1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910798077403321

Autore

Boyers Robert

Titolo

The fate of ideas [[electronic resource] ] : seductions, betrayals, appraisals / / Robert Boyers

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, [New York] : , : Columbia University Press, , 2015

©2015

ISBN

0-231-53989-4

Edizione

[Pilot project. eBook available to selected US libraries only]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (280 p.)

Disciplina

810.9/0054

Soggetti

Philosophy, Modern - 20th century

Intellectual life

Literature, Modern

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION -- 1. AUTHORITY -- 2. PLEASURE -- 3. READING FROM THE LIFE -- 4. FIDELITY -- 5. SAVING BEAUTY -- 6. MY "OTHERS" -- 7. POLITICS AND THE NOVEL -- 8. REALISM -- 9. THE SUBLIME -- 10. PSYCHOANALYSIS -- 11. MODERNISM -- 12. JUDGMENT -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX

Sommario/riassunto

As editor of the quarterly Salmagundi for the past fifty years, Robert Boyers has been on the cutting edge of developments in politics, culture, and the arts. Reflecting on his collaborations and quarrels with some of the twentieth century's most transformative writers, artists, and thinkers, Boyers writes a wholly original intellectual memoir that rigorously confronts selected aspects of contemporary society. Organizing his chapters around specific ideas, Boyers anatomizes the process by which they fall in and out of fashion and often confuse those who most ardently embrace them. In provocative encounters with authority, fidelity, "the other," pleasure, and a wide range of other topics, Boyers tells colorful stories about his own life and, in the process, studies the fate of ideas in a society committed to change and ill equipped to assess the losses entailed in modernity. Among the writers who appear in these pages are Susan Sontag and V. S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid and J. M. Coetzee, as well as figures drawn from all



walks of life, including unfaithful husbands, psychoanalysts, terrorists, and besotted beauty lovers.