Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi

Brombert thus connects his apparently self-contained readings by providing continuity between the private existential dimension of transience and the collective responsibility of civilization. Through temporal symbolism Tolstoy universalizes a singular experience, drawing from a subjective description the consciousness of a common destiny. But Brombert does not intend to delve into complex theoretical questions. Musings on Mortality does not If you would like to authenticate using a different subscribed institution that supports Shibboleth authentication or have your own login and password to Project MUSE, click 'Authenticate'.

View freely available titles: Book titles OR Journal titles.

Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi

Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — Musings on Mortality by Victor Brombert. 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.

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: Ultimately, he reveals that by understanding how these authors wrote about mortality, we can grasp the full scope of their literary achievement and vision.

Hardcover , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Musings on Mortality , please sign up.

Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Nov 01, Roslyn rated it it was ok.

What I thought this book would be: What this book was: Each chapter a teacher analyzes a reading. I get a few lines about mortality but mostly information about the reading, the writer, a historical background, and lots of, what feels like, advertisements about how great these books are and how I should read What I thought this book would be: I get a few lines about mortality but mostly information about the reading, the writer, a historical background, and lots of, what feels like, advertisements about how great these books are and how I should read them.

See a Problem?

I was an English major in college and the idea of telling stories and their function in our lives is very interesting to me. And I believe this IS the function it has whether the reader is aware of it or not. What English teachers seem to think the functions and purpose of literature is, "Oh let's make some connections between how this guy talks about death and his time period and his other writings.

Let's make sure we truly understand what he is saying and how brilliantly he made all these metaphors and look at those fun allusions that you can only understand if you have read Everything Ever Written and his biography, of course. It is a long trajectory between Tolstoy and Primo Levi.

Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi – www.newyorkethnicfood.com

The distance and the contrast tell a story. The trajectory as well as the authors along the way tell the story of the 20th century as that of a growing awareness of a collective tragedy. It is an effort at self-possession. In what ways do you think writing about death helps us to approach personal writing and memoir?

1. Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi, Brombert!
2. ;
3. .
4. The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Dover Thrift Editions)?
5. Author Corner.
6. Kierkegaards Writing, III, Part I: Either/Or: Either/Or (Kierkegaards Writings);
7. 0 Comments.

In my view, it is rather the inverse. Memoir writing, and memory in general, participate in a conscious or unconscious effort to retrieve and safeguard the evanescent moment. In my experience, memoir writing is at its deepest level a rescue operation, a reclamation program to preserve fragments of the personal past from death-like oblivion.

A line of T. Eliot comes to mind: Where does the writing of Franz Kafka fit within the tradition you are describing? In what ways do you think modernist writing, such as the novels of Virginia Woolf, approaches the issue of death and mortality?

Musings on Mortality

Death is an obsession and a fascination, especially suicide. This is obvious in Mrs. Writing itself is see by her all at once as a defiance of death and as expressing the fear of imminent collective destruction. One can hear Mrs. I can only speak about my own experience.

• Fashionable Posingbook: Exemplarische Mode- und Werbeposen für die Bereiche Fotografie, Illustration und Grafikdesign (German Edition).
• SOS Sommerferie;
• "Musings on Mortality: Tolstoy to Primo Levi" by Victor Brombert.
• .
• A Book of Poems!
• Brass Quintet Concert Album Vol. 1 Horn.
• The Palace of the Rubber King (Tales at the speed of life Book 3).

And then, close to my personal experience, in yet another war, devastation from the sky, the aerial bombardment of civilian populations, the destruction of entire cities Coventry, Dresden , and finally the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima. Could you say a little bit about the significance that language plays in the writers you discuss?

About the author

The writers I discuss have recourse to a great variety of recurrent images, metaphors, and motifs that betray their at times not so obvious meanings. But in reality, mythological figures and verbal figurations, as well as metaphors of demonic powers and epidemic disease invading the decaying city point to a more generally lethal European crisis. The language of Kafka, who was even more haunted by annihilating calamities, is on the surface more subdued.

His rhetoric is flat, almost bureaucratically reserved — but the very flatness brings out even more sharply the weird, uncanny, and understated horrors he evokes.