The Consolations of Writing: Literary Strategies of Resistance from Boethius to Primo Levi

The Consolations of Writing: Literary Strategies of Resistance from Boethius to Primo Levi

Language: English

Pages: 336

ISBN: 0691161801

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy as a prisoner condemned to death for treason, circumstances that are reflected in the themes and concerns of its evocative poetry and dialogue between the prisoner and his mentor, Lady Philosophy. This classic philosophical statement of late antiquity has had an enduring influence on Western thought. It is also the earliest example of what Rivkah Zim identifies as a distinctive and vitally important medium of literary resistance: writing in captivity by prisoners of conscience and persecuted minorities.

The Consolations of Writing reveals why the great contributors to this tradition of prison writing are among the most crucial figures in Western literature. Zim pairs writers from different periods and cultural settings, carefully examining the rhetorical strategies they used in captivity, often under the threat of death. She looks at Boethius and Dietrich Bonhoeffer as philosophers and theologians writing in defense of their ideas, and Thomas More and Antonio Gramsci as politicians in dialogue with established concepts of church and state. Different ideas of grace and disgrace occupied John Bunyan and Oscar Wilde in prison; Madame Roland and Anne Frank wrote themselves into history in various forms of memoir; and Jean Cassou and Irina Ratushinskaya voiced their resistance to totalitarianism through lyric poetry that saved their lives and inspired others. Finally, Primo Levi's writing after his release from Auschwitz recalls and decodes the obscenity of systematic genocide and its aftermath.

A moving and powerful testament, The Consolations of Writing speaks to some of the most profound questions about life, enriching our understanding of what it is to be human.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To friends, colleagues, and postgraduate students that I have gladly incurred there, as elsewhere. Generous friendships that nurture the life of the mind have been most inspiring; among these I have been especially blessed by the encouragement, patient wisdom, and support of Christine Rees and David Ricks at King’s, Jonathan Steinberg in Cambridge (long ago), and (always) the late Malcolm Parkes of Keble College, Oxford. As my work neared completion, Pamela Robinson, Alastair Minnis, Michael.

Or the earth” (each the antithesis of the other) “offer” to his heart (line 11). Her image evaporates in a wonderfully surreal pun in line 10 where the mysterious “perle des secrets” and “le safran des roses” can be elided to conjure a third mimetic image of perles des rosées (beads of dew), without the use of new words. Her literary antecedents in ancient myth (Orpheus’s Eurydice, perhaps) and medieval dream-vision poetry are usually signs of loss and bereavement. The poet’s dream vision and all.

Imitation of the fall of man. Eating the apple in full knowledge of good and evil, reverses their fallen state as slaves hiding in a sewer casing, and inaugurates a brief moment lived as freeborn men with leisure to share the good things of life, especially stories, and the mutual pleasures of companionship. (Judaism does not recognize a concept of Original Sin.) Tischler’s character represents an expansion of the storyteller figure from If This Is a Man who had told “little anecdotes” and.

Wiser, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are.” In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man’s life, a misfortune, a casualty, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is “in trouble” simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it. With people of our own rank it is different. With us, prison makes a man a pariah. (p. 93) Wilde therefore constructed his new image upon the premise.

Defensive; its circularity is also evident as the particular case is defended by reference to the archetypal, which is then asserted as paradigmatic (reinterpreting the individual’s experience as representative of the human condition) and offered to a wider readership as instructive and important. Yet, as the prisoner wrote, ostensibly for the benefit of others, he also mitigated the harm heaped on his personal reputation. Like Bunyan’s Grace Abounding, Wilde’s Epistola offers its readers a.

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