Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination: Ruins, Relics, Rarities, Rubbish, Uninhabited Places, and Hidden TreasuresTranslated here into English for the first time is a monumental work of literary history and criticism comparable in scope and achievement to Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis. Italian critic Francesco Orlando explores Western literature’s obsession with outmoded and nonfunctional objects (ruins, obsolete machinery, broken things, trash, etc.). Combining the insights of psychoanalysis and literary-political history, Orlando traces this obsession to a turning point in history, at the end of eighteenth-century industrialization, when the functional becomes the dominant value of Western culture. Roaming through every genre and much of the history of Western literature, the author identifies distinct categories into which obsolete images can be classified and provides myriad examples. The function of literature, he concludes, is to remind us of what we have lost and what we are losing as we rush toward the future. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 37
Page xi
... genre imaginable ( drama , epic , essay , short story , letter , memoir ) , its center is the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their characteristic forms : the lyric and , above all , the novel . This book , then , is primarily ...
... genre imaginable ( drama , epic , essay , short story , letter , memoir ) , its center is the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their characteristic forms : the lyric and , above all , the novel . This book , then , is primarily ...
Page 1
... genres, languages, and periods. I am trying to recall how the constants that I felt I was identifying in the passages matched, leading me to set them side by side despite such diverse and numerous variants. I would say that it was the ...
... genres, languages, and periods. I am trying to recall how the constants that I felt I was identifying in the passages matched, leading me to set them side by side despite such diverse and numerous variants. I would say that it was the ...
Page 32
... genre of compromise between the real and the unreal , between criticism of the supernatural as not verisimilar and the credit that we surrep- titiously grant to it , that is studied today under the rubric of the fantastic . And it is ...
... genre of compromise between the real and the unreal , between criticism of the supernatural as not verisimilar and the credit that we surrep- titiously grant to it , that is studied today under the rubric of the fantastic . And it is ...
Page 37
... genre tolerable , I hope they will now accept all three variations at once . Let us return to poetry , to French , and to the nineteenth century - specifically , to 1853 , when the exiled Victor Hugo ( 1802-85 ) pub- lished the singular ...
... genre tolerable , I hope they will now accept all three variations at once . Let us return to poetry , to French , and to the nineteenth century - specifically , to 1853 , when the exiled Victor Hugo ( 1802-85 ) pub- lished the singular ...
Page 39
... genres , inasmuch as surrealism — as an ideology , first and foremost , and also as a poetics — forbids us to talk of fiction in the sense of the word which implies fictitiousness . Nor does the quality of sincerity that it prescribes ...
... genres , inasmuch as surrealism — as an ideology , first and foremost , and also as a poetics — forbids us to talk of fiction in the sense of the word which implies fictitiousness . Nor does the quality of sincerity that it prescribes ...
Contents
1 | |
17 | |
47 | |
67 | |
Twelve Categories Not to Be Too Sharply Distinguished | 206 |
Some TwentiethCentury Novels | 343 |
Praising and Disparaging the Functional | 375 |
Notes | 407 |
Index of Subjects | 481 |
Index of Names and Texts | 487 |
Other editions - View all
Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination: Ruins, Relics, Rarities ... Francesco Orlando No preview available - 2006 |
Common terms and phrases
adjectives already ambivalence ancien régime ancient antifunctional antiquity appears Balzac Baroque become Bibliothèque castle catachresis century chap chapter character Chateaubriand Comédie humaine contamination culture dead death desolate-disconnected Everyman's Library examples fact functional furniture genre Gothic novel historical turning point human hyperbole Ibid imagery images Jerusalem Delivered kitsch La Comédie humaine la Pléiade Les Rougon-Macquart less lines literary literature magic memory metaphor metonymy Milan modern Mondadori narrative narrator nature negative category night nonfunctional corporality novel objects Oblomov Oeuvres complètes opposition Orlando outdoing Oxford University Press palace Paris passage past Pléiade poem poetic precious-potential present pretentious-fictitious protagonist quoted refer relationship remains reminiscent-affective repressed ruins seems semantic tree semipositive category sense sinister-terrifying solemn-admonitory space sterile-noxious story supernatural symbolic tercet thematic constants theme things threadbare-grotesque tion tradition trans treasure Turin venerable-regressive walls words worn-realistic