Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003), one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century French literature, produced a wide variety of essays and fictions that reflect on the complexities of literary work. His description of writing continually returns to a number of themes, such as solitude, passivity, indifference, anonymity, and absence—forces confronting the writer, but also the reader, the text itself, and the relations between the three. For Blanchot, literature involves a movement toward...
