Investigations Into the Literary Use of Language: Course Notes from the Collège De France, 1953 (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)

A closely annotated translation of Merleau-Ponty's lecture notes on literary language Investigations into the Literary Use of Language presents an annotated translation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's lecture notes from one of the two courses that he gave during his inaugural year teaching at the Collège de France.In his notes from the concurrent course, The Sensible World and the World of Expression, Merleau-Ponty contends that our embodied perceptual engagement with the sensible world already involves the same spontaneity that underlies cultural expression.Approaching it from the other side, he revisits here the analysis of language that he had undertaken in the unfinished manuscript The Prose of the World. Focusing on the work of Paul Valéry (1871-1945) and Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle, 1783-1842), Merleau-Ponty explores how the spontaneity of literary language sheds light on the relation between lived experience and language more broadly, and how cultural expression remains grounded in e