Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy: Chance and Choice

Encounters in the Arts, Literature, and Philosophy focuses on chance and scripted encounters as sites of tensions and alliances where new forms, ideas, meanings, interpretations, and theories can emerge. By moving beyond the realm of traditional hermeneutics, Jérôme Brillaud and Virginie Greene have compiled a volume that vitally illustrates how reading encounters represented in artefacts, texts, and films is a vibrant and dynamic mode of encountering and interpreting.
With contributions from esteemed academics such as Christie McDonald, Pierre Saint-Amand, Susan Suleiman, and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, this book is a multidisciplinary collaboration between scholars from a range of disciplines including philosophy, literature, musicology, and film studies. It uses examples chiefly from French culture and covers the Early Modern era to the twentieth century, while providing a thorough and representative array of theoretical and hermeneutical approaches.

Jérôme Brillaud is Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Manchester. His research is primarily on early modern French culture with a focus on philosophy. He is the author of Sombres Lumières (2011) and A Philosophy of Simplicity (2019).

Virginie Greene is Professor of French at Harvard University. She is a specialist in medieval literature with strong interests in history and philosophy and Proust and his times. She is the author of Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and Philosophy and Le Sujet et la Mort dans La Mort Artu.