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 ...
More
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.
Francesco Orlando
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300108088
- eISBN:
- 9780300138214
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300108088.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
This chapter examines the use of nonfunctional objects and images that appear in literature, particularly in the novel—for in the novel, this phenomenon is less straightforward and apparent as ...
More
This chapter examines the use of nonfunctional objects and images that appear in literature, particularly in the novel—for in the novel, this phenomenon is less straightforward and apparent as compared to its counterparts in the structure of a poem or a short story. Some of the novels that are examined with respect to this purpose are taken from the twentieth century, novels such as: Arturo's Island by Elsa Morante, The Bear by William Faulkner, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the incomplete The Trial by Franz Kafka among, several others. Throughout the series of twentieth-century novels, then, the chapter aims to analyze the power of structuration in the images they contain, and how they are connected to the categorization problem.Less
This chapter examines the use of nonfunctional objects and images that appear in literature, particularly in the novel—for in the novel, this phenomenon is less straightforward and apparent as compared to its counterparts in the structure of a poem or a short story. Some of the novels that are examined with respect to this purpose are taken from the twentieth century, novels such as: Arturo's Island by Elsa Morante, The Bear by William Faulkner, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the incomplete The Trial by Franz Kafka among, several others. Throughout the series of twentieth-century novels, then, the chapter aims to analyze the power of structuration in the images they contain, and how they are connected to the categorization problem.
