Death-drive : Freudian hauntings in literature and art /
"Robert Rowland Smith takes Freud's work on the death-drive and compares it with other philosophies of death - Pascal, Heidegger and Derrida in particular. He also applies it in a new way to literature and art - to Shakespeare, Rothko and Katharina Fritsch, among others. He asks whether ar...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Edinburgh :
Edinburgh University Press,
©2010.
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| Series: | Frontiers of theory
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "Robert Rowland Smith takes Freud's work on the death-drive and compares it with other philosophies of death - Pascal, Heidegger and Derrida in particular. He also applies it in a new way to literature and art - to Shakespeare, Rothko and Katharina Fritsch, among others. He asks whether artworks are dead or alive, if artistic creativity isn't actually a form of destruction, and whether our ability to be seduced by fine words means we don't put our selves at risk of death. In doing so, he proposes a new theory of aesthetics in which artworks and literary texts have a death-drive of their own, not least by their defining ability to turn away from all that is real, and where the effects of the death-drive mean that we are constantly living in imaginary, rhetorical or 'artistic' worlds. The book also provides a valuable introduction to the rich tradition of work on the death-drive since Freud."--pub. desc. |
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| Physical Description: | xvi, 215 pages : illustrations. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780748640393 (hbk.) 0748640398 (hbk.) |