A01=Robert Buch
Aesthetics
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Robert Buch
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSBH
Claude Simon
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
ekphrasis
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Francis Bacon
Franz Kafka
Georges Bataille
Heiner Müller
Language_English
PA=Available
Peter Weiss
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9780801897566
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 09 Feb 2011
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
This book is about the ambition, in a set of paradigmatic writers of the twentieth century, to simultaneously enlist and break the spell of the real-their fascination with the spectacle of violence and suffering-and the difficulties involved in capturing this kind of excess by aesthetic means. The works at the center of this study-by Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Claude Simon, Peter Weiss, and Heiner Muller-zero in on scenes of agony, destruction, and death with an astonishing degree of precision and detail. The strange and troubling nature of the appeal engendered by these sights is the subject of The Pathos of the Real. Robert Buch shows that the spectacles of suffering conjured up in these texts are deeply ambivalent, available neither to cathartic relief nor to the sentiment of compassion. What prevails instead is a peculiar coincidence of opposites: exaltation and resignation; disfiguration and transfiguration; agitation and paralysis. Featuring the experiences of violent excess in strongly visual and often in expressly pictorial terms, the works expose the nexus between violence and the image in twentieth-century aesthetics.
Buch explores this tension between visual and verbal representation by drawing on the rhetorical notion of pathos as both insurmountable suffering and codified affect and the psychoanalytic notion of the real, that is, the disruption of the symbolic order. In dialogue with a diverse group of thinkers, from Erich Auerbach and Aby Warburg to Alain Badiou and Jacques Lacan, The Pathos of the Real advances an innovative new framework for rethinking the aesthetics of violence in the twentieth century.
Robert Buch received his Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford University. He was assistant professor in Germanic studies at the University of Chicago and currently teaches in the Department of German at the University of Pittsburgh.
