A groundbreaking study examining major literary treatments of the
idea of earthly immortality, throwing into relief fascinating
instances of human self-awareness over the past three hundred
years. The idea of earthly immortality has a tradition in
literature dating to the Gilgamesh epic. But what would it mean to
attain such immortality? Answers are suggested in novels and plays
that explore the theme using varieties of Borges's "rational
imagination," often in connection with projections of biology or
cybernetics. In this groundbreaking study, Karl S. Guthke examines
key works in this vein, throwing into relief fascinating instances
of human self-awareness across the last three hundred years.
Authors discussed in detail include J. M. Barrie, Calvino, Shaw,
Adolfo Bioy Casares, Swift, Aldous Huxley, Walter Besant, Arthur C.
Clarke, Wilde, Borges, William Godwin, P. B. and Mary Shelley,
Capek, Machado de Assis, Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Amis, Dino
Buzzati, Houellebecq, Iris Barry, Saramago, Rushdie, Gabi
Gleichmann, and Pascal Mercier. Guthke finds that the fictional
triumph over death is only rarely viewed positively, and mostly as
a "curse" - for a variety of reasons. Almost always, however,
literary experiments with immortality suggest an alternative: the
chance to take our limited lifetime into our own hands, shapingit
meaningfully and thereby experiencing "a new way of being in the
world" (Mercier). The fictional immortals reject this challenge,
thus depriving themselves of what makes humans human and life worth
living. And what that mightbe is also at least hinted at in the
works Guthke analyzes. As a result, an aspect of cultural history
comes into view that is revealing and stimulating at a time that
is, as Der Spiegel put it in 2014, "obsessed by the invention of
immortality." Karl S. Guthke is the Kuno Francke Professor of
Germanic Art and Culture, Emeritus, of Harvard University.
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