Reading Materials
Works of Note:
Works highlighted in blue denote Nietzsche Circle Advisor
Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the Animality of the Human Being
Vanessa Lemm
This book explores the significance of human animality in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and provides the first systematic treatment of the animal theme in Nietzsche’s corpus as a whole. Lemm argues that the animal is neither a random theme nor a metaphorical device in Nietzsche’s thought. Instead, it stands at the center of his renewal of the practice and meaning of philosophy itself. The question of the animal in Nietzsche’s thought as treated by Lemm provides an original contribution to ongoing debates on the essence of humanism and its future.
The book will appeal not only to readers interested in Nietzsche but also to anyone interested in the theme of the animal in contemporary philosophy, comparative literature, cultural studies, and the arts, as well as those interested in the relation between biological life and politics.
About the Author:
Vanessa Lemm is Associate Professor at the School for Political Science and the Institute of Humanities at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile. She previously taught at Northwestern University and at the European College for Liberal Arts, Berlin.
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The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
Fascination with quotidian experience in modern art, literature, and philosophy promotes ecstatic forms of reflection on the very structure of the everyday world. Gosetti-Ferencei examines the ways in which modern art and literature enable a study of how we experience quotidian life. She shows that modernism, while exhibiting many strands of development, can be understood by investigating how its attentions to perception and expectation, to the common quality of things, or to childhood play gives way to experiences of ecstasis—the stepping outside of the ordinary familiarity of the world.
While phenomenology grounds this study (through Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard), what makes this book more than a treatise on phenomenological aesthetics is the way in which modernity itself is examined in its relation to the quotidian. Through the works of artists and writers such as Benjamin, Cézanne, Frost, Klee, Newman, Pollock, Ponge, Proust, Rilke, Robbe-Grillet, Rothko, Sartre, and Twombly, the world of quotidian life can be seen to harbor a latent ecstasis. The breakdown of the quotidian through and after modernism then becomes an urgent question for understanding art and literature in its capacity to further human experience, and it points to the limits of phenomenological explications of the everyday.
About the Author:
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University and a Clarendon Scholar at the University of Oxford. Her previous publications include Heidegger, Holderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language (2004) and After the Palace Burns: Poems (2003).
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Blood Orgies: Hermann Nitsch in America
Hermann Nitsch, Aaron Levy, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Osvaldo Romberg, Andreas Stadler, et al
The publication features critical essays on the relation of Nitsch's work to recent developments in performance art, art history, and cultural theory, alongside photo documentation and a video of his ritualistic performances since 1962. The publication is edited and introduced by Aaron Levy and students in the RBSL Bergman Foundation Curatorial Seminar in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania; contributors to the volume include Adrian Daub, Lorand Hegyi, Susan Jarosi, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Michèle H. Richman, Osvaldo Romberg, and Dieter Ronte. The book will be distributed internationally by Microcinema International.
About the Author:
Hermann Nitsch (born 1938) is an Austrian performance artist and a forerunner of Wiener Aktionismus (Viennese Actionism, or Performance art). Nitsch is known for his ritualistic performance actions, often combining fake crucifixion with the disemboweling of lambs and other animals. In the late 50s Hermann Nitsch developed the concept of the "Orgien Mysterien Theater" (Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries) a total work of art appealing to all senses, celebratory and life-affirming. Drawing on religion, philosophy and psychology, he has composed numerous theoretical writings, compositions and scores to accompany over 100 realized action performances between the years of 1962 and 1998. In 1998, Nitsch staged his 100th performance (named the 6-Day Play after its length) which took place at Schloss Prinzendorf, his castle in Austria.
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Epochal Discordance: Holderlin's Philosophy of Tragedy
Véronique M. Fóti
Examines the German poet Hölderlin’s philosophical insights into tragedy.
Friedrich Hölderlin must be considered not only a significant poet but also a philosophically important thinker within German Idealism. In both capacities, he was crucially preoccupied with the question of tragedy, yet, surprisingly, this book is the first in English to explore fully his philosophy of tragedy. Focusing on the thought of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Reiner Schürmann, Véronique M. Fóti discusses the tragic turning in German philosophy that began at the close of the eighteenth century to provide a historical and philosophical context for an engagement with Hölderlin. She goes on to examine the three fragmentary versions of Hölderlin’s own tragedy, The Death of Empedocles, together with related essays, and his interpretation of Sophoclean tragedy. Fóti also addresses the relationship of his character Empedocles to the pre-Socratic philosopher and concludes by examining Heidegger’s dialogue with Hölderlin concerning tragedy and the tragic.
“Original, interesting, and carefully argued, this book makes an important contribution by demonstrating that Hölderlin must be taken seriously for his work in philosophy. Among its numerous strengths, Fóti’s study contextualizes Hölderlin’s philosophy of tragedy within larger currents of post-Kantian continental philosophy, recognizes that Hölderlin’s overall approach to tragedy appears not as a rigid position, but rather emerges through a number of transformations in the course of his productive life, and sheds new light on several celebrated texts by Hölderlin, such as his ‘Remarks on Oedipus’ and ‘Remarks on Antigone.’” — Theodore D. George, author of Tragedies of Spirit: Tracing Finitude in Hegel’s Phenomenology
Contents:
- Prefatory Note
- Prologue
- The Tragic Turning and Tragic Paradigm in Philosophy
- Communing with the Pure Elements: The First Two Versions of The Death of Empedocles
- Singularity and Reconciliation: The Third Version of The Death of Empedocles
- Between Hölderlin’s Empedocles and Empedocles of Akragas
- The Faithless Turning: Hölderlin’s Reading of Oedipus Tyrannos
- Dys-Limitation and the “Patriotic Turning”: Sophocles’s Antigone
- From an Agonistic of Powers to a Homecoming: Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Sophocles
- Epilogue
About the Author:
Véronique M. Fóti is Professor of Philosophy at Penn State at University Park and the author of Vision’s Invisibles: Philosophical Explorations, also published by SUNY Press, and Heidegger and the Poets: Poiesis/Sophia/Techne.
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On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy
Gerald L. Bruns
As Bruns demonstrates, the difficulty of much modern and contemporary poetry can be summarized in the idea that a poem is made of words, not of any of the things that we use words to produce: meanings, concepts, propositions, narratives, or expressions of feeling. Many modernist poets have argued that in poetry language is no longer a form of mediation but a reality to be explored and experienced in its own right. But what sort of experience, philosophically, might this be? The problem of the materiality or hermetic character of poetic language inevitably leads to questions of how philosophy itself is to be written and what sort of community defines the work of art—or, for that matter, the work of philosophy.
In this provocative study, Bruns answers that the culture of modernism is a kind of anarchist community, where the work of art is apt to be as much an event or experience—or, indeed, an alternative form of life—as a formal object. In modern writing, philosophy and poetry fold into one another. In this book, Bruns helps us to see how.
About the Author:
Gerald L. Bruns is the William P. & Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. His books include: Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language; Inventions: Writing, Textuality and Understanding in Literary History; Heidegger’s Estrangements: Language, Truth, and Poetry in the Later Writings; Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern; and Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy. His most recent book is The Material of Poetry: Sketches for a Philosophical Poetics.
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Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology
Ernst Bertram
Translated by Robert E. Norton
The only English translation of a crucial interpretation of Nietzsche
First published in 1918, Ernst Bertram’s Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology substantially shaped the image of Nietzsche for the generation between the wars. It won the Nietzsche Society’s first prize and was admired by luminous contemporaries including André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Gottfried Benn, and Thomas Mann. Although translated into French in 1932, the book was never translated into English following the decline of Nietzsche’s and Bertram’s reputations after 1945. Now, with Nietzsche’s importance for twentieth-century thought undisputed, the work by one of his most influential interpreters can at last be read in English.
Employing a perspectival technique inspired by Nietzsche himself, Bertram constructs a densely layered portrait of the thinker that shows him riven by deep und ultimately irresolvable cultural, historical, and psychological conflicts. At once lyrical and intensely probing, richly complex yet thematically coherent, Bertram’s book is a masterpiece in a forgotten tradition of intellectual biography.
"An imaginative and robust reading of Nietzsche; the great value of this English translation is the book’s historical role in consequential cultural developments provoked by figurations of Nietzsche. A significant contribution to Anglophone readers who are interested in Nietzsche’s philosophy generally, and particularly in the historical reception of his writings."--Lawrence J. Hatab, author of Nietzsche’s Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence
“Robert E. Norton has done an admirable job in preparing this English translation of a provocative critical study of Nietzsche. An important link between Nietzsche’s reception in the Weimar Period and the philosopher’s cooptation by the Nazis in the 1930s. This translation is simply splendid--flowing, precise, and sensitive to nuance.”--Marion Faber, translator of Human, All Too Human and Beyond Good and Evil
About the Author:
Ernst Bertram (1884–1957) was a recognized scholar of German literature and culture, as well as an accomplished poet. Although Nietzsche remained his only monograph, he published numerous essays and several books of poetry. Robert E. Norton is a professor of German at the University of Notre Dame and the author of Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle.
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Nietzsche's Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works
Michael Ure
I cannot praise this book highly enough. It offers a set of rich insights into the texts of Nietzsche's unduly neglected 'middle period' and returns us to the congenial Nietzsche who is a great psychologist of the pathologies of human vanity and wounded narcissism and a philosopher of modesty and probity. His book succeeds in taking us beyond the aestheticist clichés that have impaired our reception and appreciation of Nietzsche in recent years. Michael Ure is a highly able and subtle reader of Nietzsche who has fresh things to say on Nietzsche's relation to Stoicism and psychoanalysis and on Nietzsche's use of the ironic and the comic. The book merits a wide readership and I am confident that it will inspire a major renewal of interest in the middle period texts both in terms of pedagogy and scholarship."—Keith Ansell Pearson, University of Warwick
Nietzsche's Therapy examines Nietzsche's middle works in order to challenge those views that dismiss his conception of self-cultivation as a symptom of unadulterated narcissism. It aims to develop a far more balanced and refined conception of his idea of self-cultivation by re-examining the much neglected free-spirit trilogy of Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science. Contra Nietzsche's critics, it argues that the kind of self-cultivation that draws on the model of Hellenistic and Roman Stoic philosophical therapeia. It suggests that he renovates this therapeutic tradition through his own critical, psychoanalytic insights into narcissism and its transformations. It reconstructs Nietzsche's ethics of self-cultivation in terms of his psychological analysis of the pathological symptoms of narcissism and its healthy or positive transformations. In charting Nietzsche's course from pathological narcissism to mature individualism, Nietzsche's Therapy unpacks the philosophical and psychological basis of his critique of Rousseau and Schopenhauer's ethics of pitié/Mitleid, his use and analysis of comedy and humor in his critical, deflationary treatment of the malady of omnipotence, and his exploration of the idea of friendship as a positive counterpoint to damaged forms of intersubjectivity.
About the Author:
Michael Ure is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland.
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Reading Nietzsche at the Margins
Edited by Steven V. Hicks, Alan Rosenberg
Reading Nietzsche at the Margins brings together leading Nietzsche scholars--Christa Davis Acampora, David B. Allison, Stuart Elden, Lawrence Hatab, Kathleen Higgins, Tyler Roberts, Richard Schacht, Gary Shapiro, Charles E. Scott, and Michael E. Zimmerman, among others. The scholars' essays examine a variety of key ideas in Nietzsche's writings that have been marginalized or slighted simply because they do not fit neatly into any of the usual categories of Nietzsche scholarship, for example, his ideas on love, laughter, friendship, compassion, forgetfulness, autocritique, convalescence, ecology, geo-philosophy, spirituality, music, war, terrorism, and the conflict of Islam and the West. These so-called "marginal" matters appear repeatedly in Nietzsche's writings, and his views on them are essential to his unique understanding of philosophy as "a way of life" or "in the service of life" as opposed to a merely academic undertaking.
By shifting the focus of philosophical attention away from the standard topics, the essays in Reading Nietzsche at the Margins, divided into four parts, open up fresh perspectives on Nietzsche and will inspire constructive debate about his relevance to a variety of current philosophical, political, social, and cultural concerns. The essays appeal to a wide audience, not just specialists, and will be invaluable to anyone who seeks a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of Nietzsche's works.
Topics Covered:
- Prefacing the Margins: A Beginning at Self-Disclosure. Nietzsche on Resolution, Memory and Autocritique
- Laughing at the Margins: Nietzsche's Tragic/Comic Sense of Life
- Spirit at the Marings: Mimesis, Music, and the Art of Self-Fashioning
- Natural and Cultural Expressions of Marginal Forces: Nietzsche on War, Ecology, and Geophilosophy
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On the Seventh Solitude: Endless Becoming and Eternal Return in the Poetry of Friedrich Nietzsche
Rohit Sharma
Much as Nietzsche has gained in popularity during the last century, his poetry still has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. On closer scrutiny, his aposiopetic style, along with the labyrinthine and self-referential nature of his writings, subtly hint toward the recurring and parallel presence of poetry in his writings. This fact cannot be ignored, and his poetry should therefore be included in any reading of Nietzsche. This study investigates Nietzsche's poetic output while simultaneously regarding him as a poet-philosopher. This reading allows juxtaposing all Nietzschean key concepts while avoiding the temptation to simplify Nietzsche by centering his thought on any particular one. The author ends by highlighting a hitherto neglected term that allows a simultaneous reading of Nietzschean keywords while also including the essential notions of movement, flux, and play.
Contents:
- The debate between poetry and philosophy
- Reading Nietzsche as a poet-philosopher
- Recognizing aposiopesis and self-referentiality in Nietzsche's style
- Illustrating polysemy in Nietzsche's works through a reading of his poems
- Identifying the notion of movement in its many avatars
- Identifying Seventh Solitude.
About the Author:
Rohit Sharma is an assistant professor of German at the Department of Humanities at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. He is currently working on another monograph concerning some of the movements of the historical avant-garde.
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Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language
John T. Hamilton
In the romantic tradition, music is consistently associated with madness, either as cause or cure. Writers as diverse as Kleist, Hoffmann, and Nietzsche articulated this theme, which in fact reaches back to classical antiquity and continues to resonate in the modern imagination. What John Hamilton investigates in this study is the way literary, philosophical, and psychological treatments of music and madness challenge the limits of representation and thereby create a crisis of language. Special focus is given to the decidedly autobiographical impulse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where musical experience and mental disturbance disrupt the expression of referential thought, illuminating the irreducible aspects of the self before language can work them back into a discursive system.
The study begins in the 1750s with Diderot's Neveu de Rameau, and situates that text in relation to Rousseau's reflections on the voice and the burgeoning discipline of musical aesthetics. Upon tracing the linkage of music and madness that courses through the work of Herder, Hegel, Wackenroder, and Kleist, Hamilton turns his attention to E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose writings of the first decades of the nineteenth century accumulate and qualify the preceding tradition. Throughout, Hamilton considers the particular representations that link music and madness, investigating the underlying motives, preconceptions, and ideological premises that facilitate the association of these two experiences. The gap between sensation and its verbal representation proved especially problematic for romantic writers concerned with the ineffability of selfhood. The author who chose to represent himself necessarily faced problems of language, which invariably compromised the uniqueness that the author wished to express. Music and madness, therefore, unworked the generalizing functions of language and marked a critical limit to linguistic capabilities. While the various conflicts among music, madness, and language questioned the viability of signification, they also raised the possibility of producing meaning beyond significance.
About the Author:
John T. Hamilton is professor of comparative literature and Germanic languages and literature at New York University. He has held teaching positions at the University of California-Santa Cruz and Harvard University. The author of Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity, and the Classical Tradition (2003), he has also published extensively on German and French literature, aesthetics, and the afterlife of classical antiquity.
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Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic
James H. Donelan
James H. Donelan describes how two poets, a philosopher, and a composer – Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Hegel, and Beethoven – developed an idea of self-consciousness based on music at the turn of the nineteenth century. This idea became an enduring cultural belief: the understanding of music as an ideal representation of the autonomous creative mind. Against a background of political and cultural upheaval, these four major figures – all born in 1770 – developed this idea in both metaphorical and actual musical structures, thereby establishing both the theory and the practice of asserting self-identity in music. Beethoven still carries the image of the heroic composer today; this book describes how it originated in both his music and in how others responded to him. Bringing together the fields of philosophy, musicology, and literary criticism, Donelan shows how this development emerged from the complex changes in European cultural life taking place between 1795 and 1831.
Includes detailed examination of works by each of the four figures under discussion: Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Hegel, and Beethoven • Provides material appropriate to scholars of each of the three areas of musicology, philosophy, and literature • Also covers late Enlightenment music aesthetics, providing historical context.
Contents:
- Preface: the sound and the spirit
- Self-consciousness and music in the late Enlightenment
- Hölderlin’s Deutscher Gesang and the music of poetic self-consciousness
- Hegel’s aesthetic theory: self-consciousness and musical material
- Nature, music, and the imagination in Wordsworth’s poetry
- Beethoven and musical self-consciousness
- The persistence of sound
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After Nietzsche
Notes Towards a Philosophy of Ecstasy
Jill Marsden
Palgrave Macmillan, 2002
This book explores the imaginative possibilities for philosophy created by Nietzsche's sustained reflection on the phenomenon of ecstasy. From The Birth of Tragedy to his experimental 'physiology of art,' Nietzsche examines the aesthetic, erotic, and sacred dimensions of rapture, hinting at how an ecstatic philosophy is realized in his elusive doctrine of Eternal Return. Jill Marsden pursues the implications of this legacy for contemporary Continental thought via analyses of such voyages in ecstasy as those of Kant, Schopenhauer, Schreber, and Bataille.
About the Author:
Jill Marsden is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Bolton Institute. She has published a number of articles on Nietzsche and related themes in contemporary European philosophy.
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The Complete Greek Temples
Tony Spawforth
This is the first complete, fully illustrated survey of Greek temples ever compiled. Written by a leading authority and profusely illustrated with photographs, maps, plans and reconstruction drawings, it is both an inspiring survey for tourists and travellers and an essential work of reference for students and scholars.
Contents Include:
- Homes of the Gods: Development, Glory and Decline
- Building for the Gods: Siting, Construction, Decoration and Finance
- Encounters with the Gods: The Temple in its Sacred Setting
- Temples of the Gods: Seven Journeys Through Greek Lands – a complete and up-to-date gazetteer of colonnaded Greek temples, including the famous temples of Athens and Olympia, as well as hundreds of lesser-known sites, along with the latest discoveries, all arranged by region.
About the Author:
Tony Spawforth, former Assistant Director of the British School at Athens, is Professor of Ancient History at Newcastle- upon-Tyne University and Honorary Curator of the Shefton Museum of Greek Art there. He is co-editor of The Oxford Classical Dictionary, co-author of Greece: An Oxford Archaeological Guide and a well-known presenter of programmes in the BBC television series 'Ancient Voices'.
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The Genealogy of Aesthetics
Ekbert Faas
Cambridge University Press; 1st Edition
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Examines the construction of vision in the works of Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Nancy, and Derrida.
A philosophical exploration of the power that poetry, music, and the erotic have on us.
Nietzsche's philosophy exercised a mesmerizing influence on twentieth-century thought, and continues to be a significant source of inspiration for work in all the major branches of philosophical inquiry. A Companion to Nietzsche showcases contemporary research and scholarship, and provides a comprehensive guide to all the main aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy. The volume opens with an introduction to Nietzsche's life and thought and an essay on his art of the aphorism. This is followed by major sections on Art, Nature, and Individuation; Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Future; Philosophy of Mind; Philosophy and Genealogy; Ethics; Politics; Aesthetics; and Evolution and Life. In addition, there are fresh treatments of Nietzsche's core and enigmatic doctrines such as eternal recurrence, the will to power, and the overhuman. The volume profiles the latest research into Nietzsche's texts (published and unpublished) and reflects trends in recent scholarship, such as the renewed focus on Nietzsche's naturalism and interest in his philosophy of time, of nature, and of life. Contributors include both rising stars and established scholars and form an international cast comprising many of the leading commentators on and interpreters of Nietzsche.
Thus
Spoke Zarathustra is a masterpiece of literature as well as
philosophy. It was Nietzsche's own favorite and has proved
to be his most popular. In this book he addresses the problem
of how to live a fulfilling life in a world without meaning,
in the aftermath of "the death of God." His solution lies
in the idea of eternal recurrence, which he calls "the highest
formula of affirmation that can ever be attained." A successful
engagement with this profoundly Dionysian idea enables us
to choose clearly among the myriad possibilities that existence
offers, and thereby to affirm every moment of our lives with
others on this "sacred" earth. 
Adobe Acrobat PDF format.] 
This book is about intersections among science, philosophy, and literature. It bridges the gap between the traditional “cultures” of science and the humanities by constituting an area of interaction that some have called a “third culture.” By asking questions about three disciplines rather than about just two, as is customary in research, this inquiry breaks new ground and resists easy categorization. It seeks to answer the following questions: What impact has the remapping of reality in scientific terms since the Copernican Revolution through thermodynamics, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics had on the way writers and thinkers conceptualized the place of human culture within the total economy of existence? What influence, on the other hand, have writers and philosophers had on the doing of science and on scientific paradigms of the world? Thirdly, where does humankind fit into the total picture with its uniquely moral nature? In other words, rather than privileging one discipline over another, this study seeks to uncover a common ground for science, ethics, and literary creativity.
This book addresses the philosophical reception of early German Romanticism and offers the first in-depth study in English of the movement’s most important philosopher, Friedrich Schlegel, presenting his philosophy against the background of the controversies that shaped its emergence. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert begins by distinguishing early German Romanticism from classical German Idealism, under which it has all too often been subsumed, and then explores Schlegel’s romantic philosophy (and his rejection of first principles) by showing how he responded to three central figures of the post-Kantian period in Germany—Jacobi, Reinhold, and Fichte—as well as to Kant himself. She concludes with a comprehensive critique of the aesthetic and epistemological consequences of Schlegel’s thought, with special attention paid to his use of irony.
Maurice Blanchot is among the most important twentieth-century French thinkers. Figures such as Bataille, Deleuze, Derrida, and Levinas all draw deeply on his novels and writings on literature and philosophy. In The Dark Gaze, Kevin Hart argues that Blanchot has given us the most persuasive account of what we must give up—whether it be continuity, selfhood, absolute truth, totality, or unity—if God is, indeed, dead. Looking at Blanchot’s oeuvre as a whole, Hart shows that this erstwhile atheist paradoxically had an abiding fascination with mystical experiences and the notion of the sacred.
Sarah Kofman (1934-1994), Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and the author of over twenty books, was one of the most significant postwar thinkers in France. Kofman's scholarship was wide-ranging and included work on Freud and psychoanalysis, Nietzsche, feminism and the role of women in Western philosophy, visual art, and literature. The child of Polish Jewish immigrants who lost her father in the Holocaust, she also was interested in Judaism and anti-Semitism, especially as reflected in works of literature and philosophy. This book is an anthology of some of Kofman's most significant writings on these and other topics. Its purpose is to provide a general introduction to Kofman's thought, which has been highly influential in both Europe and America. Although some of the selections have been published previously, the majority of the books contents appear in English translation for the first time.
Nineteenth-century Romantic landscape painting and the Northern tradition as the origin of modern abstraction. The premise set forth in 1975 by the renowned art historian and professor Robert Rosenblum (1927-2006), inspires this exhibition with which the Fundación Juan March inaugurates its artistic season in October. It is comprised of some 100 works on paper by 25 European and American artists, from Caspar David Friedrich to Mark Rothko or Jackson Pollock, lent by various institutions on both continents. The exhibition attempts to reveal visually, through the works of great masters, the evolution of the Romantic landscape throughout modern times up to its progressive abstraction by the American Abstract Expressionists and certain European contemporary artists.
The first book-length study on the subject in any language, Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time treats Tolstoy's experience as a massive philosophical and religious project rather than a crisis-laden tragedy. Inessa Medzhibovskaya explains the evolution of Tolstoy's religious outlook based on his ongoing dialogue with the tradition of conversion in Europe and Russia, as well as on the demands of his own heart, mind, and spirit. The author contextualizes Tolstoy's conversion, comparing his pattern of religious conversion with that of other notable religious converts-Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Luther, Pascal, Rousseau-as well with that of Tolstoy's countrymen-Pushkin, Gogol, Chaadaev, Stankevich, Belinsky, Herzen, and Dostoevsky.
Written in the vein of Douglas R. Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning Godel, Escher, Bach , this original and imaginative book sheds light on one of Borges' most complex, richly layered works. Bloch begins each chapter with a mathematical idea--combinatorics, topology, geometry, information theory--followed by examples and illustrations that put flesh on the theoretical bones. In this way, he provides many fascinating insights into Borges' Library. He explains, for instance, a straightforward way to calculate how many books are in the Library--an easily notated but literally unimaginable number--and also shows that, if each book were the size of a grain of sand, the entire universe could only hold a fraction of the books in the Library. Indeed, if each book were the size of a proton, our universe would still not be big enough to hold anywhere near all the books.