The Ruin of Kasch Taking as his focus the periods immediately before and after the French Revolution but making occasional sallies backward and forward in time from Vedic India to the porticoes of the Palais Royal and
Taking as his focus the periods immediately before and after the French Revolution but making occasional sallies backward and forward in time from Vedic India to the porticoes of the Palais Royal and to the killing fields of Pol Pot Calasso recounts, elucidates, and interprets the downfall of what Baudelaire was already calling the Modern This downfall came as a seqTaking as his focus the periods immediately before and after the French Revolution but making occasional sallies backward and forward in time from Vedic India to the porticoes of the Palais Royal and to the killing fields of Pol Pot Calasso recounts, elucidates, and interprets the downfall of what Baudelaire was already calling the Modern This downfall came as a sequel to an earlier and opposite collapse that of the archaic societies which were regulated by the movements of the stars and the rituals of sacrifice At the center of the work stands the story of the ruin of Kasch, a legendary African kingdom whose annihilation becomes emblematic of the ruin of the ancient and modern worlds The genius of Calasso s book is that, in its illuminating blend of literature and ideas, it establishes a genre all its own Its form is a rich blend of anecdotes, quotations, analysis, digressions, aphorisms, dialogues, historical discussion, and straightforward storytelling that beautifully mirrors its subject matter and evokes the protean spirit of Modernism It is a sumptuous literary feast Calasso brings to his stage a vast gallery of characters, including Laclos and Marx, Benjamin and Chateaubriand, Sainte Beuve and Levi Strauss, Max Stirner and Joseph de Maistre And presiding over them all is the French statesman Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Perigord, who knew the secrets of both the Old and New regimes and who was able to adjust the perplexing and cruel notion of legitimacy to the modern age Cynical Talleyrand who showed that success in the new era depends on agility, fluidity, and a consummate sense of style serves, fittingly, as the master of ceremonies throughout the book,which is at once a meditation on the origins and nature of power and a breathtaking synthesis of Western cultural history It is an extraordinary reading experience.
-
☆ The Ruin of Kasch || ↠ PDF Download by ↠ Roberto Calasso William Weaver Stephen Sartarelli
131
Roberto Calasso William Weaver Stephen Sartarelli
-
Title:
☆ The Ruin of Kasch || ↠ PDF Download by ↠ Roberto Calasso William Weaver Stephen Sartarelli
Posted by:
Published :2020-09-04T03:43:53+00:00
Roberto Calasso born 30 May 1941 in Florence is an Italian publisher and writer He was born into a family of the local upper class, well connected with some of the great Italian intellectuals of their time His maternal grandfather Giovanni Codignola was a professor of philosophy at Florence University Codignola created a new publishing house called La Nuova Italia, in Florence, just like his friend Benedetto Croce had done in Bari with Laterza His uncle Tristano Codignola, partigiano during the Resistenza, after the war joined the political life of the new republic, and was for a while Minister of Education His mother Melisenda who gave up a promising academic career to raise her three children was a scholar of German literature, and had worked on H lderlin s translations of the Greek poet Pindar His father Francesco was a law professor, first at Florence University and then in Rome, where he eventually became dean of his faculty He has been working for Adelphi Edizioni since its founding in 1962 and became its Chairman in 1999 His books have from 1990 been translated into most European languages After a successful career in publishing he has become a leading intellectual citation needed He is the author of a work in progress, that started with The Ruin of Kasch in 1983, a book welcome by Italo Calvino, dedicated to the French statesman Talleyrand and to a reflection on the culture of modernity This was followed in 1988 by The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, a book where the tale of Cadmus and his wife Harmonia becomes a pretext for re writing the great tales of Greek mythology and reflect on the reception of Greek culture for a contemporary readership The trend for portraying whole civilizations continues with Ka where the subject of the re writing is Hindu mythology K instead restricts the focus to one single author Franz Kafka this trend continues with Il rosa Tiepolo, inspired by an adjective used by Proust to describe a shade of pink used by Tiepolo in his paintings With his latest book, La folie Baudelaire, Calasso goes back to the fresco of whole civilisations, this time re writing the lives and works of the artists that revolutionised our artistic taste, the symbolist poets and impressionist painters.His essaystic production is collected in a few books I quarantanove gradini The Forty nine Steps, a collection of essays about major authors and thinkers in European modernity addressed to Pierre Klossowski and his wife His Oxford lessons are collected in Literature and the Gods In 2005 Calasso published La follia che viene dalle ninfe, a collection of essays on the influence of the nymph in literature, which is discussed through authors ranging from Plato to Nabokov.