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Permanent liminality and modernity : analysing the sacrificial carnival through novels / Arpad Szakolczai.
Author
Szakolczai, Árpád
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Format
Book
Language
English
Published/Created
London ; New York : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.
Description
ix, 271 pages ; 24 cm.
Availability
Copies in the Library
Location
Call Number
Status
Location Service
Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks
BF175.5.L55 S93 2017
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Details
Subject(s)
Liminality
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Liminality in literature
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Rites and ceremonies
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Civilization, Modern
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Series
Contemporary liminality
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Summary note
This book offers a comprehensive sociological study of the nature and dynamics of the modern world, through the use of a series of anthropological concepts, including the trickster, schismogenesis, imitation and liminality. Developing the view that with the theatre playing a central role, the modern world is conditioned as much by cultural processes as it is by economic, technological or scientific ones, the author contends the world is, to a considerable extent, theatrical - a phenomenon experienced as inauthenticity or a loss of direction and meaning. As such the novel is revealed as a means for studying our theatricalised reality, not simply because novels can be understood to be likening the world to theatre, but because they effectively capture and present the reality of a world that has been thoroughly 'theatricalised' - and they do so more effectively than the main instruments usually employed to analyse reality: philosophy and sociology. With analyses of some of the most important novelists and novels of modern culture, including Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Mann, Blixen, Broch and Bulgakov, and focusing on fin-de-siècle Vienna as a crucial 'threshold' chronotope of modernity, Permanent Liminality and Modernity demonstrates that all seek to investigate and unmask the theatricalisation of modern life, with its progressive loss of meaning and our deteriorating capacity to distinguish between what is meaningful and what is artificial. Drawing on the work of Nietzsche, Bakhtin and Girard to examine the ways in which novels explore the reduction of human existence to a state of permanent liminality, in the form of a sacrificial carnival, this book will appeal to scholars of social, anthropological and literary theory. -- Provided by publisher.
Bibliographic references
Includes bibliographical references (pages 240-249) and indexes.
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Before WWI : waiting for the storm
Empires and their collapse : fin-de-siècle vienna in context
Hugo von Hofmannstha l: promises and realities
Novel origins : Rilke's notebooks of Malte and Hofmannsthal's Andreas
Suspended in the in-between : Franz Kafka
Kafka's sources and insights : theatre and other modes of distorted communication
Kafka's novels : in between theatre, theology and prophecy
The Zürau notebooks : the indestructible and the way
After WWI : hypermodernity as sacrificial carnival
Thomas Mann : death in venice and magic mountain
Karen Blixen : carnival and angelic avengers
Hermann Broch : sleepwalkers
Mikhail Bulgakov : master and margarita
Heimito von Doderer : demons
Béla Hamvas : carnival
Conclusion.
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ISBN
9781472473882 ((hardback))
1472473884 ((hardback))
LCCN
2016018101
OCLC
960968948
Other standard number
40026578709
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