The Art of the Novel - Hardcover

Kundera,Molan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571148190 ISBN 13: 9780571148196

Publisher: Grove Press, 1988

Synopsis

Landmark collection of essays on subject. The first appearance of the title in English. The artistic manifesto of the greatest living "postmodern" novelist. Written with a strong philosophical and aesthetic background, the book's greatest value is as the perfect antidote to the countless, dreary "critical theory" studies churned out by unimaginative and mediocre university professor/hacks. One of the most eloquent books on the novelist's art, it is indispensable to a greater understanding of Milan Kundera's roots, influences and very deeply held beliefs as a novelist as well as to the very possibilities of the novel itself as an art form. Wise, tender, poetic, intelligent and witty, as is to be expected from Kundera's novels, and to be found in these essays, too. The question is no longer whether Kundera deserves to win the Nobel Prize but whether the award is worthy of him. 2005, ModernRare.com

About this title

About the Author

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Farewell Waltz, Life Is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short-story collection Laughable Loves—all originally written in Czech. His most recent novels Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Part One

The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes

In 1935, three years before his death, Edmund Husserl gave his celebrated lectures in Vienna and Prague on the crisis of European humanity. For Husserl, the adjective "European" meant the spiritual identity that extends beyond geographical Europe (to America, for instance) and that was born with ancient Greek philosophy. In his view, this philosophy, for the first time in history, apprehended the world (the world as a whole) as a question to be answered. It interrogated the world not in order to satisfy this or that practical need but because "the passion to know had seized mankind."

The crisis Husserl spoke of seemed to him so profound that he wondered whether Europe was still able to survive it. The roots of the crisis lay for him at the beginning of the Modern Era, in Galileo and Descartes, in the one-sided nature of the European sciences, which reduced the world to a mere object of technical and mechanical investigation and put the concrete world of life, die Lebenswelt as he called it, beyond their horizon.

The rise of the sciences propelled man into the tunnels of the specialized disciplines. The more he advanced in knowledge, the less clearly could he see either the world as a whole or his own self, and he plunged further into what Husserl's pupil Heidegger called, in a beautiful and almost magical phrase, "the forgetting of being."

Once elevated by Descartes to "master and proprietor of, nature," man has now become a mere thing to the forces (of technology, of politics, of history) that bypass him, surpass him, possess him. To those forces, man's concrete being, his "world of life" (die Lebenswelt), has neither value nor interest: it is eclipsed, forgotten from the start.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 1988
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571148190
• ISBN 13: 9780571148196
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 240