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Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi de Victor Brombert

Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi

Autor Victor Brombert
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 10 noi 2015

Adresată studenților de literatură comparată, cercetătorilor și umaniștilor preocupați de condiția umană, lucrarea Musings on Mortality oferă o perspectivă profundă asupra modului în care arta devine un instrument de reziliență în fața finitudinii. Observăm în această ediție o abordare care depășește critica literară convențională, fiind ancorată în experiența personală a lui Victor Brombert, care vede literatura ca pe o forță aflată permanent „de partea vieții”.

Structura volumului este una riguroasă, dedicând capitole individuale unor figuri monumentale precum Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf sau Primo Levi. Apreciem modul în care Brombert urmărește o progresie tematică clară: de la agonia individuală a lui Ivan Ilici la Tolstoi sau a lui Aschenbach la Thomas Mann, până la catastrofele colective reflectate în operele lui Bassani și Camus. Comparabil cu The Meaning of Life and Death de Michael Hauskeller în rigurozitate, volumul lui Brombert se distinge prin actualizarea temei în contextul traumelor istorice ale secolului XX și prin infuzia de amintiri personale.

Această lucrare se poziționează ca o sinteză a preocupărilor de o viață ale autorului, regăsite și în eseuri precum cele din The Pensive Citadel sau în memoriile sale de război, Trains of Thought. Dacă în The Hidden Reader autorul se concentra pe literatura franceză de secol XIX, aici spectrul se lărgește, investigând cum scrisul poate fi, pentru autori ca Kafka sau Woolf, o promisiune de salvare, fie ea și ambiguă. Este un volum esențial pentru a înțelege cum marii scriitori au transformat anxietatea morții într-o viziune literară durabilă.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780226323824
ISBN-10: 022632382X
Pagini: 200
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.25 kg
Editura: University of Chicago Press
Colecția University of Chicago Press

De ce să citești această carte

Recomandăm această carte oricui dorește să exploreze intersecția dintre filozofie și beletristică. Cititorul câștigă o înțelegere nuanțată a modului în care literatura a procesat traumele istorice și frica de moarte. Este o lectură fundamentală pentru cei care caută în textele clasice nu doar analiză estetică, ci și răspunsuri vitale despre demnitate, suferință și sensul existenței în fața inevitabilului.

Despre autor

Victor Brombert este profesor emerit „Henry Putnam” de literatură comparată și limbi romanice la Universitatea Princeton. Distins cărturar și veteran al celui de-al Doilea Război Mondial, Brombert și-a dedicat cariera analizei figurilor și temelor centrale din literatura europeană modernă. Printre lucrările sale de referință se numără „In Praise of Antiheroes” și memoriile „Trains of Thought”, ambele reflectând experiențele sale de tânăr evreu în Franța anilor '30 și ascensiunea regimului de la Vichy. Expertiza sa vastă transformă critica literară într-o meditație umanistă profundă.

Descriere scurtă

“All art and the love of art,” Victor Brombert writes at the beginning of the deeply personal Musings on Mortality, “allow us to negate our nothingness.” As a young man returning from World War II, Brombert came to understand this truth as he immersed himself in literature. Death can be found everywhere in literature, he saw, but literature itself is on the side of life. With delicacy and penetrating insight, Brombert traces the theme of mortality in the work of a group of authors who wrote during the past century and a half, teasing out and comparing their views of death as they emerged from vastly different cultural contexts.

Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, Giorgio Bassani, J. M. Coetzee, and Primo Levi—these are the writers whose works Brombert plumbs, illuminating their views on the meaning of life and the human condition. But there is more to their work, he shows, than a pervasive interest in mortality: they wrote not only of physical death but also of the threat of moral and spiritual death—and as the twentieth century progressed, they increasingly reflected on the traumatic events of their times and the growing sense of a collective historical tragedy. He probes the individual struggle with death, for example, through Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych and Mann’s Aschenbach, while he explores the destruction of whole civilizations in Bassani, Camus, and Primo Levi. For Kafka and Woolf, writing seems to hold the promise of salvation, though that promise is seen as ambiguous and even deceptive, while Coetzee, writing about violence and apartheid South Africa, is deeply concerned with a sense of disgrace. Throughout the book, Brombert roots these writers’ reflections in philosophical meditations on mortality. Ultimately, he reveals that by understanding how these authors wrote about mortality, we can grasp the full scope of their literary achievement and vision.
Drawing deeply from the well of Brombert’s own experience, Musings on Mortality is more than mere literary criticism: it is a moving and elegant book for all to learn and live by.

Notă biografică

Victor Brombert is the Henry Putnam University Professor Emeritus of Romance and Comparative Literatures at Princeton University. He is the author of many books, including In Praise of Antiheroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature, 1830–l980, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and the wartime memoir Trains of Thought. He lives in Princeton, NJ.

Cuprins

Prologue: “To Negate Our Nothingness”

1 Tolstoy: “Caius Is Mortal”
2 Thomas Mann and the Lure of the Abyss
3 Kafka: The Death Journey in the Everlasting Present
4 Virginia Woolf: “Death Is the Enemy”
5 Albert Camus: The Endless Defeat
6 Giorgio Bassani: “Even Objects Die”
7 J. M. Coetzee and the Scandal of Death
8 Primo Levi: The Flawed Design

Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index of Names

Recenzii

 “Musings on Mortality is a book suffused with wisdom and argued with the strong hand of a weathered and feeling literary scholar. To treat such tragic and inconsolable subject matter with such clarity and respect, with such equanimity and understanding, is to levitate above it, in stoic courage and willed serenity. It is hard to imagine such thematic criticism being done better than here. What a beautiful book.”

 “A brave and eloquent book devoted to what André Malraux called ‘negating nothingness.’ Victor Brombert moves gracefully from Tolstoy, though Kafka, Coetzee, and others, to Primo Levi in a meditation that is both engaging and profound, highly erudite, and completely personal.”

 “This book offers a unique pleasure—a sustained conversation with one of the most learned and wise critics of our age about the great defining truth of human existence: the persistent awareness of mortality. Full of life, it is self-consciously the musings of old age, of a man who has spent decades with the consolations and discomforts of literature as it engages with death.”

 “With sensitivity and insight, Princeton University emeritus literature professor Brombert studies the work of eight 20th-century authors and their literary approaches to mortality and death. . . . The simplicity and directness of Brombert’s style gives his discussion of the philosophical and aesthetic underpinnings of the works under scrutiny great clarity, and his study of the authors in their native languages allows him to discuss nuances of the text that might otherwise have been lost in translation.”

“Albert Camus’s The Plague, Thomas Mann’s doomed aesthete Aschenbach from Death in Venice, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, and the writings of Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and J.M. Coetzee are all examined by this distinguished scholar in exemplary essays that reflect the authors’ different fears and hopes. Brombert’s eloquently written book is for serious lovers of literature.”

“It is clear that Brombert, a fine scholar and critic, is also an inspiring teacher. . . . The moments when Brombert engages in autobiographical reminiscence or tells anecdotes about his students are delightful and instructive.”

“An eloquent and stylish book of high-end, close literary criticism. . . . Brombert’s examination of each author’s work is the epitome of academic objectivity and the product of a lifetime of dedicated scholarship and extraordinarily wide reading. . . . The exploration of the authors’ ideas, their personal circumstances and especially their works—all classics—invite further reading.” 

“Brombert’s thoughtful observations on the finite nature of existence make for interesting reading.”

“Musings on Mortality is an invitation to learn gladly from a deeply cultured man who would gladly teach. [Brombert’s] lesson, to use his own words about Primo Levi, is a ‘lesson in human dignity.’ And among the dignities of man, as Victor Brombert convincingly demonstrates, is the serious discussion of serious literature, which treats it as having something wroth saying to those who would only listen.”

“This handsome, compact book is, in fact, a work of elegant, beautifully written literary criticism, examining how eight major writers—‘From Tolstoy to Primo Levi’—dealt with death in their fiction. It offers the highly distilled insights of a master teacher.”

“In these essays, Brombert reads these writers’ oeuvres closely with a judicious and restrained eye towards biographical influence and sets them within their larger historical contexts.”
 
“An engagingly personal book.”
 
“Much more than mere ‘musings on mortality.’”