The Paradoxes of Posterity

The impetus for literary creation has often been explained as an attempt to transcend the mortality of the human condition through a work addressed to future generations. Failing to obtain literal immortality, or to turn their hope toward the spiritual immortality promised by religious systems, literary creators seek a symbolic form of perpetuity granted to the intellectual side of their person in the memory of those not yet born while they write. In this book, Benjamin Hoffmann illuminates...