The Unnamable Present

Author : Roberto Calasso
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141988029
Total Pages : 147 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Unnamable Present written by Roberto Calasso and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tourists, terrorists, secularists, hackers, fundamentalists, transhumanists, algorithmicians: in this book Roberto Calasso considers the tribes that inhabit and inform the world today. A world that feels more elusive than ever before. This book, the ninth part of a work in progress, is a meditation on the obscure and ubiquitous process of transformation happening in societies today, where distant echoes of Auden's The Age of Anxiety give way to something altogether more unsettling.

Author : Roberto Calasso
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141397020
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Ruin of Kasch written by Roberto Calasso and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sparkling new translation of the classic work on violence and revolution as seen through mythology and art The Ruin of Kasch takes up two subjects: "the first is Talleyrand, and the second is everything else," wrote Italo Calvino when the book first appeared in 1983. Hailed as one of those rare books that persuade us to see our entire civilization in a new light, its guide is the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, who knew the secrets of the ancien régime and all that came after, and was able to adapt the notion of "legitimacy" to the modern age. Roberto Calasso follows him through a vast gallery of scenes set immediately before and after the French Revolution, making occasional forays backward and forward in time, from Vedic India to the porticoes of the Palais-Royal and to the killing fields of Pol Pot, with appearances by Goethe and Marie Antoinette, Napoleon and Marx, Walter Benjamin and Chateaubriand. At the centre stands the story of the ruin of Kasch, a legendary kingdom based on the ritual killing of the king and emblematic of the ruin of ancient and modern regimes. 'Startling, puzzling, profound . . . a work charged with intelligence and literary seduction' The New York Times 'Unique, idiosyncratic and vaultingly ambitious... essential reading' Independent 'A great fat jewel-box of a book, gleaming with obscure treasures' John Banville

Author : Roberto Calasso
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0307272966
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Tiepolo Pink written by Roberto Calasso and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2009-10-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches, palaces, and villas, often covering vast ceilings like those at the Würzburg Residenz in Germany and the Royal Palace in Madrid with frescoes that are among the glories of Western art. The life of an epoch swirled around him—but though his contemporaries appreciated and admired him, they failed to understand him. Few have even attempted to tackle Tiepolo’s series of thirty-three bizarre and haunting etchings, the Capricci and the Scherzi, but Roberto Calasso rises to the challenge, interpreting them as chapters in a dark narrative that contains the secret of Tiepolo’s art. Blooming ephebes, female Satyrs, Oriental sages, owls, snakes: we will find them all, as well as Punchinello and Death, within the pages of this book, along with Venus, Time, Moses, numerous angels, Cleopatra, and Beatrice of Burgundy—a motley company always on the go. Calasso makes clear that Tiepolo was more than a dazzling intermezzo in the history of painting. Rather, he represented a particular way of meeting the challenge of form: endowed with a fluid, seemingly effortless style, Tiepolo was the last incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue sprezzatura, the art of not seeming artful.

Author : Maria Beville
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135052301
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Unnameable Monster in Literature and Film written by Maria Beville and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-30 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book visits the 'Thing' in its various manifestations as an unnameable monster in literature and film, reinforcing the idea that the very essence of the monster is its excess and its indeterminacy. Tied primarily to the artistic modes of the gothic, science fiction, and horror, the unnameable monster retains a persistent presence in literary forms as a reminder of the sublime object that exceeds our worst fears. Beville examines various representations of this elusive monster and argues that we must looks at the monster, rather than through it, at ourselves. As such, this book responds to the obsessive manner in which the monsters of literature and culture are ‘managed’ in processes of classification and in claims that they serve a social function by embodying all that is horrible in the human imagination. The book primarily considers literature from the Romantic period to the present, and film that leans toward postmodernism. Incorporating disciplines such as cultural theory, film theory, literary criticism, and continental philosophy, it focuses on that most difficult but interesting quality of the monster, its unnameability, in order to transform and accelerate current readings of not only the monsters of literature and film, but also those that are the focus of contemporary theoretical discussion.

Author : Roberto Calasso
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141971819
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Ardor written by Roberto Calasso and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this revelatory volume, Roberto Calasso, whom the Paris Review has called 'a literary institution', explores the ancient texts known as the Vedas. Little is known about the Vedic people who lived more than three thousand years ago in northern India: they left behind almost no objects, images, ruins. They created no empires. Even the hallucinogenic plant, the soma, which appears at the centre of some of their rituals, has not been identified with any certainty. Only a 'Parthenon of words' remains: verses and formulations suggesting a daring understanding of life. 'If the Vedic people had been asked why they did not build cities,' writes Calasso, 'they could have replied: we did not seek power, but rapture.' This is the ardor of the Vedic world, a burning intensity that is always present, both in the mind and in the cosmos. With his signature erudition and profound sense of the past, Calasso explores the enigmatic web of ritual and myth that define the Vedas. Often at odds with modern thought, he shows how these texts illuminate the nature of consciousness more than neuroscientists have been able to offer us up to now. Following the 'hundred paths' of the Satapatha Brahmana, an impressive exegesis of Vedic ritual, Ardor indicates that it may be possible to reach what is closest by passing through that which is most remote, as 'the whole of Vedic India was an attempt to think further'.

Author : Roberto Calasso
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307537730
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Literature and the Gods written by Roberto Calasso and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-06-16 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brilliant, inspired, and gloriously erudite, Literature and the Gods is the culmination of Roberto Calasso’s lifelong study of the gods in the human imagination. By uncovering the divine whisper that lies behind the best poetry and prose from across the centuries, Calasso gives us a renewed sense of the mystery and enchantment of great literature. From the banishment of the classical divinities during the Age of Reason to their emancipation by the Romantics and their place in the literature of our own time, the history of the gods can also be read as a ciphered and splendid history of literary inspiration. Rewriting that story, Calasso carves out a sacred space for literature where the presence of the gods is discernible. His inquiry into the nature of “absolute literature” transports us to the realms of Dionysus and Orpheus, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, and prompts a lucid and impassioned defense of poetic form, even when apparently severed from any social function. Lyrical and assured, Literature and the Gods is an intensely engaging work of literary affirmation that deserves to be read alongside the masterpieces it celebrates.

Author : Roberto Calasso
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0679775471
Total Pages : 465 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Ka written by Roberto Calasso and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1999-11-02 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In "the very best book about Hindu mythology that anyone has ever written" (The New Republic) Calasso plunges Western readers into the mind of ancient India. He begins with a mystery: Why is the most important god in the Rg Veda, the oldest of India's sacred texts, known by a secret name—"Ka," or Who? What ensues is not an explanation, but an unveiling. Here are the stories of the creation of mind and matter; of the origin of Death, of the first sexual union and the first parricide. We learn why Siva must carry his father's skull, why snakes have forked tongues, and why, as part of a certain sacrifice, the king's wife must copulate with a dead horse. A tour de force of scholarship and seduction, Ka is irresistible.

Author : Roberto Calasso
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0374183341
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book La Folie Baudelaire written by Roberto Calasso and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-10-16 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the life, influence, and work of the French writer and founder of modernism.

Author : Ellen Booraem
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 13 : 0152063684
Total Pages : 339 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Unnameables written by Ellen Booraem and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2008 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A boy and a goatman defy the establishment in a whimsical fantasy about belonging, the dangers of forgetting history, the Usefulness of art, and the importance of wind control.

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 0374279470
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book written by and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: