Literature and the Gods
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"One way or another, the world will go on being the place of epiphanies," says literary theorist Calasso (Ka; The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony) in this impressive, weighty and succinct work based on his Weidenfeld Lectures at Oxford last year. Calasso argues that literary texts have always had a religious dimension, whether overtly (as in Homer) or covertly (as in Borges). In the modern era, pre-Christian deities, though often seen as "fugitive guests of literature," have weighed in heavily, asserts Calasso. He elucidates their none-too-obvious influence in a variety of works, both Western and non-Western, from Vedic verse ("the first example of the worship of form") and the Romantic prose of Nietzsche, to the modern poetry of Mallarm and even the postmodern prose of Nabokov. Calasso sees the 19th century as "the heroic age of absolute literature," which embodies "a knowledge that one assimilates while in search of an absolute, and that thus draws in no less than everything... unbound, freed from any... social utility." Married to certain aesthetics, specifically from German Romanticism through Symbolism, he dismisses much 20th-century poetic experimentalism "embarrassingly labeled as 'modernism' or 'the avant-garde' " for its "aggressive, disruptive forms." Regardless of literary preference, his gorgeous, vivid turns of phrase are a pleasure, and Parks's translation retains Calasso's grace and poise, doing justice to his lovely metaphors ("literature can become an effective stratagem for sneaking the gods out of the universal clinic and getting them back into the world, scattered across its surface where they have always dwelt"). Scholars and general readers of world literature and religion will enjoy this rich, poetic contribution to literary theory, and to poetics in particular.
