The Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with Rene Girard
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The Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with Rene Girard

Reading Milan Kundera with Rene Girard

  1. 208 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

The Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with Rene Girard

Reading Milan Kundera with Rene Girard

Book details
Table of contents
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About This Book

Trevor Cribben Merrill offers a bold reassessment of Milan Kundera's place in the contemporary canon. Harold Bloom and others have dismissed the Franco-Czech author as a maker of "period pieces" that lost currency once the Berlin Wall fell. Merrill refutes this view, revealing a previously unexplored dimension of Kundera's fiction. Building on theorist René Girard's notion of "triangular desire, " he shows that modern classics such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting display a counterintuitive-and bitterly funny-understanding of human attraction. Most works of fiction (and most movies, too) depict passionate feelings as deeply authentic and spontaneous. Kundera's novels and short stories overturn this romantic dogma. A pounding heart and sweaty palms could mean that we have found "the One" at last-or they could attest to the influence of a model whose desires we are unconsciously borrowing: our amorous predilections may owe less to personal taste or physical chemistry than they do to imitative desire. At once a comprehensive survey of Kundera's novels and a witty introduction to Girard's mimetic theory, The Book of Imitation and Desire challenges our assumptions about human motive and renews our understanding of a major contemporary author.

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Information

Publisher
Bloomsbury Academic
Year
2013
ISBN
9781441195463
Edition
1
Topic
Literature
Subtopic
European Literary Criticism
Index
Literature

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. HalfTitle
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Contents
  7. Foreword by Andrew McKenna
  8. Author’s Preface
  9. 1 “Women Look for Men Who Have Had Beautiful Women”
  10. 2 Into the Labyrinth of Values
  11. 3 From Imitation to Rivalry
  12. 4 The Model as Obstacle
  13. 5 Jealousy and its Metaphors
  14. 6 The Quadrille of Desire
  15. 7 At the Heart of the Labyrinth
  16. 8 Repudiating the Model
  17. 9 Tomas in Colonus, or the Wisdom of the Novel
  18. Postscript: A Response to Elif Batuman
  19. Appendix: A Brief Overview of Kundera’s Life and Works
  20. Notes
  21. Bibliography
  22. Index