Product details
- ISBN 9789637326578
- Weight: 360g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 10 Aug 2006
- Publisher: Central European University Press
- Publication City/Country: HU
- Product Form: Hardback
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Literature is defined in a challenging way as the science of imperfection and defeat, or else as a type of discourse that deals with defeat, loss, uncertainty in social life, by contrast with virtually all disciplines (hard sciences or social sciences) that affirm certainties and wish to convince us of truths. If in real history most constructive attempts end up in failure, it follows that we ought to have also a field of research that examines this diversity of failures and disappointments, as well as the alternative options to historical evolution and progress. Thus literature serves an indispensable role: that of gleaning the abundance of past existence, the gratuitous and the rejected being placed here on an equal level with the useful and the successful.This provocative and unusual approach is illustrated in chapters that deal with the dialectics between literary writing and such fields as historical writing, or religious discourses, and is also illustrated by the socio-historical development of East-Central Europe.
Virgil Nemoianu is William J. Byron Distinguished Professor of Literature and Ordinary Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He is the author and editor of over 700 articles, reviews, and columns on three continents, and over 15 books including The Taming of Romanticism (Harvard UP, 1985), The Theory of the Secondary (Johns Hopkins UP, 1989) and The Triumph of Imperfection (Univ. S. Carolina UP, 2005).
