The novel and the transience of cultural worlds
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The first decades of the 20th century saw the emergence of a robust, holist and historicist notion of culture. This essay examines the moral and aesthetic implications of the paradigm shift spearheaded by this term, as these manifest in the realm of the 20th-century realist novel. At the center of study are three elegiac novels that belong to three literary traditions: The Age of Innocence (1920), Radetzkymarsch (1932) and Past Continuous (1977). Their authors--American Edith Wharton, Austro-Hungarian Joseph Roth and Israeli Yaakov Shabtai--all lived through what they regarded as the demise of the worlds that had shaped them. By articulating this personal experience using a distinctively social-constructivist and post-metaphysical vocabulary, they provided us not only with poignant stories of cultural collapse, but also with subtle meditations on the changing meanings of morality and selfhood in a post-Nietzschean, post-Darwinian intellectual climate. Although Wharton, Roth and Shabtai have each received considerable critical attention in their respective traditions, they have not yet been read together as part of a single, comparative, literary-historical argument. The present study attempts this kind of synthesis. Culture, it seeks to show, emerges from these novels, simultaneously, as an all-pervasive power, which by constructing identities, terminally shapes lives, and as a fragile, parochial and ultimately transitory human creation.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2012 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Evron, Nir |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Comparative Literature. |
| Primary advisor | Eshel, Amir |
| Primary advisor | Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich |
| Thesis advisor | Eshel, Amir |
| Thesis advisor | Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich |
| Thesis advisor | Berman, Russell A, 1950- |
| Advisor | Berman, Russell A, 1950- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Nir Evron. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Comparative Literature. |
| Thesis | Ph.D. Stanford University 2012 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2012 by Nir Evron
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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