- Jubilee offer: spend £10 or more on any product sold by Amazon.co.uk on or before June 6 and you can buy The Diamond Jubilee A Classical Celebration Album for just £2.50 Here's how (terms and conditions apply)
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Literature and Evil for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Special Offers and Product Promotions
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Synopsis
Essays discuss the work of Emily Bronte, Baudelaire, William Blake, Proust, Kafka, Genet, and de Sade, and examine the depiction of evil.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In this collection of Bataille's essays on various authors - Kafka, Sade, Brontė, Baudelaire, Blake, and others - we are not only served with interesting observations but also a good introduction to Bataille's own philosophy. It's a form of literary criticism that, like all of Bataille's writing, defies any schematic classification, yet it is a welcome diversion in the face of the reams of psychoanalytical studies of the mentioned writers.
Basically, Bataille brings the writings and lives of these authors into a pattern of good and evil. But here good and evil are formal identities that have different meanings for every other writer and not superficial metaphysical categories. And although Bataille views the authors and their works in relation to one another he mostly shies away from exploring troubled parental relationships, identifying neurotic tendencies or sexual deviation.
The underlying notion is that 'evil' belongs to the realm of counter-productivity, savagery, deliberate perversion, and the transgression of boundaries. In Bataille's other writings this realm is that of the 'sacred', or 'experience'. 'Good' is the realm of utility, reason, modesty, and adulthood. One could also apply the name 'profane' to this.
As mentioned, this basic pattern gets a different meaning with each other. For example, Baudelaire's evil is that he consciously posits the existence of God and subsequently rebels against this entity by taken the side of Satan. Also, his complete lethargy to work and loathing of society (i.e. the sphere of utility and reason) places him in the realm of evil.
Other examples are Kafka's rebellion against the world of adulthood by deliberately drenching himself in childishness, or Brontė's strange contrast of a meek young woman expressing herself in a novel ("Wuthering Heights") rich with violence and ob-scenity.
A welcome addition to literary criticism.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5 reviews
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Literature and Evil
26 Jun 2001
Format:Paperback
Georges Battaille throws down a challange to Jean-Paul Sartre, who held that "literature is inncocent". Bataille, in his examination of such figures as Emily Bronte, Sade, Baudelaire, Genet, Kafka and Michelet, and the component of "evil" in their works, argues that literature is, in fact, "guilty" and that, moreover, it must acknowledge itself as such. In his reading of these literary figures, Bataille proceeds to analyse literature's complicity with evil and how this enables it reach a fuller level of communication. Drawing on Freud, he "eroticises" literary creativity and contends that the notion of "Art for art's sake", which emerges as a reaction to a fragmented and reified social world dominated by utilitarianism and commodity fetishism, is actually a subterfuge, literature masquerading as innocent under the mantle of "pure art", in order to rechannel the forces that are dammed up owing to the repressions imposed by culture. Though elliptical and opaque, this book is a challenging and fascinating study, which has a potential for laying the foundations for a philosophy of composition that underwrites the aesthetic of evil and explores its relation to the overarching forces of institutional and administrative surveillance.
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful
The Death Drive in literature
14 Jun 1998
Format:Paperback
In this short (and at times very difficult) collection of essays, Bataille challenges Sartre's view that "literature is innocent". A selective survey of key writers - including Bronte, Genet and Sade - shows that literature is a necessary antidote to the overarching Superego and Capitalism's emphasis on the Reality Principle. In this way, Bataille shows that literture is in fact evil, in that it is anti-utilitiarian and thus embedded in the childish Pleasure Principle. While Bataille seems to alternate between ascribing the driving force of literature to both the Life Drive (Eros) and the Death Drive (Thanatos), he does succeed in showing how Freud - although he never explicitely invokes the name - can be used for a new method of reading literature.
Complex, Problematic, and Fascinating
27 Jun 2011
Format:Paperback
A fascinating and extremely difficult collection of essays from philosopher-anthropologist-novelist-librarian Georges Bataille, whose work on literature brings us closer to literarity in terms of Freudian repression. Bataille covers a number of great writers in this collection (Bronte, Genet, Baudelaire, Sade), and attempts to unveil their complicity with evil and eros. For Bataille, writing is eros in the damned sense. He inherits the Platonic legacy which has condemned poetry as that which is always at a double removal from truth. Literature is not an innocent counter-gesture to the decay of civilization, it is itself embedded in thanatos. While Bataille's own prose here is extremely cryptic, and he often subordinates the author's to his own vision, this remains a peculiar and important text.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
