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Evanton. 2000. Northwestern University Press. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0810117746. 150 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration: Gefallene Bilder, Fallen Pictures, 1986. Jacket design: Toni Ellis. keywords: Literary Criticism Germany Literature. FROM THE PUBLISHER-In FIVE PORTRAITS, one of the most acute critical thinkers of our time presents essays on five of the most important writers of the past hundred years. The result is a remarkable examination of a moment of cultural crisis-a time when these writers, caught between the dream of creating an abiding masterpiece and the reality of a brutal culture fascinated by apocalyptic catastrophe, deliberately put themselves and their work at the center of the storm. FIVE PORTRAITS analyzes the work of Rainer Maria mike, Paul Celan, Robert Musil, Martin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin: two poets, a novelist, a philosopher, and a literary and cultural theorist. Michael AndrE Bernstein's essays, written in elegant and jargon-free prose, create a vivid image of a cultural epoch whose aspirations and torments continue to shape the world we inhabit today. Bernstein's concerns are not limited to literary and philosophical issues. The complex relationship among the worlds of politics, history, and high culture is at the heart of Five Portraits. Bernstein shows how the seductiveness of solitary introspection can, when combined with a will to political power, produce devastation. What Hitler called the Fuhrerprinzip, the right of the superior being to the unquestioning obedience of others, depends on a culturally shared mythologizing of the genius's special insight. The charismatic power of such a claim is inextricably bound up with the history of modernism itself. It is that era when modernism flourished, its inspiring triumphs as well as its monstrous excesses, that Five Portraits lets us see in all its fascinating detail. ‘Five Portraits represents the work of one of our leading critics of modern literature writing at the peak of his powers. What unites these essays is above all Bernstein's shrewd and eminently sensible perception of the moral dangers in a propensity to the cultivation of dramatic extremes in the modern German imagination. '-Robert Alter, University of California, Berkeley. MICHAEL ANDRE BERNSTEIN is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include FOREGONE CONCLUSIONS: AGAINST APOCALYPTIC HISTORY; BITTER CARNIVAL: RESSENTIMENT AND THE ABJECT HERO; and THE TALE OF THE TRIBE: EZRA POUND AND THE MODERN VERSE EPIC. His work regularly appears in the New Republic, the Times Literary Supplement, and other publications. inventory #34492.
