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Literary Essays
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by Ernst Bloch,
Translated by Andrew Joron
Stanford University Press
Due/Published
September 1998, 448 pages,
paper
ISBN
0804727074
These essays, dating from between 1913 to 1964, deal with a variety of subjects ranging from literary, musical, and artistic works to such phenomena as advertisements, landscapes, clichŽs and obsessive images, and film. A few specifics: What is the function of musical accompaniment in a silent film? How does a writer's birthplace imprint itself on his intellect? What is the philosophical import of the detective novel? Why is anxiety more acute when its stimulus is aural rather than visual? What is the relation between modern art and the machinery of factory production? Series: Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics |
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Review
One of the pleasures of this new collection is its difficulty to categorize. Ernst Bloch is, of course, one of the most important Marxist and political thinkers of the twentieth century whose friends included the likes of Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno and Brecht. In The writings in Literary Essays, Bloch turns his attention to issues of culture but with the same urgency that his philosophical and utopian writings had. Bloch’s attention is always, and in the most diverse gestures, workds and productions, alert to the energies of political transcendence. He reveals his own style of original thinking in essays on literature, music, art as well as such phenomena as advertisements, landscapes, and clichés. Along the way he examines such diverse and diverting issues as: What is the function of musical accompaniment in silent film? How does a writer’s birthplace imprint itself on his intellect? What is the philosophical import of the detective novel? What is the relation between modern art and the machinery of factory production? The writing in Literary Essays, which here spanning over fifty years, is a fitting tribute to one of our century’s most original thinkers.
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