Short Voyages to the Land of the People - Paperback

by Jacques Rancière (Author), James B. Swenson (Translator)

This book analyzes a range of texts that seek, in different ways, to represent "the people." Rancière approaches these texts as travel narratives or ethnographies whose authors have traveled not to distant or exotic lands but across class lines. In this truly comparative study, he examines Wordsworth's poetry, the utopian discourse of the Saint-Simoniens, the correspondence and theater of Büchner, Claude Genoux's Mémoires d'un enfant de la Savoie, Michelet's theories of history, the prose and poetry of Rilke, and the performance of Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini's postwar film Europe 51.

Rancière examines the various forms of displacement that affect his subjects, enabling each to become foreign to the sites and trajectories commonly known as reality.

He argues convincingly that "the people" have no proper signification in the texts under consideration, instead, they function as points of reality upon which the voyager can drape a conceptual framework shaped by the circumstances not of the other, but of the self.

Front Jacket

This book analyzes a range of texts that seek, in different ways, to represent "the people." Ranciere approaches these texts as travel narratives or ethnographies whose authors have traveled not to distant or exotic lands but across class lines. In this truly comparative study, he examines Wordsworth's poetry, the utopian discourse of the Saint-Simoniens, the correspondence and theater of Buchner, Claude Genoux's Memoires d'un enfant de la Savoie, Michelet's theories of history, the prose and poetry of Rilke, and the performance of Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini's postwar film Europe 51.
Ranciere examines the various forms of displacement that affect his subjects, enabling each to become foreign to the sites and trajectories commonly known as reality.
He argues convincingly that "the people" have no proper signification in the texts under consideration, instead, they function as points of reality upon which the voyager can drape a conceptual framework shaped by the circumstances not of the other, but of the self.

Back Jacket

This is an important work for a number of reasons. The depth of Rancière's knowledge, the brilliance of his insights, and the passionate commitment with which he pursues the questions raised by the texts under consideration, all combine to make it a challenging and rewarding intellectual experience. --Karl A. Britto, University of California, Berkeley

Author Biography

Jacques Rancière is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. His most recent book in English is Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy.