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The Lie of Romanticism and the Truth of the Novel

14.99 €
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The Lie of Romanticism and the Truth of the Novel
14.99 €
In basket
The title of this first book by the Franco-American philosopher René Girard already encapsulates the entire pathos of his thought: for him, "romanticism" is not so much a movement in European art as the illusion that man is free in his desires, and the "novel" is not a literary genre but a "revelation" exposing our radical dependence on the Other. Enlisting the support of great writers—Cervantes, Flaubert, Stendhal, Proust, and Dostoevsky—the author creates a conceptual history of desire from the New Age to the present, from the playful imitation of the "Sun King" Louis XIV to the dark hatred of all for all that engulfed the 20th century. For him, the European novel becomes a guide through the human soul, which journeys from vanity, envy, and imitation of one's neighbor to the liberation that comes to the hero on his deathbed. While Girard's subsequent books would explore culture and the world at large, The Lie of Romanticism is his only work to address the life and death of the individual. Whether explicitly or condensed, all of the philosopher's fundamental ideas are already present here: the mimetic principle, the sacrificial crisis, the scapegoat mechanism—and its overcoming in Christianity.
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