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Elias Canetti's counter-image of society : crowds, power,
transformation
Johann P. Arnason and David Roberts
Rochester, N.Y. : Camden House, c2004.
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Book description
The award of the Nobel Prize for literature in
1981 has seemingly assured Elias Canetti's place in literary history. But
his significance as a cultural critic has not been adequately recognized.
The present study redresses this situation in two ways: by mapping the
counter-image of human existence, history, and society that informs
Canetti's critique of the modern world and its sciences; and by opening up
Canetti's hermetic oeuvre by tracing his cryptic and often concealed
dialogue with major figures within the Western tradition such as Hobbes,
Durkheim, and Freud and contemporaries such as Adorno, Arendt, and Elias.
The authors ask how Canetti's alternative vision of man and society relates
to important themes of twentieth-century social and civilizational thought
even as it calls into question fundamental assumptions of the social and
human sciences. In analyses of Auto da Fé, Crowds and Power, and the
aphorisms, the authors elucidate key aspects of Canetti's interrogation of
human existence and human history across five thematic complexes: individual
and social psychology, totalitarian politics, religion and politics,
theories of society, and power and culture. They thus trace the movement of
Canetti's thought from an apocalyptic sense of crisis to his search for
cultural resources to set against the holocaust of European civilization. [Camden
House]
About the author
Johann P. Arnason is a visiting Research Fellow in the School of
Languages, Cultures & Linguistics at Monash University. Professor
Arnason is editor of the internationally recognised journal of social
theory Thesis Eleven and he held a personal chair in Sociology
at La Trobe University from 1994 to 2003.
David Roberts is Emeritus Professor of German at Monash University.
Professor Roberts is a former director of the Centre for Comparative
Literature and Cultural Studies, and co-editor of the social theory journal
Thesis Eleven.
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