Iris Murdoch And Elias Canetti

"Since the revelation of Iris Murdoch's (1919-1999) affair with Elias Canetti (1905-1994), scholarship on their relationship has been largely biographical, focusing in particular on Canetti's alleged role as the real-life model for some of Murdoch's most invidious protagonists. Little research, however, has been done on the extensive common ground between the two writers' literary projects. In this groundbreaking comparative study, Elaine Morley conducts a careful philological comparison of Murdoch's and Canetti's works, from their literary themes and theories to their idiosyncratic stylistic practices. Morley demonstrates that these authors were preoccupied with a common philosophical problem, and that they were in fact not only personally close, but also more intellectually allied than has been previously thought. Elaine Morley is Lecturer in German and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary, University of London where she convenes the MA in Anglo-German Cultural Relations."

For the first time, novelist Iris Murdoch's life in her own words, from girlhood to her last years Iris Murdoch was an acclaimed novelist and groundbreaking philosopher whose life reflected her unconventional beliefs and values. But what has been missing from biographical accounts has been Murdoch's own voice—her life in her own words. Living on Paper—the first major collection of Murdoch's most compelling and interesting personal letters—gives, for the first time, a rounded self-portrait of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers and thinkers. With more than 760 letters, fewer than forty of which have been published before, the book provides a unique chronicle of Murdoch's life from her days as a schoolgirl to her last years. The result is the most important book about Murdoch in more than a decade. The letters show a great mind at work—struggling with philosophical problems, trying to bring a difficult novel together, exploring spirituality, and responding pointedly to world events. They also reveal her personal life, the subject of much speculation, in all its complexity, especially in letters to lovers or close friends, such as the writers Brigid Brophy, Elias Canetti, and Raymond Queneau, philosophers Michael Oakeshott and Philippa Foot, and mathematician Georg Kreisel. We witness Murdoch's emotional hunger, her tendency to live on the edge of what was socially acceptable, and her irreverence and sharp sense of humor. We also learn how her private life fed into the plots and characters of her novels, despite her claims that they were not drawn from reality. Direct and intimate, these letters bring us closer than ever before to Iris Murdoch as a person, making for an extraordinary reading experience.

Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti's sensational memoir: a frank, acerbic, and cranky way his years of British exile.

Agony of Flies: Notes and Notations presents brief aphorisms selected from the German Nobel laureate Elias Canetti's writings. These short writings collected in this bilingual edition offer remarkable insight into the life and thinking of "one of our great imaginers and solitary men of genius" (Iris Murdoch).

Stuart Cuno has decided to become good. Not believing in God, he invents his own methods, which include celibacy, chastity and the abandonment of a promising academic career. Interfering friends and relations question his sincerity, his sanity and his motives. Stuart's step-brother Edward Baltram is tormented by guilt because he has, he believes, killed his best friend. He dreams sometimes of redemption, sometimes of suicide. Funny, compelling and extremely moving, THE GOOD APPRENTICE is about guilt ridden despair, and the difficult problem of how to try to be good - and the various magical devices which console those who are sensible enough not to try.

Using unpublished archive material, including correspondence and the many annotations Murdoch made to the books held in her Oxford library, this book offers fresh insights into Murdoch's work by placing it within a diversity of new contexts. It also reveals startling parallels between Murdoch's work and other literary and philosophical texts.

In The Art of Distances, Corina Stan identifies an insistent preoccupation with interpersonal distance in a strand of twentieth-century European and Anglophone literature that includes the work of George Orwell, Paul Morand, Elias Canetti, Iris Murdoch, Walter Benjamin, Annie Ernaux, Günter Grass, and Damon Galgut. Specifically, Stan shows that these authors all engage in philosophical meditations, in the realm of literary writing, on the ethical question of how to live with others and how to find an ideal interpersonal distance at historical moments when there are no obviously agreed-upon social norms for ethical behavior. Bringing these authors into dialogue with philosophers such as Michel de Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Helmuth Plessner, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy, Emmanuel Levinas, Peter Sloterdijk, Guillaume le Blanc, and Pierre Zaoui, Stan shows how the question of the right interpersonal distance became a fundamental one for the literary authors under consideration and explores what forms and genres they proposed in order to convey the complexity of this question. Albeit unknowingly, she suggests, they are engaged in fleshing out what Roland Barthes called “a science, or perhaps an art, of distances.”