Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

Forty years in the making, a new cultural canon that celebrates truth over hypocrisy, literature over totalitarianism.
Echoing Edward Saidâ€™s belief that â€œWestern humanism is not enough, we need a universal humanism,â€ the renowned critic Clive James presents here his lifeâ€™s work. Containing over one hundred original essays, organized by quotations from A to Z, Cultural Amnesia illuminates, rescues, or occasionally destroys the careers of many of the greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the twentieth century. In discussing, among others, Louis Armstrong, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, James writes, â€œIf the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.â€ Soaring to Montaigne-like heights, Cultural Amnesia is precisely the book to burnish these memories of a Western civilization that James fears is nearly lost.
Country USA
Manufacturer W. W. Norton & Company
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber 0393061167
Model 0393061167
ReleaseDate 2007-03-17
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780393061161

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