Waubonsee Community College

Encounter, Milan Kundera ; translated from the French by Linda Asher

eng

no index present

non fiction

Encounter

456180604

Milan Kundera ; translated from the French by Linda Asher

Milan Kundera's new collection of essays is a passionate defense of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. Art is what we possess in the face of evil and the darker side of human nature. With the same mix of emotion and idea that characterizes his novels, Kundera revisits the artists who remain important to him and whose works help us better understand the world we live in and what it means to be human. An astute reader of fiction, Kundera brings his extraordinary critical gifts to bear on the paintings of Francis Bacon, the music of Leoš Janáček, and the films of Federico Fellini, as well as the novels of Philip Roth, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Gabriel García Márquez, among others. He also seeks to restore to its rightful place the work of Anatole France and Curzio Malaparte, major writers who have fallen into obscurity. --From publisher description

I. The painter's brutal gesture : on Francis Bacon -- II. Novels, Existential Soundings -- The Comical Absence of the Comical (Dostoyevky: The Idiot) -- Death and the Fuss (Louis-Ferdinand Céline: From Castle to Castle) -- Love in Accelerating History (Philip Roth: The Professor of Desire) -- The Secret of the Ages of Life (Gudbergur Bergsson: The Swan) -- The Idyll, the Daughter of Horror (Marek Bieńczyk: Tworki) -- The Debacle of Memories (Juan Goytisolo: The Curtain Falls) -- The Novel and Procreation (Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude) -- III. Blacklists, or Divertimento in Homage to Anatole France -- IV. The Dream of Total Heritage -- A Dialogue on Rabelais and the Misomusists -- The Dream of Total Heritage in Beethoven -- The Arch-Novel: An Open Letter for the Birthday of Carlos Fuentos -- The Total Rejection of Heritage, or Iannis Xenakis (a text published in 1980, with two interventions from 2008) -- V. Beautiful Like a Multiple Encounter -- VI. Elsewhere -- Exile as Liberation According to Vera Linhartova -- The Untouchable Solitude of a Foreigner (Oscar Milosz) -- Enmity and Friendship -- Faithful to Rabelais and to the Surrealists Who Delved into Dreams -- On the Two Great Springs, and on the Škvoreckýs -- From Beneath You'll Breathe the Roses (The Last Visit with Ernest Breleur) -- VII. My First Love -- The Long Race of a One-Legged Runner -- The Most Nostalgic Opera -- VIII. Forgetting Schoenberg -- No Celebration (a text published in 1995 in the Frankfurter Rundschau together with the other pieces celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the birth of cinema) -- What Will Be Left of You, Bertolt? -- Forgetting Schoenberg -- IX. The Skin: Malaparte's Arch-Novel