The Adventures of Telemachus (French Modernist Library) (English and French Edition) - Hardcover

Aragon, Louis; Aragon; Hubert, Renee Riese; Hubert, Judd David

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9780803210219: The Adventures of Telemachus (French Modernist Library) (English and French Edition)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803210213 ISBN 13: 9780803210219

Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr, 1988

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Published in 1922 and modeled on F�nelon's seventeenth-century epic of the same name, Aragon's work parodies its heroic models, didacticism, psychological stability, and descriptive and narrative balance.

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Language Notes:

Text: English, French (translation)

From Publishers Weekly:

Poet and novelist Aragon (1897-1982) helped launch the dada and surrealist movements. In Telemachus, written in 1922 and newly translated for this first English edition, he does an irreverent spoof of the 17th century moralist Fenelon, who rewrote Homeric epic as a guide for princes and schoolboys. Along with MentorMinerva in dragTelemachus quests for his father Ulysses, who is dawdling amorously on the way back from Troy. But where Fenelon warns against women, Aragon indulges Telemachus in the erotic delights offered by petulant nymphs Calypso and Eucharis. Minerva and Calypso have a lesbian interlude. An amusing sequence takes place in Neptune's underwater brothel. Instead of fleeing temptation by diving in the sea to seek wisdom on a distant shore, Aragon's Telemachus tastes pleasure and wrestles with his identity in the here-and-now of Calypso's isle. His final act is Aragon's invention. The highly academic introduction discusses Telemachus as a dada/surrealist document, with its fracturing of language and bourgeois values. Most non-specialist readers will skim over the novel's tortured talkiness, savoring Aragon's passages of sensuous lyricism, his playful tactics with myth and his obvious delight in the power of words.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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