About the author: Victor Kocay, Associate Professor of French at Saint Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, Canada, is the author of several articles on French writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, and of a monograph on the aesthetic philosophy of Roman Ingarden.
2001 0-7734-7414-5 This is the first only work to date that attempts to consider the works of the Swiss author and theoretician, Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), from the perspective of his little known treatise on religion. Constant’s work on religion, published in seven volumes from 1824 to 1833, in fact represents the development of the notion of sentiment. Individual sentiment is the defining notion of human beings, the trait which best distinguishes our species from other animal species. The first part of the work is a close reading of Constant’s religious works, followed by an examination of his political writings. The final part, which deals with his literary works, shows that the notions of sentiment, of society and social forces, of opinion and individual freedom run throughout these works, where they generally take the form of maxims. In French.
2014 0-7734-3509-3 In addition to analyzing Perse’s later poems, this work also gives an account of Perse’s personal understanding of poetry. The analyses follow the poems closely, strophe by strophe, section by section, from the first of these poems Chronique, to the last published poems in the Mediterranean Cycle, Sécheresse and underscores the main tenants of Perse’s poetry.