Francesco Orlando
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300108088
- eISBN:
- 9780300138214
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300108088.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
Translated here into English is a work of literary history and criticism comparable in scope and achievement to Eric Auerbach's Mimesis. The author explores Western literature's obsession with ...
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Translated here into English is a work of literary history and criticism comparable in scope and achievement to Eric Auerbach's Mimesis. The author explores Western literature's obsession with outmoded and nonfunctional objects (ruins, obsolete machinery, broken things, trash, etc.). Combining the insights of psychoanalysis and literary-political history, he traces this obsession to a turning point in history, at the end of eighteenth-century industrialization, when the functional became the dominant value of Western culture. Roaming through every genre and much of the history of Western literature, the author identifies distinct categories into which obsolete images can be classified and provides myriad examples. The function of literature, he concludes, is to remind us of what we have lost and what we are losing as we rush toward the future.Less
Translated here into English is a work of literary history and criticism comparable in scope and achievement to Eric Auerbach's Mimesis. The author explores Western literature's obsession with outmoded and nonfunctional objects (ruins, obsolete machinery, broken things, trash, etc.). Combining the insights of psychoanalysis and literary-political history, he traces this obsession to a turning point in history, at the end of eighteenth-century industrialization, when the functional became the dominant value of Western culture. Roaming through every genre and much of the history of Western literature, the author identifies distinct categories into which obsolete images can be classified and provides myriad examples. The function of literature, he concludes, is to remind us of what we have lost and what we are losing as we rush toward the future.
