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Marina Van Zuylen - Monomania - 9780801489860 - V9780801489860
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Monomania

€ 33.99
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Description for Monomania Paperback. Num Pages: 252 pages, black & white illustrations. BIC Classification: DSB. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 230 x 156 x 16. Weight in Grams: 356.

"This book is about the obsessive strategies people use to keep the arbitrary out of their lives; it is about the fanaticism and intolerance linked to their ideas of perfection and permanence.... Those readers who have brushed against the dangers of the idée fixe, who have come close to surrendering to something or someone diabolically seductive or coercive, will recognize in these characters their own encounter with a dangerously systematized world."—From the introduction.

Monomania explores the cultural prominence of the idée fixe in Western Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marina van Zuylen revives the term monomania to explore ... Read more

In van Zuylen's view, there is a productive tension between disabling fixations and their curative powers; she argues that the idée fixe has acted as a corrective for the multiple disorders of modernity. The authors she studies—Charles Baudelaire, Sophie Calle, Elias Canetti, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and Thomas Mann among them—embody or set in motion different manifestations of this monomaniacal imperative. Their protagonists or alter egos live more intensely, more meaningfully, because of the compulsive pressures they set up for themselves. Monomania shows that transforming life into art, or at least into the artful, drives out the anxiety of the void and puts in its place something so orderly and meaningful that it can take on the aura of a religion.

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Product Details

Format
Paperback
Publication date
2005
Publisher
Cornell University Press United States
Number of pages
256
Condition
New
Number of Pages
252
Place of Publication
Ithaca, United States
ISBN
9780801489860
SKU
V9780801489860
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1

About Marina Van Zuylen
Marina van Zuylen is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Bard College. She is the author of Difficulty as an Aesthetic Principle.

Reviews for Monomania
"As we turn these learned pages on modernist fanaticism, obsession, compulsion, and idées fixes, we come to recognize the figure in the mirror: the monomaniac is us. Marina van Zuylen's gentle irony and dry wit make this richly written book a delight to read."
Janet Beizer, Harvard University "In the same way as Rene Girard analyzed the structure of ... Read more

Goodreads reviews for Monomania


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