These prose poems were written by Claudel over ten years in his travels through China and Japan in the 19th century. In his translation, James Lawler presents Claudel as a poet who discovered himself in his experience of the East. He gives a detailed introduction, notes on the poet and the poems.
This is a short essay presenting a philosophical model on the meaning and purpose of life. It addresses the very basic but critical question: ""Why do people do what they do and feel what they feel?"" In other words, is it possible to identify a fundamental motivating factor that commands and explains all our deeds, impressions and desires? And if so, how can such an ultimate reference of meaning help us to lead a better life? Although it recognizes its due to our philosophical tradition, this book is meant to be of easy access, written so that most readers can enjoy it.
These prose poems were written by Claudel over ten years in his travels through China and Japan in the 19th century. In his translation, James Lawler presents Claudel as a poet who discovered himself in his experience of the East. He gives a detailed introduction, notes on the poet and the poems.
European literature and theory of the twentieth century have been intensely preoccupied with questions of 'Desire', whereas 'love' has increasingly represented a fractured and strange, if not actually suspect, proposal: this is a prime symptom of an age of deep cultural mutation and uncertainty. Paul Gifford's book allows this considerable contemporary phenomenon to be observed steadily and whole, with strategic understanding of its origins, nature and meaning. Gifford paints a clear and coherent picture of the evolution of erotic ideas and their imaginary and formal expressions in modern French writing. He first retraces the formative matrix of French tradition by engaging with five classic sources: Plato's Symposium, the Song of Songs, the myth of Genesis, the tension between Greek Eros and Christian Agape and the repercussions of Nietzsche's declaration of the 'death of God'. Modern variations on these perennial problematics are then pursued in ten chapters devoted to Proust, Valéry, Claudel, Breton, Bataille, Duras, Barthes, Irigarary, Emmanuel, Kristeva. Literary and theoretical perspectives are perfectly blended in his study of these attempts at 'deciphering Eros'. The book will appeal not only to students of French literature, but to all those interested in the cultural upheavals of the twentieth century.
Although internationally renowned as a novelist, journalist, and essayist, Nobel Prize-winning author François Mauriac (1885-1970) never established a reputation as a poet. Yet it was Maurice Barrès’s favourable review of his first collection of verse, Les Mains jointes, that launched Mauriac’s career in 1910. He went on to publish three further collections of poems and insisted to the end of his life that, despite critical neglect of his verse, he remained first and foremost a poet. This book offers the first ever in-depth exploration of the whole of Mauriac’s verse output. After a chapter tracing his general conception of poetry and comparing his ideas to those of other poets and theorists, each of Mauriac’s verse collections is analysed in turn, as are many of his poems that were published exclusively in literary journals. A final chapter explores the significant relationship between Mauriac’s verse and his novels, revealing the multiple connections between these two series of texts. This volume will appeal to those with an interest in twentieth-century French poetry and, more generally, to those interested in the relationship between verse and prose.
although Hans Urs von Balthasar’s earliest publication is from 1925, and although he was a mature forty years old in 1945, there is a deficiency in the secondary literature regarding his early literature, its historical backgrounds and non-theological sources. In this study Balthasar is presented in relation to the various contexts in which he was both drawing upon and responding to from the 1920s to the 1940s. The major contexts analyzed here are the broad central European Germanophone cultural context, the Germanophone Catholic cultural context, the German studies context, the French Catholic renewal literature and theology of the early 20th-century, the popular journal Stimmen der Zeit, Neo-Scholasticism, early 20th-century French Catholic culture, Swiss fascism, National Socialist literature, the Renouveau Catholique, the George-Kreis and many others. Balthasar’s early anti-Semitism and some of the problematic aspects of his early work are also addressed in this study. His understanding of the modern age, his relationships with some key intellectual figures and his later reflections on his early work are also introduced. The book offers a comprehensive study of Balthasar’s early intellectual development.
Paul Hindemith had a multifaceted career as an internationally acclaimed composer, performer, festival organizer, teacher, lecturer, and writer. Born in Germany in 1895, he was a leading member of the musical avant-garde, and when the Nazis came to power his compositions eventually were banned as "decadent art." In 1938 Hindemith went into voluntary exile in Switzerland and in 1940 migrated to the United States, where he became a citizen. His return to Europe after the war in response to urgent calls for help in rebuilding European musical life gave rise to many inner emotional problems. This selection of letters written by Hindemith spans his entire career, from the First World War until shortly before his death in 1963. Translated and edited by a leading authority on Hindemith, the letters (some of which were written in English) reveal that he was an observant, engaging, and opinionated correspondent who took a keen interest in contemporary culture and politics. The first such selection to appear in English, the letters deal with personal and professional matters and are addressed to his wife, publishers, and friends in both Europe and America. Among the many important personalities with whom he came into contact were the composers Stravinsky and Milhaud, the conductors Mengelberg, Furtwängler, Koussevitzky, and Klemperer, and the choreographers Massine and Balanchine. Published to coincide with the centenary of Hindemith's birth, the letters fill out our portrait of him and provide an absorbing chronicle of his life and times.
This study proposes to examine the tension in Nietzsche’s works between two competing discourses, i.e., the discourse of theology and the discourse of philology. It argues that, in order to understand Nietzsche’s complicated standpoint and the aim of his Kulturkritik, we have to appreciate how he operates with two different discourses, one indexed to belief, faith, liturgy (i.e., the discourse of theology) and another indexed to analytical reason, sceptical investigation, and logical argumentation, as well as historical context and linguistic precision (i.e., the discourse of philology). Its core thesis is that, in the end, Nietzsche can no longer believe, because he thinks he has uncovered a fraudulent production of meaning in the texts, in a way that is comparable with his insight into the production of morality in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887).
A new ethics for the global practice of curating Today, everyone is a curator. What was once considered a hallowed expertise is now a commonplace and global activity. Can this new worldwide activity be ethical and, if yes, how? This book argues that curating can be more than just selecting, organizing, and presenting information in galleries or online. Curating can also constitute an ethics, one of acquiring, arranging, and distributing an always conjectural knowledge about the world. Curating as Ethics is primarily philosophical in scope, evading normative approaches to ethics in favor of an intuitive ethics that operates at the threshold of thought and action. It explores the work of authors as diverse as Heidegger, Spinoza, Meillassoux, Mudimbe, Chalier, and Kofman. Jean-Paul Martinon begins with the fabric of these ethics: how it stems from matter, how it addresses death, how it apprehends interhuman relationships. In the second part he establishes the ground on which the ethics is based, the things that make up the curatorial—for example, the textual and visual evidence or the digital medium. The final part focuses on the activity of curating as such—sharing, caring, preparing, dispensing, and so on. With its invigorating new approach to curatorial studies, Curating as Ethics moves beyond the field of museum and exhibition studies to provide an ethics for anyone engaged in this highly visible activity, including those using social media as a curatorial endeavor, and shows how philosophy and curating can work together to articulate the world today.
Modernism is still widely acknowledged as perhaps the most important and influential artistic and cultural phenomenon of the 20th century. Written by expert scholars from around the world and covering hundreds of different topics in a clear, incisive, and critical manner, this reference maps the complex field of modernism in a fresh and original way. The principal focus of the book is on English-language literary modernism and the period 1890-1939, yet many entries extend beyond those parameters to include important precursors and successors of the movement. The book also covers the crucial European and interdisciplinary dimensions of modernism and provides complementary comparative perspectives from countries and regions not usually included in traditional accounts of the subject. Entries cite works for further reading, and the volume closes with a selected, general bibliography.
With more than fifty period photos and documents, countless letters and a foreword by E. D. Blodgett, F. P. Grove in Europe and Canada represents the definitive biography of the writer Northrop Frye called a "Canadian Dreiser." This work will prove an invaluable resource for scholars in Canadian and German literature, comparative literature, modernism, publishing history and translation studies."--BOOK JACKET.
Intelligent, ambitious and a rising star in the French artillery, Captain Alfred Dreyfus appeared to have everything: family, money, and the prospect of a post on the General Staff. But his rapid rise had also made him enemies - many of them aristocratic officers in the army's High Command who resented him because he was middle-class, meritocratic and a Jew. In October 1894, the torn fragments of an unsigned memo containing military secrets were retrieved by a cleaning lady from the waste paper basket of Colonel Maximilien von Schwartzkoppen of the German embassy in Paris. When French intelligence pieced the document back together to uncover proof of a spy in their midst, Captain Dreyfus, on slender evidence, was charged with selling military secrets to the Germans, found guilty of treason by unanimous verdict and sentenced to life imprisonment on the notorious Devil's Island. The fight to free the wrongfully convicted Dreyfus - over twelve long years, through many trials - is a story rife with heroes and villains, courage and cowardice, dissimulation and deceit. One of the most infamous miscarriages of justice in history, the Dreyfus affair divided France, stunned the world and unleashed violent hatreds and anti-Semitic passions which offered a foretaste of what was to play out in the long, bloody twentieth century to come. Today, amid charged debates over national and religious identity across the globe, its lessons throw into sharp relief the conflicts of the present. In the hands of historian, biographer and prize-winning novelist Piers Paul Read, this masterful epic of the struggle between a minority seeking justice and a military establishment determined to save face comes dramatically alive for a new generation.
In this mesmerizing examination of Delacroix’s crowning masterwork, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, and of Saint-Sulpice, the grand church that houses it, Jean-Paul Kauffmann reveals the city of Paris in an entirely new way. With the same insight and understanding he brought to his National Book Critics Circle Award–nominated The Black Room at Longwood, in The Angel of the Left Bank Jean-Paul Kauffmann confronts humanity’s struggle with God. His muse is Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, Eugène Delacroix’s “spiritual testimony” and certainly one of his masterpieces, a painting that portrays one of the most enigmatic episodes in Genesis. Throughout his careful, impassioned examination of the work, which Delacroix labored over for eight years and finished in 1861, Kauffmann touches on architecture and art history, philosophy and religion, and the luminous city of Paris itself. Like a detective, he looks for lingering clues in the places Delacroix frequented and the objects he touched some 150 years ago, seeking to connect with the artist’s philosophical and artistic process—and, in turn, to discover what truths we might ultimately glean from it. His journey makes for enthralling reading.
Examines how secular transformations of religious ideas have helped to shape the style and substance of works by American writers, filmmakers and artists from Catholic backgrounds.
This superbly authoratitive new work provides a comprehensive A-Z guide to some 1000 years of Western music. It explores in detail the lives and achievements of a vast range of composers, as well as looking at such key topics as music history (from medieval plainchant to contemporary minimalism), performers, theory and jargon. Throught Griffiths skilfully blends lightly worn scholarship with personal insight, whether examining the emotional colouring that different musical keys achieve or charting the rise and development of the symphony.
In 1932 German theologian and philosopher Erich Przywara penned his Analogia Entis, a vision of the analogy of being and a metaphysical exploration of the dynamic between God and creation. A translation into English in 2014 made Przywara’s brilliant and influential work available to more people than ever before. In this book Philip Gonzales calls English-speaking readers to embrace the Christian treasure of the Analogia Entis and to reimagine what it offers Christians today. Gonzales brings Przywara’s text into dialogue with debates in contemporary philosophy and theology, engaging in conversation with Edith Stein, Karl Barth, Martin Heidegger, the Nouvelle théologie, Vatican II, and leading figures in postmodern theology and the Continental turn to religion. The first book of its kind in English, Reimagining the “Analogia Entis” articulates a Christian vision of being for the postmodern era.
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