Kirjahaku

A book on the experience of reading Honoré de Balzac's La Comédie humaine which recounts the process of Peter Brooks's own discovery of Balzac. A personal account of coming to terms with Balzac: moving from more classical and restrained authors to the highly-coloured melodramatic novels of the Human Comedy, which give us the dynamics of a new and challenging world on the threshold of modernity. This volume shows readers how to read, and to love reading, Balzac, and how to engage with his vast work.

This text juxtaposes cases from law and literature to view the kinds of truth we associate with confessions, and why we both rely on them and regard them with suspicion. By questioning the truths of confession, Brooks challenges us to reconsider how we demand confessions and what we do with them.

In 1963 George Wilson, the landlord of the Fox and Grapes public house in Sneinton, Nottingham was brutally stabbed to death outside his pub. The pub was known to all of the citizens of Nottingham as "The Pretty Windows" and this name became synonymous with one of Nottingham's most vicious and frenzied murders.George Wilson's attacker was never brought to justice.This book charts a brief history of Sneinton and the part that the pub played, and still plays, in the local community. It uses contemporary newspaper reports to examine the murder, and explores the possible links to other murders committed in the same area in the years immediately prior to and just after 1963.

In this lucid and fascinating book, Peter Brooks argues that melodrama is a crucial mode of expression in modern literature. After studying stage melodrama as a dominant popular form in the nineteenth century, he moves on to Balzac and Henry James to show how these "realist" novelists created fiction using the rhetoric and excess of melodrama - in particular its secularized conflicts of good and evil, salvation and damnation. The Melodramatic Imagination has become a classic work for understanding theater, fiction, and film.

A lively and distinctive look at realism in great modern books and art?Realist Vision exploresthe claim to represent the world “as it is.” Peter Brooks takes a new look at the realist tradition and its intense interest in the visual. Discussing major English and French novels and paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Brooks provides a lively and perceptive view of the realist project. Centering each chapter on a single novel or group of paintings, Brooks examines the “invention” of realism beginning with Balzac and Dickens, its apogee in the work of such as Flaubert, Eliot, and Zola, and its continuing force in James and modernists such as Woolf. He considers also the painting of Courbet, Manet, Caillebotte, Tissot, and Lucian Freud, and such recent phenomena as “photorealism” and “reality TV.”

Against the historical backdrop of the French expedition in 1840 to retrieve Napoleon's body from Saint Helena, two men and a woman find themselves engulfed in long-dormant and dangerous political passions. Philippe de Rohan-Chabot, an aristocratic young diplomat, is charged with bringing the body from the island prison where Napoleon died to a glorious tomb at Les Invalides in Paris. Chabot's rival is the aging diplomat and author Henri Beyle, known to posterity as Stendhal. The enigmatic and impulsive Amelia Curial must free herself from the shadow of her mother's scandalous loves and untimely death, and from the life of stale convention that her family urges upon her. The dead emperor is a token in a political game to appease the enemies of the monarchy, but that gamble imperils the king's rule and a new revolution looms. Meanwhile, the interplay of the three central characters traces a delicate pattern of romance, longing, misunderstanding, and the obstacles to the pursuit of happiness.

In 1869, Gustave Flaubert published what he considered to be his masterwork novel, A Sentimental Education, which told a deeply human and deeply pessimistic story of the 1848 revolutions. The book was a critical and commercial flop. Flaubert was devastated.

Psychoanalysis and Narrative is a clear and exemplary demonstration of the ways in which the vital connections between psychoanalysis and literature can be articulated without reductive simplification. Following Freud's assumption that sexuality and narrative form are analogous, Brooks proposes that literature constitutes a fundamental part of human existence. He supplements the terminology of narrative theory with the rich and suggestive language of psychoanalysis.

A book which should appeal to both literary theorists and to readers of the novel, this study invites the reader to consider how the plot reflects the patterns of human destiny and seeks to impose a new meaning on life.

Henry James's reputation as The Master is so familiar that it's hard to imagine he was ever someone on whom some things really were lost. This is the story of the year--1875 to 1876--when the young novelist moved to Paris, drawn by his literary idols living at the center of the early modern movement in art. As Peter Brooks skillfully recounts, James largely failed to appreciate or even understand the new artistic developments teeming around him during his Paris sojourn. But living in England twenty years later, he would recall the aesthetic lessons of Paris, and his memories of the radical perspectives opened up by French novelists and painters would help transform James into the writer of his adventurous later fiction. A narrative that combines biography and criticism and uses James's writings to tell the story from his point of view, Henry James Goes to Paris vividly brings to life the young American artist's Paris year--and its momentous artistic and personal consequences. James's Paris story is one of enchantment and disenchantment. He initially loved Paris, he succeeded in meeting all the writers he admired (Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Goncourt, and Daudet), and he witnessed the latest development in French painting, Impressionism. But James largely found the writers disappointing, and he completely misunderstood the paintings he saw. He also seems to have fallen in and out of love in a more ordinary sense--with a young Russian aesthete, Paul Zhukovsky. Disillusioned, James soon retreated to England--for good. But James would eventually be changed forever by his memories of Paris.

"We know that it matters crucially to be able to say who we are, why we are here, and where we are going," Peter Brooks writes in Enigmas of Identity. Many of us are also uncomfortably aware that we cannot provide a convincing account of our identity to others or even ourselves. Despite or because of that failure, we keep searching for identity, making it up, trying to authenticate it, and inventing excuses for our unpersuasive stories about it. This wide-ranging book draws on literature, law, and psychoanalysis to examine important aspects of the emergence of identity as a peculiarly modern preoccupation. In particular, the book addresses the social, legal, and personal anxieties provoked by the rise of individualism and selfhood in modern culture. Paying special attention to Rousseau, Freud, and Proust, Brooks also looks at the intersection of individual life stories with the law, and considers the creation of an introspective project that culminates in psychoanalysis. Elegant and provocative, Enigmas of Identity offers new insights into the questions and clues about who we think we are.

"We know that it matters crucially to be able to say who we are, why we are here, and where we are going," Peter Brooks writes in Enigmas of Identity. Many of us are also uncomfortably aware that we cannot provide a convincing account of our identity to others or even ourselves. Despite or because of that failure, we keep searching for identity, making it up, trying to authenticate it, and inventing excuses for our unpersuasive stories about it. This wide-ranging book draws on literature, law, and psychoanalysis to examine important aspects of the emergence of identity as a peculiarly modern preoccupation. In particular, the book addresses the social, legal, and personal anxieties provoked by the rise of individualism and selfhood in modern culture. Paying special attention to Rousseau, Freud, and Proust, Brooks also looks at the intersection of individual life stories with the law, and considers the creation of an introspective project that culminates in psychoanalysis. Elegant and provocative, Enigmas of Identity offers new insights into the questions and clues about who we think we are.

Contending that a search for "realism" distorts the writing of Crebillon, Marivaux, Laclos, and Stendahl, Peter Brooks considers their novels with reference to the manner in which the characters explore their worth and pursue their own systems of relationships. The novels discussed are used as examples of the fictional exploitation of the drama inherent in man's social existence and the encounters of personal styles within the framework and code provided by a coterie which is an object of conscious cultivation for its own sake. The author gives detailed readings of the four authors' works and moves backward to consider the seventeenth-century moralistes and the drawing rooms in which literary forms applied to social man were eloquently elaborated. Originally published in 1969. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Contending that a search for "realism" distorts the writing of Crebillon, Marivaux, Laclos, and Stendahl, Peter Brooks considers their novels with reference to the manner in which the characters explore their worth and pursue their own systems of relationships. The novels discussed are used as examples of the fictional exploitation of the drama inherent in man's social existence and the encounters of personal styles within the framework and code provided by a coterie which is an object of conscious cultivation for its own sake. The author gives detailed readings of the four authors' works and moves backward to consider the seventeenth-century moralistes and the drawing rooms in which literary forms applied to social man were eloquently elaborated. Originally published in 1969. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This book tests the proposition that the humanities can, and at their best do, represent a commitment to ethical reading. And that this commitment, and the training and discipline of close reading that underlie it, represent something that the humanities need to bring to other fields: to professional training and to public life. What leverage does reading, of the attentive sort practiced in the interpretive humanities, give you on life? Does such reading represent or produce an ethics? The question was posed for many in the humanities by the “Torture Memos” released by the Justice Department a few years ago, presenting arguments that justified the use of torture by the U.S. government with the most twisted, ingenious, perverse, and unethical interpretation of legal texts. No one trained in the rigorous analysis of poetry could possibly engage in such bad-faith interpretation without professional conscience intervening to say: This is not possible. Teaching the humanities appears to many to be an increasingly disempowered profession—and status—within American culture. Yet training in the ability to read critically the messages with which society, politics, and culture bombard us may be more necessary than ever in a world in which the manipulation of minds and hearts is more and more what running the world is all about. This volume brings together a group of distinguished scholars and intellectuals to debate the public role and importance of the humanities. Their exchange suggests that Shelley was not wrong to insist that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind: Cultural change carries everything in its wake. The attentive interpretive reading practiced in the humanities ought to be an export commodity to other fields and to take its place in the public sphere.

This book tests the proposition that the humanities can, and at their best do, represent a commitment to ethical reading. And that this commitment, and the training and discipline of close reading that underlie it, represent something that the humanities need to bring to other fields: to professional training and to public life. What leverage does reading, of the attentive sort practiced in the interpretive humanities, give you on life? Does such reading represent or produce an ethics? The question was posed for many in the humanities by the "Torture Memos" released by the Justice Department a few years ago, presenting arguments that justified the use of torture by the U.S. government with the most twisted, ingenious, perverse, and unethical interpretation of legal texts. No one trained in the rigorous analysis of poetry could possibly engage in such bad-faith interpretation without professional conscience intervening to say: This is not possible. Teaching the humanities appears to many to be an increasingly disempowered profession—and status—within American culture. Yet training in the ability to read critically the messages with which society, politics, and culture bombard us may be more necessary than ever in a world in which the manipulation of minds and hearts is more and more what running the world is all about. This volume brings together a group of distinguished scholars and intellectuals to debate the public role and importance of the humanities. Their exchange suggests that Shelley was not wrong to insist that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind: Cultural change carries everything in its wake. The attentive interpretive reading practiced in the humanities ought to be an export commodity to other fields and to take its place in the public sphere.

Enter the mind of French literary giant Honor de Balzac with this groundbreaking biography that illuminates the writer's life and era through close study of the unforgettable characters and places in Balzac's expansive and inimitable works. Peter Brook's Balzac's Lives is a biography like no other, a vivid and searching portrait of the great novelist that is based on a close examination of the extraordinary characters that throng his work. More than anyone, Balzac invented the nineteenth-century novel, with its interwoven plots and diverse and overlapping realities, political, economic, domestic, psychological; indeed, Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that Balzac invented the nineteenth century It was, in any case, above all the wonderful, unforgettable, extravagant characters he dreamed up and made flesh--entrepreneurs, bankers, inventors, industrialists, poets, artists, bohemians of both sexes, journalists, aristocrats, politicians, prostitutes--that allowed Balzac to bring to life the dynamic forces of the new era that ushered in our own. Brooks singles out the capitalist Gobseck, the aspiring writer Lucien de Rubembr , the ambitious politican Rastignac, the gay criminal mastermind, Collin, among others, to disclose the secret workings of a great writer's inner world.