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"The Flame of Eternity" provides a reexamination and new
interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy and the central role that
the concepts of eternity and time, as he understood them, played in
it. According to Krzysztof Michalski, Nietzsche's reflections on
human life are inextricably linked to time, which in turn cannot be
conceived of without eternity. Eternity is a measure of time, but
also, Michalski argues, something Nietzsche viewed first and
foremost as a physiological concept having to do with the body. The
body ages and decays, involving us in a confrontation with our
eventual death. It is in relation to this brute fact that we come
to understand eternity and the finitude of time. Nietzsche argues
that humanity has long regarded the impermanence of our life as an
illness in need of curing. It is this "pathology" that Nietzsche
called nihilism. Arguing that this insight lies at the core of
Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole, Michalski seeks to explain and
reinterpret Nietzsche's thought in light of it. Michalski maintains
that many of Nietzsche's main ideas--including his views on love,
morality (beyond good and evil), the will to power, overcoming, the
suprahuman (or the "overman," as it is infamously referred to), the
Death of God, and the myth of the eternal return--take on new
meaning and significance when viewed through the prism of
eternity.
Yuri Lotman (1922-1993) was one of the most prominent and
influential scholars of the twentieth century working in the Soviet
Union. A co-founder of the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics, he
applied his mind to a wide array of disciplines, from aesthetics to
literary and cultural history, narrative theory to intellectual
history, cinema to mythology. This collection provides a
stand-alone primer to his intellectual legacy in both semiotics and
cultural history. It includes new translations of some of his major
pieces as well as works that have never been published in English.
The collection brings Lotman into the orbit of contemporary
concerns such as gender, memory, performance, world literature, and
urban life. It is aimed at students from various disciplines and is
augmented by an introduction and notes that elucidate the relevant
contexts.
Yuri Lotman (1922-1993) was one of the most prominent and
influential scholars of the twentieth century working in the Soviet
Union. A co-founder of the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics, he
applied his mind to a wide array of disciplines, from aesthetics to
literary and cultural history, narrative theory to intellectual
history, cinema to mythology. This collection provides a
stand-alone primer to his intellectual legacy in both semiotics and
cultural history. It includes new translations of some of his major
pieces as well as works that have never been published in English.
The collection brings Lotman into the orbit of contemporary
concerns such as gender, memory, performance, world literature, and
urban life. It is aimed at students from various disciplines and is
augmented by an introduction and notes that elucidate the relevant
contexts.
Scholars of modernism have long addressed how literature, painting,
and music reflected the radical reconceptualization of space and
time in the early twentieth century-a veritable revolution in both
physics and philosophy that has been characterized as precipitating
an "epistemic trauma" around the world. In this wide-ranging study,
Benjamin Paloff contends that writers in Central and Eastern Europe
felt this impact quite distinctly from their counterparts in
Western Europe. For the latter, the destabilization of traditional
notions of space and time inspired works that saw in it a new kind
of freedom. However, for many Central and Eastern European authors,
who were writing from within public discourses about how to
construct new social realities, the need for escape met the
realization that there was both nowhere to escape to and no stable
delineation of what to escape from. In reading the prose and poetry
of Czech, Polish, and Russian writers, Paloff imbues the term
"Kafkaesque" with a complexity so far missing from our
understanding of this moment in literary history.
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The Romance of Teresa Hennert (Paperback)
Zofia Nalkowska; Translated by Megan Thomas, Ewa Malachowska-Pasek; Foreword by Benjamin Paloff
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R759
R618
Discovery Miles 6 180
Save R141 (19%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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The Romance of Teresa Hennert is a masterpiece of psychological
realism and a still-shocking portrait of mixed motives and bad
behavior. It renders a tragicomic vision of what happens when a
society is suddenly deprived of the struggle that had defined it
for more than a century. Written in 1922, just four years after
Poland achieved independence from its neighboring empires, the
novel focuses on a Warsaw community of officers, bureaucrats,
intellectuals, wives, and lovers, all of them adrift in a hell of
their own making-the long-sought freedom to shape their own
destiny. At the center of this milieu is Teresa Hennert, whose
youthful charm, modern habits, and apparent indifference to the
emotional torment of those around her make her an inescapable
object of their fascination and desire. Told in multiple voices and
from numerous perspectives, Zofia Nalkowska's novel is a mosaic of
dysfunction at all levels of the new Polish society, from a
bumbling lieutenant who cannot stand his home life to a young
Communist who believes his forebears have made a mess that only the
next generation can clean up. In this world, ideological battles,
personal animosity, postwar trauma, and infidelity become
inextricably bound together, driving these colorful, increasingly
confused characters toward corruption, suicide, and murder.
Nalkowska (1884-1954), though long neglected in the West, was a
central figure in the literary life of interwar Poland and was an
early pioneer of feminist fiction in Central Europe. Her spare,
witty prose will surprise contemporary readers with its frank
sexuality and stark illustration of dreams gone horribly,
humiliatingly, dramatically awry.
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Tworki (Paperback)
Marek Bienczyk; Translated by Benjamin Paloff; Andrew Baruch Wachtel
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R638
R605
Discovery Miles 6 050
Save R33 (5%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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In Tworki, a village just southwest of Warsaw, there is a
psychiatric hospital and in that hospital, the patients and their
caretakers are hidden from the war just outside their iron gates.
Our hero, Jurek, answers an ad in the paper for a job there and
finds himself keeping the books alongside a knock-out strawberry
blonde named Sonia. They and their group of friends - vital young
people like Marcel, an initial rival for Jurek; Olek, Sonia's
chosen love; and Janka, with whom Jurek becomes involved - do their
jobs, picnic on the weekends, and dance in the gardens on the
grounds of the hospital.Jurek speaks often of, and even in, verse,
whether he is talking to his friends or in letters to a distant and
admiring cousin. He and his friends live lives that defy the
discord and destruction of the war in Europe, striving to
rediscover or save whatever beauty they can. Much of this beauty is
embodied by Sonia, who is beloved of all the friends and patients
at the asylum.But the revitalizing spring they all hope will come
for Poland is not to arrive this year. Despite the relative safety
of their odd surroundings, the world and the war soon come for the
friends. Olek's absences are longer and unexplained. Marcel is not
what he seems, and he and his wife mysteriously disappear, she
says, to the gas. And the perfection that Sonia embodies cannot
ultimately be kept, by the friends, by the nation, or even by Sonia
herself.
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