In The Age Of Prose

The guiding theme of these essays is the fate of the imagination and the condition of art in the modern world, where both appear to be enfeebled by scientific hubris, undermined by psychological self-questioning and compromised by political disaster. Erich Heller traces this predicament with subtlety and profundity, from Hegel's and Nietzsche's diagnoses to the various truces and manoeuvres through which remarkable victories have nonetheless been achieved - such as the comic triumphs of Wilhelm Busch. As elsewhere in Professor Heller's work, Thomas Mann's attempt to outwit and redeem his circumstances through art - 'despite' them, as he said himself - occupies a central place. Three of the present essays are devoted to him. Others consider Kleist, Fontane, Hamsun, Karl Kraus and the crucial figures of Hölderlin (who plays such a central role in Heidegger's later philosophical writings) and Rilke. Written with feeling, and the distinctive elegance and wit that have characterized all of Professor Heller's work, the essays here reaffirm the vital interdependence of literature and human values.

The Age of the Poets revisits the age-old problem of the relation between literature and philosophy, arguing against both Plato and Heidegger’s famous arguments. Philosophy neither has to ban the poets from the republic nor abdicate its own powers to the sole benefit of poetry or art. Instead, it must declare the end of what Badiou names the “age of the poets,” which stretches from Hölderlin to Celan. Drawing on ideas from his first publication on the subject, “The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process,” Badiou offers an illuminating set of readings of contemporary French prose writers, giving us fascinating insights into the theory of the novel while also accounting for the specific position of literature between science and ideology.

The purpose os this volume is to provide representative selections from English prose and poetry of the eighteenth century for undergraduate courses in that period. In this second edition of the anthology the editors have expanded the contents considerably. Additions have been made from Addison, Pope, Swift, Young, Smart, Burke, and Reynolds, with Blake's comments. The extensive notes and introductions should assist the beginning student to understand the texts, but it is hoped that they will also lead him to explore further in the works listed in the bibliographies.