The Bond of the Furthest Apart: Essays on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bresson, and Kafka

Sharon Cameron

Published by University of Chicago Press 2017

The Bond of the Furthest Apart

Essays on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bresson, and Kafka

Sharon Cameron

https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226414232

Overview
Contents

About this book

In the French filmmaker Robert Bresson’s cinematography, the linkage of fragmented, dissimilar images challenges our assumption thatweknow either what things are in themselves orthe infinite ways in which they are entangled.The “bond” of Sharon Cameron’s title refers to the astonishing connections found both within Bresson’sfilms and across literary works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Kafka,whose visionary rethinkingsof experience are akin to Bresson’s in their resistance to all forms of abstraction and classification thatsegregate aspects of reality.

Whether exploring Bresson’s efforts to reassess thelimitsof human reason and will, Dostoevsky’s subversions of Christian conventions, Tolstoy’s incompatible beliefs about death, or Kafka’s focus on creatures neither human nor animal, Cameron illuminates how the repeatedjuxtapositionof disparate, even antithetical, phenomena carves out new approaches to defining the essence of being, one where the very nature of fixed categories is brought into question. An innovative look at a classic French auteur and three giants of European literature, The Bond of the Furthest Apart will interest scholars of literature, film, ethics, aesthetics, and anyone drawn to an experimental venture in critical thought.

Author information

Sharon Cameron is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emerita of English at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of eightbooks, including, most recently, Impersonality: Seven Essays, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

“The Bond of the Furthest Apart is a powerful description of the ethical dimension of aesthetic experience and is in conversation with some of the best work in continental philosophy. It will have a broad appeal across film studies, literary studies, and philosophy.”

— Brian Price, University of Toronto

“Original to the point of uniqueness, this is a work of literary and film criticism, but its arguments and insights are fundamentally philosophical. Beneath the vast differences, both within the work of the artists Cameron is so closely studying and between the visions of each of the artists, is a kind of nonconformist unity, a resistance to whatever teaches us to look away, to hide among abstractions, not to see what we are seeing.”

— Michael Wood, Princeton University

"[Cameron] teases out a more tenuous, more originally imagined thread of connections between the filmmaker and the writers. . .poetically imagined. . . .The achievement of this book, with its motley crew of gifted storytellers, is to extract from their art the imaginative resources to think and perceive, at least momentarily, outside blinkering, enculturated categories and ideas. . .Cameron's readings give sensuous form to philosophical concepts."

— Modern Language Notes

"The enigmatic title of Sharon Cameron’s latest book offers a solution to a very basic problem in comparative literature, namely: when we compare literature across differences and find affinities we feel compelled to use materialist historicism, network analysis, and other narratives of circulation and synthesis to demonstrate the transmission of influence or else explain such coincidences as a parallel efflorescence. The Bond of the Furthest Apart models a transcendentalist approach to comparative literatureanchored in Emerson’s notion of impersonal intimacy, its hermeneutics carried over and intensified from her two earlier books. . . .The Bond repeatedly enlists comparison to the mystery of experience—first as something that is not really yours, then as something whose integrity depends on your not readily associating it with anything else."

— Comparative Literature

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Abbreviations Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Animal Sentience: Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	12
2. “Outside Christ”: Dostoevsky’s Joy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	40
3. The Sight of Death in Tolstoy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	75
4. Robert Bresson’s Pathos Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	119
5. Kafka’s No-Hope Spaces Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	168
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	201
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	265

Language: English
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 320
Illustrations
- Other: 75 halftones
Keywords: Bresson; aesthetic; ethical; ontology; Dostoevsky; Tolstoy; Kafka; counterpoint; categorical

eBook

Published: April 10, 2017
ISBN: 9780226414232