On trust : art and the temptations of suspicion
"In this wide-ranging book, an eminent novelist, playwright, and literary critic explores the question that has troubled artists and philosophers (though not critics) since the time of the Romantics: is it possible to create art today with the freedom of earlier ages and yet produce works that are more than merely decorative or commercial? Such a question, argues Gabriel Josipovici, is not timeless; it has a history, and a relatively short one at that. Why is it only with the Romantics that suspicion, not just of motive but of the very tools of art, language, and form, has become so insistent?" "To understand Romantic suspicion, the author argues, we need to understand what it supplanted and why. To that end he turns to the work created in what he calls cultures of trust, to Homer and the Hebrew Bible, to Dante and Shakespeare, before examining the interplay of trust and suspicion in a number of Romantic and post-Romantic writers from Wordsworth to Beckett."--Jacket
Print Book, English, ©1999
Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., ©1999
ix, 294 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
9780300079913, 0300079915
41528017
The age of suspicion
Lightness and gravity
Excursus I.A tale of a heel and a hip
Dante: trusting the mother tongue
Shakespeare: trust and suspicion at play
Excursus II. Red blood white snow
Romantic doubts
Proust and the face of true goodness
Franz Kafka: the innocent pretence
'Dear incomprehension!': Beckett and trust
Kinetic melodies