This intellectual portrait of Romain Rolland (1866-1944)--French
novelist, musicologist, dramatist, and Nobel prizewinner in
1915--focuses on his experiments with political commitment against
the backdrop of European history between the two world wars. Best
known as a biographer of Beethoven and for his novel,
Jean-Christophe, Rolland was one of those nonconforming writers who
perceived a crisis of bourgeois society in Europe before the Great
War, and who consciously worked to discredit and reshape that
society in the interwar period. Analyzing Rolland's itinerary of
engaged stands, David James Fisher clarifies aspects of European
cultural history and helps decipher the ambiguities at the heart of
all forms of intellectual engagement.
Moving from text to context, Fisher organizes the book around a
series of debates--Rolland's public and private collisions over
specific committed stands--introducing the reader to the polemical
style of French intellectual discourse and offering insight into
what it means to be a responsible intellectual. Fisher presents
Rolland's private ruminations, extensive research, and
reexamination of the function and style of the French man of
letters. He observes that Rolland experimented with five styles of
commitment: oceanic mysticism linked to progressive, democratic
politics; free thinking linked to antiwar dissent; pacifism and,
ultimately, Gandhism; antifacism linked to anti-imperialism,
antiracism, and all-out political resistance to fascism; and, most
controversially, fellow traveling as a form of socialist humanism
and the positive side of antifascism. Fisher views Rolland's
engagement historically and critically, showing that engaged
intellectuals of that time were neither naive propagandists nor
dupes of political parties.
David James Fisher makes a case for the committed writer and
hopes to re-ignite the debate about commitment. For him, Romain
Rolland sums up engagement in a striking, dialectical formula:
"Pessimism of the Intelligence, Optimism of the Will." His story
presents a powerful challenge to modern intellectuals.
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