The Pathos of the Real

This book is about the ambition, in a set of paradigmatic writers of the twentieth century, to simultaneously enlist and break the spell of the real—their fascination with the spectacle of violence and suffering—and the difficulties involved in capturing this kind of excess by aesthetic means.The wo...

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Main Author: Buch, Robert
Format: Online
Language:English
Published: Johns Hopkins University Press 2022
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Online Access:ONIX_20220715_9781421428109_508
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author Buch, Robert
author_browse Buch, Robert
author_facet Buch, Robert
author_sort Buch, Robert
collection Directory of Open Access Books
description This book is about the ambition, in a set of paradigmatic writers of the twentieth century, to simultaneously enlist and break the spell of the real—their fascination with the spectacle of violence and suffering—and the difficulties involved in capturing this kind of excess by aesthetic means.The works at the center of this study—by Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Claude Simon, Peter Weiss, and Heiner Müller—zero in on scenes of agony, destruction, and death with an astonishing degree of precision and detail. The strange and troubling nature of the appeal engendered by these sights is the subject of The Pathos of the Real. Robert Buch shows that the spectacles of suffering conjured up in these texts are deeply ambivalent, available neither to cathartic relief nor to the sentiment of compassion. What prevails instead is a peculiar coincidence of opposites: exaltation and resignation; disfiguration and transfiguration; agitation and paralysis.Featuring the experiences of violent excess in strongly visual and often in expressly pictorial terms, the works expose the nexus between violence and the image in twentieth-century aesthetics. Buch explores this tension between visual and verbal representation by drawing on the rhetorical notion of pathos as both insurmountable suffering and codified affect and the psychoanalytic notion of the real, that is, the disruption of the symbolic order.In dialogue with a diverse group of thinkers, from Erich Auerbach and Aby Warburg to Alain Badiou and Jacques Lacan, The Pathos of the Real advances an innovative new framework for rethinking the aesthetics of violence in the twentieth century.
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spelling doab-20.500.12854ir-887612024-03-26T22:58:38Z The Pathos of the Real Buch, Robert Literature: history & criticism thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DS Literature: history and criticism This book is about the ambition, in a set of paradigmatic writers of the twentieth century, to simultaneously enlist and break the spell of the real—their fascination with the spectacle of violence and suffering—and the difficulties involved in capturing this kind of excess by aesthetic means.The works at the center of this study—by Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Claude Simon, Peter Weiss, and Heiner Müller—zero in on scenes of agony, destruction, and death with an astonishing degree of precision and detail. The strange and troubling nature of the appeal engendered by these sights is the subject of The Pathos of the Real. Robert Buch shows that the spectacles of suffering conjured up in these texts are deeply ambivalent, available neither to cathartic relief nor to the sentiment of compassion. What prevails instead is a peculiar coincidence of opposites: exaltation and resignation; disfiguration and transfiguration; agitation and paralysis.Featuring the experiences of violent excess in strongly visual and often in expressly pictorial terms, the works expose the nexus between violence and the image in twentieth-century aesthetics. Buch explores this tension between visual and verbal representation by drawing on the rhetorical notion of pathos as both insurmountable suffering and codified affect and the psychoanalytic notion of the real, that is, the disruption of the symbolic order.In dialogue with a diverse group of thinkers, from Erich Auerbach and Aby Warburg to Alain Badiou and Jacques Lacan, The Pathos of the Real advances an innovative new framework for rethinking the aesthetics of violence in the twentieth century. 2022-07-15T15:13:26Z 2022-07-15T15:13:26Z 2010 book ONIX_20220715_9781421428109_508 9781421428109 https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/88761 eng image/jpeg Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International https://muse.jhu.edu/book/478 Johns Hopkins University Press 10.1353/book.478 10.1353/book.478 1f9b1002-ec35-4fcf-94be-32cfd0a1dfd3 9781421428109 232 open access
spellingShingle Literature: history & criticism
thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DS Literature: history and criticism
Buch, Robert
The Pathos of the Real
title The Pathos of the Real
title_full The Pathos of the Real
title_fullStr The Pathos of the Real
title_full_unstemmed The Pathos of the Real
title_short The Pathos of the Real
title_sort pathos of the real
topic Literature: history & criticism
thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DS Literature: history and criticism
topic_facet Literature: history & criticism
thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DS Literature: history and criticism
url ONIX_20220715_9781421428109_508
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