The book of imitation and desire: reading Milan Kundera with René Girard
"Trevor Cribben Merrill offers a bold reassessment of Milan Kundera's place in the contemporary canon. Harold Bloom and others have dismissed the Franco-Czech author as a maker of "period pieces" that lost currency once the Berlin Wall fell. Merrill refutes this view, revealing a...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Book |
| Language: | English |
| Subito Delivery Service: | Order now. |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
New York, NY [u.a.]
Bloomsbury
2013
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| In: | Year: 2013 |
| Reviews: | [Rezension von: Merrill, Trevor Cribben, The book of imitation and desire : reading Milan Kundera with René Girard] (2018) (Alberg, Jeremiah, 1957 -)
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| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Kundera, Milan 1929-2023
/ Immitation (Motif)
/ Longing (Motif)
/ Desire (Motif)
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| Further subjects: | B
Kundera, Milan
Criticism and interpretation
B Desire in literature B Imitation in literature |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (doi) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Parallel Edition: | Non-electronic
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| Summary: | "Trevor Cribben Merrill offers a bold reassessment of Milan Kundera's place in the contemporary canon. Harold Bloom and others have dismissed the Franco-Czech author as a maker of "period pieces" that lost currency once the Berlin Wall fell. Merrill refutes this view, revealing a previously unexplored dimension of Kundera's fiction. Building on theorist René Girard's notion of "triangular desire," he shows that modern classics such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting display a counterintuitive--and bitterly funny--understanding of human attraction. Most works of fiction (and most movies, too) depict passionate feelings as deeply authentic and spontaneous. Kundera's novels and short stories overturn this romantic dogma. A pounding heart and sweaty palms could mean that we have found "the One" at last--or they could attest to the influence of a model whose desires we are unconsciously borrowing: our amorous predilections may owe less to personal taste or physical chemistry than they do to imitative desire. At once a comprehensive survey of Kundera's novels and a witty introduction to Girard's mimetic theory, The Book of Imitation and Desire challenges our assumptions about human motive and renews our understanding of a major contemporary author."--Bloomsbury Publishing |
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| Item Description: | Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Physical Description: | Online-Ressource |
| ISBN: | 1472543432 |
| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.5040/9781472543431 |