Cowinner of the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature
“Our daily encounters with forgetting have not taught us enough about how much power it exercises over our lives, what reflections and feelings it evokes in different individuals, how even art and science presuppose—with sympathy or antipathy—forgetting, and finally what political and cultural barriers can be erected against forgetting when it cannot be reconciled with what is right and moral. . . . We find that cultural history provides a helpful perspective in which the value of the art of forgetting emerges. . . . That is the subject this book (through which flows Lethe, the meandering stream of forgetfulness) will try to represent and discuss by means of many concrete examples, taken primarily from literature.”—from Lethe
Lethe is an exploration of the art of forgetting—as the counterpart of the rhetorical art of memory—in Western culture from the Greeks to the present. It offers penetrating analyses of works by, among others, Augustine, Bellow, Borges, Casanova, Celan, Cervantes, Dante, Descartes, Freud, Goethe, Homer, Kant, Kleist, Levi, Locke, Mallarmé, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Ovid, Pirandello, Plato, Proust, Rabelais, Rousseau, Sartre, and Wiesel. What emerges is a general view of forgetting that combines a recognition of its necessity and inevitability with a critique of forgetting (particularly in the case of the Holocaust) and the need to combat it. Harald Weinrich’s epilogue considers forgetting in the present age of information overflow, particularly in the area of the natural sciences.
This magisterial book was first published in German in 1997 and has already been translated into French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish; a Korean translation is in the works. This is the first of Weinrich’s books to be translated into English and will be welcomed by scholars and students of literature, intellectual and cultural historians, classicists, historians of philosophy, and other philosophers with literary interests. The range of the book is astonishing. In Steven Rendall’s skillful and fluent translation, its readability is noteworthy.
Reviews
“Surveying the ‘high’ literary and philosophical tradition, he casts forgetting in a new light. Memory loss, as commonly understood, is a form of pathology, an illness, and a cause of great anxiety -- consider the stigma attached to Alzheimer’s disease. Weinrich on the other hand shines his beam on cases—both real and fictional—where memory is the burden and forgetting the cure.”—The Australian, 21 August 2004
“Clearly, Weinrich has an eye for the most far-reaching historical and literary-historical connections. Forgetting has been a topic of great interest in recent years, often in fairly narrow connection with Nietzsche and Freud. This book, with its vastly enlarged range of reference, entirely revises and renews one’s sense of the topic.”—Henry Staten, MLQ, September 2005
“This is a truly great book, one of the most subtle and certainly lasting contributions to the discussion about the dialectics of memory in our time. Harald Weinrich is one of the most learned European humanists.”—Paul Michael Lutzeler, Rosa May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities, Washington University
“In writing a history of forgetting, Harald Weinrich, who for several decades now has been one of the leading European humanists, has discovered what appears to be the hidden—the true?—history of our knowledge and perhaps even of what we call our ‘culture.’ Surprisingly, this turns out to be a history of fears and obsessions, of randomness and necessity, of scarcity, exuberance, oppression—and of redemption.”—Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Albert Guérard Professor in Literature, Stanford University
“Harald Weinrich is a genuine humanist of wide and profound erudition. His sources include many literatures of the West, from antiquity to the present. His unerring critical judgment permits him to select the essential within these. All these qualities he needs as he tackles the unusual and multifarious topic of forgetting. The book not only conveys enormous information as it considers forgetting from a novel angle but also serves to engender inspiration. Weinrich’s text is composed with such clarity and style that reading becomes a pleasure rather than a labor.”—Ernst Pulgram, Hayward Keniston Professor of Classical and Romance Linguistics, Emeritus, University of Michigan
“Harald Weinrich formulates topics with extraordinary clarity and writes with an elegance rare in contemporary cultural studies and virtually unknown in German scholarship in the last few decades. Lethe begins as an apparently unassuming history of a topic no one ever thought about before and gradually shifts from narration to a civil but incisive critique of our current situation. The brilliance of the book lies perhaps most of all in its understatement. The most innocent form of philological classification can suddenly open into penetrating moral and psychological analysis.”—Jane K. Brown, University of Washington
About the Author
Harald Weinrich has taught at Princeton University and the University of Michigan, as well as at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and the Scuola Normale in Pisa. Among his books are Das Ingenium Don Quijotes, Tempus, Literatur für Leser, Wege der Sprachkultur, and Textgrammatik der deutschen Sprache. Steven Rendall is the author of many studies on French literature and literary theory and the translator of more than two dozen books from French and German. He currently lives in France.
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