The Pathos of Distance: Affects of the Moderns

The Pathos of Distance: Affects of the Moderns
ISBN-10
1501307975
ISBN-13
9781501307973
Category
Literary Criticism
Pages
224
Language
English
Published
2016-04-21
Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Author
Jean-Michel Rabaté

Description

Jean-Michel Rabaté uses Nietzsche's image of a “pathos of distance,” the notion that values are created by a few gifted and lofty individuals, as the basis for a wide-ranging investigation into the ethics of the moderns. Revealing overlooked connections between Nietzsche's and Benjamin's ideas of history and ethics, Rabaté provides an original genealogy for modernist thought, moving through figures and moments as varied as Yeats and the birth of Irish Modernism, the ethics of courage in Virginia Woolf, Rilke, Apollinaire, and others in 1910, T. S. Eliot's post-war despair, Jean Cocteau's formidable selfmythology in his first film The Blood of a Poet, Siri Hustvedt's novel of American trauma, and J. M. Coetzee's dystopia portraying an affectless future haunted by a messianic promise.

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