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The Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with Rene Girard

Name: The Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with Rene Girard
ISBN: 9781441195463

Reading Milan Kundera with Rene Girard

Trevor Cribben Merrill,

208 pages
English
PDF
Available on iOS & Android

eBook - PDF

The Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with Rene Girard

Reading Milan Kundera with Rene Girard

Trevor Cribben Merrill,

About this book

Trevor Cribben Merrill offers a bold reassessment of Milan Kundera's place in the contemporary canon. Harold Bloom and others have dismissed the Franco-Czech author as a maker of "period pieces" that lost currency once the Berlin Wall fell. Merrill refutes this view, revealing a previously unexplored dimension of Kundera's fiction. Building on theorist René Girard's notion of "triangular desire, " he shows that modern classics such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting display a counterintuitive-and bitterly funny-understanding of human attraction. Most works of fiction (and most movies, too) depict passionate feelings as deeply authentic and spontaneous. Kundera's novels and short stories overturn this romantic dogma. A pounding heart and sweaty palms could mean that we have found "the One" at last-or they could attest to the influence of a model whose desires we are unconsciously borrowing: our amorous predilections may owe less to personal taste or physical chemistry than they do to imitative desire. At once a comprehensive survey of Kundera's novels and a witty introduction to Girard's mimetic theory, The Book of Imitation and Desire challenges our assumptions about human motive and renews our understanding of a major contemporary author.

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Yes, you can access The Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with Rene Girard by Trevor Cribben Merrill in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & European Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.