Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts - Hardcover

James, Clive

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393061167 ISBN 13: 9780393061161

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007

Synopsis

Echoing Edward Said's belief that "Western humanism is not enough, we need a universal humanism," the renowned critic Clive James presents here his life'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, "If 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." 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.

About this title

Review:

The greatest cultural critic of our time. -- Allen Barra

The summa of James's unparalleled career as a cultural critic.

One of the most ingeniously stimulating literary critics now writing in English. -- Richard Eder

A capacious and capricious encyclopedia of essays about everyone he considers worth knowing about in the 20th century. -- Liesl Schillinger

For non-fiction, there was one stupedous starburst of wild brilliance: Clive James's Cultural Amnesia. It crackles with epigrammatic mischief and reminded me of Charles Dantzig's great Dictionnair egoiste de la litterature francaise, a book that features a devastating skewering of Sartre and a spirited defence of the adjective, plus essays on ignorance, cliches, therapy (against it) digressions (for) and lettres. Will someone please get this fabulous box of tricks translated? -- Simon Schama

James's writings include the great tome Cultural Amnesia, the reading of which is something like getting a master's degree in 20th-century intellectual history. --Elizabeth Gilbert"

About the Author:

Born in Australia, Clive James lives in Cambridge, England. He is the author of Unreliable Memoirs; a volume of selected poems, Opal Sunset; the best-selling Cultural Amnesia; and the translator of The Divine Comedy by Dante. He has written for the New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. He is an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0393061167
• ISBN 13: 9780393061161
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 912