Author: Jean KelloggPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214
Book Description
Dark Prophets of Hope--Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus, Faulkner
Author: Jean KelloggPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214
Book Description
Dostoevsky and the Affirmation of Life
Author: Predrag CicovackiPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135152173X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 375
Book Description
Dostoevsky's philosophy of life is unfolded in this searching analysis of his five greatest works: Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov. Predrag Cicovacki deals with a fundamental issue in Dostoevsky's opus neglected by all of his commentators: How can we affirm life and preserve a healthy optimism in the face of an increasingly troublesome reality? This work displays the vital significance of Dostoevsky's philosophy for understanding the human condition in the twenty-first century. The main task of this insightful effort is to reconstruct and examine Dostoevsky's "aesthetically" motivated affirmation of life, based on cycles of transgression and restoration. If life has no meaning, as his central figures claim, it is absurd to affirm life and pointless to live. Since Dostoevsky's doubts concerning the meaning of life resonate so deeply in our own age of pessimism and relativism, the central question of this book, whether Dostoevsky can overcome the skepticism of his most brilliant creation, is innately relevant. This volume includes a thorough literary analysis of Dostoevsky's texts, yet even those who have not read all of these novels will find Cicovacki's analysis interesting and enthralling. The reader will easily extrapolate Cicovacki's own philosophical interpretation of Dostoevsky's literary heritage.
Levinas and Camus
Author: Tal SesslerPublisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441195734
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 125
Book Description
This important new book compares the respective oeuvre of two seminal thinkers of the 20th century, Emmanuel Levinas and Albert Camus. Tal Sessler compares their lasting legacies within the specific context of intellectual resistance to totalitarianism and political violence, with particular focus on their respective approaches to the Holocaust and genocide in the 20th century and, correspondingly, the question of theodicy and religious faith. Levinas and Camus explores each thinker's congruent and complimentary metaphysical and political rationale in opposing tyranny. Sessler emphasises the religious component in Levinas's depiction of Hitlerism as paganism (a perception that Camus shares), and the correlation between liberalism and monotheism. The book explores Levinas and Camus's reflections on the Holocaust and the question of theodicy and deals with their corresponding critiques of Stalinism and Hegelian philosophy of history. Sessler goes on to consider how Levinas and Camus would have contended with the central political issue of our own era, religious fundamentalism, and explicates the dualist nature of Israel and Algeria in the writings of Levinas and Camus.
The Faulkner Journal
Author: The Dramatic Journey of Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett
Author: Jaya KapoorPublisher: Partridge Publishing
ISBN: 1543706886
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Book Description
The moderns found these two writers to be one of them, and the post moderns said their essence was post-modern. They were found to have deep existential core and humanism was the defining spirit of their works. When a writer writes with deep empathy for the human situation, the work is freed from the traps of ideologies and techniques. It reaches out to people beyond time and space. Truth is complex and individual in manifestation but simple and universal in essence. This simplicity is the most difficult to achieve and most prized achievement of an artist. This simplicity of the communication is what the journey of O’Neill and Beckett has been all about. Their journey is marked by unsparing effort to give a universal metaphor to an immensely subjective experience. The voices of two of the greatest dramatists come together to tell not just what drama has been all about in the 20th Century, but also what it is in our own day. It looks not just into the plots or characters to understand their works but also how they communicated so much more through the way they visualized the technical aspects and theatrical impact of their plays.
The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre
Author: Paul Arthur SchilppPublisher: La Salle, Ill. : Open Court
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 778
Book Description
The Ethical Pragmatism of Albert Camus
Author: Dean VasilPublisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 176
Book Description
In what, since the age of its Enlightenment, the West has perceived to be an absurd universe, it has had continually to choose between two ways of life as consequences of that perception and of the movement which gave it rise: these are the way of ethics and the way of modern historicist ideology, the way of a moral imperative without God and that of the will to become God in His place. The first is illogical, but the second is irrational, «la prédication de la surhumanité, » as Camus says, «aboutissant à la fabrication méthodique des sous-hommes.» The way of ethics or of man as an end in himself is the way of Camus as well, and one the reflection of whose origins and raison d'être in his own thought is the subject of the two studies in the present essay.
Faulkner and the Modern Fable
Author: Kiyoko TōyamaPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Book Description
In Faulkner and the Modern Fable, Kiyoko M. T yama offers an array of personal responses to the writings of William Faulkner as well as to those of several other major writers. While her response to Faulkner and other writers is personal, her research is based on years of active reading, thinking and teaching Faulkner. As a Japanese woman scholar, T yama has seen in his enterprise certain religious and family themes that are not as apparent to many Western readers and are, more importantly, critical to the understanding of his work. The seeming eclecticism of this book is not a consequence of its contents having been casually assembled. It is, rather, a reflection of the writer's broad range of interests, and all the chapters are approached from the viewpoint of Words and Deeds, essentials that comprise our life. The book, a work of literary criticism, was ultimately written in answer to the personal questions which the author asked herself: "Where am I from? Where am I now? and Where am I going?" The volume has been inspired by a desire to bring unity to her Japaneseness, her Catholicism, and her love of literature.
The Continental Novel
Author: Louise S. FitzgeraldPublisher: Metuchen, N.J. : Scarecrow Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 552
Book Description
Camus' Imperial Vision
Author: Anthony RizzutoPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 174
Book Description
Although the young Camus celebrated his godlike difference, Anthony Rizzuto reveals here that this leading existentialist gradually embraced the community of man. In the early Camus (La Morte heureuse, Caligula, L’Etranger), Rizzuto identifies an imperial vision that requires utter detachment. It presumes the “ability to be reborn . . . purely out of one’s will.” Body and mind must be separated, memory stifled. In Le Mythe de Sisyphe the Camus hero evolves from a detached intellectual to a man of action. Camus urges commitment, argues against suicide. Yet the imperial vision persists; the protagonist is an actor-hero who creates himself, who shows himself not as he is but as he would be. The plague, a mad moral equivalent to the Nazi invasion, forms human ties in La Peste. Camus preaches solidarity, shifts focus from the self to the group. Dr. Rieux, the protagonist, reflects Camus’ new sense of commitment: he is not an elitist actor-hero but a man among equals. With L’Homme révolté, Camus affirms human nature and, for the first time, acknowledges the past: “The suppression of the past, whether historical or psychological, engenders not an emancipated future but a bloody fiction… Every modern revolution has… contributed to the further enslavement of man.” Camus’ last novel, La Chute, satirizes both Sartre and his own earlier work. Here Camus attacks the concept of monologue, calling instead for dialogue—a democratic exchange of ideas. He also recants his ridicule of the Socratic dictum, “Know thyself.” And reversing his earlier position, Camus concludes that the “division of sensation and intellect spawns cultural barbarism.” No longer an aloof god, Camus has become a man.