with contemporary problems in philosophy, literary theory, and culture in general. Rather than merely taking sides, Frank engages his French counterparts (he, himself, is a literary scholar and philosopher) to discover where their apparently obscure and extreme writings might inform more traditionally humanistic enterprises and where French theory might itself stand in need of criticism and deeper reflection. Frank's dialogue is further singular in its breadth and depth of learning, contextualizing present-day debate within the thinking of Romanticism. How many engaged in the debate with poststructuralism know, for example, that Schleiermacher had developed a semiotics a century in advance of Saussure? Highly recommended for anyone who wants to read a reasonable voice and vault over the horns of an apparent dilemma in thought.
