Five Faces of Modernity by Matei Calinescu

Five Faces of Modernity by Matei Calinescu

Five Faces of Modernity is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: modernity, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, and postmodernism. The concept of modernity—the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours—is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural modernity and, in tracing the shifting senses of the five terms under scrutiny, illustrates the intricate value judgments, conflicting orientations, and intellectual paradoxes to which it has given rise. Five Faces of Modernity attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as classicism, baroque, romanticism, realism, or symbolism and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity.

Matei Calinescu (1934-2009), born and educated in Romania, was one of the leading intellectuals of his generation. His novel The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter (published in Romanian in 1969) acquired cult status among generations of young people despite attempts by Romanian authorities to expunge Calinescu's name and works from cultural memory. He emigrated to America in 1973 and established himself in his new homeland as a literary scholar, publishing his two major works, Five Faces of Modernity (1977; ultimately translated into eight languages) and Rereading (1993), and teaching in the Comparative Literature Department at Indiana University. After the collapse of Ceauşescu's national-Communist dictatorship in 1989, Calinescu was welcomed once more in his home country. In a poll of literary critics conducted there in 2001, The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter was ranked among the top ten Romanian prose works of the twentieth century. A sixteen-volume edition of his selected literary and scholarly works is currently in progress.

Adriana Calinescu is the Thomas T. Solley curator emerita of ancient art at Indiana University's Eskenazi Museum of Art. She has written widely on the subject of ancient art and is the editor of the scholarly work Ancient Jewelry and Archaeology. She has translated works from English into Romanian, including Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which is the standard text in Romania.

Breon Mitchell is a professor emeritus of Germanic studies and comparative literature at Indiana University. A past president of the American Literary Translators Association, he has received numerous national awards for literary translations, including the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize, the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize from the Modern Language Association, and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize from the British Society of Authors. His translations from the German include Franz Kafka's The Trial and Günter Grass's The Tin Drum, as well as works by Heinrich Bü¾¦˜¼ll, Siegfried Lenz, Uwe Timm, and Marcel Beyer.

Norman Manea has written numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, including the memoir The Hooligan's Return and the novel The Lair. He has been awarded several literary prizes, including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Guadalajara International Book Fair's (FIL) 2016 Literature in Romance Languages Award, and the Prix Mü¾Ž–”¼dicis ü¾Ž–”¼tranger. He is a professor emeritus and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

SKU	Non disponible
ISBN 13	9780822307679
ISBN 10	0822307677
Titre	Five Faces of Modernity
Auteur	Matei Calinescu
État	Non disponible
Type de reliure	Paperback
Éditeur	Duke University Press
Année de publication	1987-06-01
Nombre de pages	422
Note de couverture	La photo du livre est présentée à titre d'illustration uniquement. La reliure, la couverture ou l'édition réelle peuvent varier.
Note	Non disponible