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Author Buch, Robert Caspar.

Title The pathos of the real : on the aesthetics of violence in the twentieth century / Robert Buch
Published Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010

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Description 1 online resource (217 pages)
Series Rethinking theory
Rethinking theory.
Contents In praise of cruelty: Bataille, Kafka, and ling'-chi -- Fragmentary description of a disaster: Claude Simon -- The resistance to pathos and the pathos of resistance: Peter Weiss -- Medeamachine: the "fallout" of violence in Heiner Müller -- Epilogue
Summary 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 Muller--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 in the subject of The Pathas 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 Badion and Jacques Lacan. The Pathos of the Real advances an innovative new framework for rethinking the aesthetics of violence in the twentieth century. --Book Jacket
Analysis Literature: history & criticism
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 197-212) and index
Notes English
Print version record
Subject Reality -- History -- 20th century
Pathos -- History -- 20th century
Violence -- History -- 20th century
Cruelty -- History -- 20th century
Aesthetics, Modern -- 20th century.
Literature: history & criticism.
Aesthetics, Modern
Cruelty
Pathos
Reality
Violence
Genre/Form dictionaries.
History
Dictionaries.
Dictionnaires.
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2010007499
ISBN 9780801899270
0801899273
1421428105
9781421428109