1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910953837503321

Autore

Ellison David R.

Titolo

Ethics and aesthetics in European modernist literature : from the sublime to the uncanny / / David Ellison

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge : , : Cambridge University Press, , 2001

ISBN

1-107-12433-6

0-511-01361-2

1-280-15494-2

0-511-11978-X

0-511-15452-6

0-511-32841-9

0-511-48574-3

0-511-04432-1

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xiv, 290 pages) : digital, PDF file(s)

Disciplina

809/.9112

Soggetti

Literature, Modern - 20th century - History and criticism

Literature, Modern - 19th century - History and criticism

Modernism (Literature) - Europe

Ethics in literature

Aesthetics in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 265-277) and index.

Nota di contenuto

; pt. 1. Kant, Romantic Irony, Unheimlichkeit. ; 1. Border crossings in Kant. ; 2. Kierkegaard: on the economics of living poetically. ; 3. Freud's "Das Unheimliche": the intricacies of textual uncanniness -- ; pt. 2. The Romantic Heritage and Modernist Fiction. ; 4. Aesthetic redemption: the thyrsus in Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Wagner. ; 5. The "beautiful soul": Alan-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes and the aesthetics of Romanticism. ; 6. Proust and Kafka: uncanny narrative openings. ; 7. Textualizing immoralism: Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Gide's L'Immoraliste. ; 8. Fishing the waters of impersonality: Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Epilogue: Narrative and music in Kafka and Blanchot: the "singing" of Josefine.



Sommario/riassunto

David Ellison's book is an investigation into the historical origins and textual practice of European literary Modernism. Ellison's study traces the origins of Modernism to the emergence of early German Romanticism from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and emphasizes how the passage from Romanticism to Modernism can be followed in the gradual transition from the sublime to the uncanny. Arguing that what we call High Modernism cannot be reduced to a religion of beauty, an experimentation with narrative form, or even a reflection on time and consciousness, Ellison demonstrates that Modernist textuality is characterized by the intersection, overlapping, and crossing of aesthetic and ethical issues. Beauty and morality relate to each other as antagonists struggling for dominance within the related fields of philosophy and theory on the one hand (Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud) and imaginative literature on the other (Baudelaire, Proust, Gide, Conrad, Woolf, Kafka).