Five Portraits: Modernity and the Imagination in Twentieth-Century German Writing

by Bernstein, Michael Andre

• ISBN13: 9780810117747
• ISBN10: 0810117746
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-10-01
• Publisher: Northwestern Univ Pr

Summary

In Five Portraits one of the most acute and interesting critical thinkers of our time offers essays on five of the most important writers of the past hundred years. The result is a remarkable portrait of a cultural moment of crisis -- a time when these writers, caught between the dream of creating an abiding masterpiece and the reality of a brutal culture deeply fascinated by apocalyptic catastrophe, deliberately put themselves and their work at the imaginative center of the storm.

Five Portraits includes compelling readings of Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Celan, Robert Musil, Martin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin: two poets, a novelist, a philosopher, and a literary-cultural theorist. Though many readers are familiar with these names, few, apart from specialists, possess an in-depth knowledge of them all. Bernstein's essays, written in elegant and jargon-free prose, can stand alone; but together they create a vivid image of a cultural epoch whose aspirations and torments continue to shape the world we inhabit today.

Michael Andre Bernstein's concerns are not l

Author Biography

Michael Andre Bernstein is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction Five Portraits and the Modernist Masterpiece	1	(10)
The Book of Inwardness	11	(24)
Rainer Maria Rilke
Precision and Soul	35	(22)
Robert Musil
Judgment Terminal and Interminable	57	(22)
Martin Heidegger
Apocalypse and Memory	79	(20)
Walter Benjamin
Radiance That Will Not Comfort	99	(26)
Paul Celan
Notes	125	(18)
Index	143