The Culture of Redemption

Leo Bersani

Published by Harvard University Press 1990

The Culture of Redemption

Leo Bersani

https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674734272

Overview
Contents

Author / Editor information

Bersani Leo :

Leo Bersani is the Class of 1950 Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

I find Bersani's message irresistible and exhilarating, one that provokes an act of recognition on the same order as viewing the emperor's new clothes...It is, I believe, prescient as well. For Bersani's path-breaking formulations help make way, during this brief, odd period of transition, for new shapes of art having little to do with 'modern' or 'postmodern'--for those playful modes just now beginning to imagine themselves.

Bersani is one of the best essayists and readers now writing, in or outside the academy. Learned and precise, his best essays reinterpret both a specific text and the cultural moment. The finest chapters are those devoted to Marcel Proust and Melanie Klein, to Freud, to Baudelaire, Benjamin, and Nietzsche, and above all a profound piece on the unjustly neglected André Malraux and on Georges Bataille.

In a world where literary criticism is subject to the grossest forms of overproduction and where critical books that matter, and have something of general importance to say to our culture, are extremely rare, Bersani's will stand out as one of the half dozen or so by which its decade will be remembered.

Brilliant...[Bersani's] 'culture of redemption'...holds that literature is not there to stir us to erotic excitement as we read but to reaffirm us in our egos, and that the grand designs of art are grand because they compensate us for the tedium, pain and disorder of reality. Such a philosophy of art, Mr. Bersani suggests, devalues both reality and art--reality because once it is thus redeemed the real is dead, its uniqueness having been sacrificed in the cause of intelligibility; and art because it now appears as some sort of repair kit, a merely rational, insufficiently pleasurable makeweight for the shortcomings of life...[Bersani's] post-modern culture of narcissism may have no hope of ever replacing the old culture of redemption, but in putting its case with such admirable eloquence and sophistication he has brought real light to the dark question of how we may relate, as selves, to any culture at all.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Prologue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I. The Corrective Will
CHAPTER 1. Death and Literary Authority: Marcel Proust and Melanie Klein Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	7
CHAPTER 2. Erotic Assumptions: Narcissism and Sublimation in Freud Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	29
CHAPTER 3. Boundaries of Time and Being: Benjamin, Baudelaire, Nietzsche Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
CHAPTER 4. Literature and History: Malraux and Bataille Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	102
PART II. Encyclopedic Fictions
CHAPTER 5. Flaubertian Rhythms of Knowledge Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	127
CHAPTER 6. Incomparable America Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	136
CHAPTER 7. Against Ulysses Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155
CHAPTER 8. Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	179
Epilogue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	201
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	211
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	231

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Edition: Reprint 2013
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 232
Illustrations
- Other: 1 halftone
Keywords: Psychoanalysis and literature.; Literature, Modern -- History and criticism.; Aesthetics.

eBook

Published: October 1, 2013
ISBN: 9780674734272

Hardcover

Published: February 5, 1990
ISBN: 9780674734265