Kafka (Fontana modern masters)

Heller, Erich

Literature & Fiction

Fontana

The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought

History & Criticism

Barnes & Noble Imports

Erich Heller is probably the finest critic of German literature now writing. As evidence one need only mention The Disinherited Mind and Thomas Mann: The Ironic German. These are works which illuminate the literary consciousness at many levels, combining scholarly precision with highly adventurous forays into the psychology and artistic development of their subjects, and which manage, as so many learned studies do not, to capture a particular sensibility and its relevance to culture in general. Alive, original, acute, Heller's judgments have moreover a wide philosophical range, a talent eminently displayed in the seven superb essays under discussion here. Two of them tackle the thorny area of Romanticism and Realism and show the interlocking paradoxical nature of each. Three of them consider the meaning of Hegel, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein especially as reflected through the dilemma of human inwardness, whether in Hamlet, Rilke's Elegies, or in religious, historical, philological questions of salvation and ethics. The first essay elaborates on the various versions of the Faust legend as encountered in Marlowe, Goethe and Mann, and the second achieves the extraordinary feat of making Schiller's poetic dramas and ""Beautiful Soul"" ideal a fascinating and moving experience. The whole collection is one of imposing dimensions, profound, gracefully written, thorough. 
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re...\nContents: 
Faust's damnation: the morality of knowledge.-- 
In two minds about Schiller.-- 
The romantic expectation.-- 
The realistic fallacy.-- 
The artist's journey into the interior: a Hegelian prophecy and its fulfillment.-- 
The importance of Nietzsche.-- 
Wittgenstein and Nietzsche.

The Artist's Journey into the Interior, and Other Essays

World Literature

Harcourt

Heller examines the sense of values embodied in the works of key German writers and thinkers from Goethe to Kafka, particularly the consciousness of life's depreciation.

Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought

Essays & Correspondence

Harper-perennial

In this book, one of the most distinguished scholars of German culture collects his essays on a figure who has long been one of his chief preoccupations. Erich Heller's lifelong study of modern European literature necessarily returns again and again to Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche prided himself on having broken with all traditional ways of thinking and feeling, and once even claimed that he would someday be recognized for having ushered in a new millennium. While acknowledging Nietzsche's radicalism, Heller also insists on the continuity of the story in which he does indeed occupy a central place. By considering Nietzsche in relation to Goethe, Rilke, Wittgenstein, Yeats, and others, Heller shows the philosopher's ambivalence toward the tradition he inherited as well as his profound effect on the thought and sensibility of those who followed him. It is hardly an exaggeration to say, as Heller does in his first essay, that Nietzsche is to many modern writers and thinkers—including Mann, Musil, Kafka, Freud, Heidegger, Jaspers, Gide, and Sartre—what St. Thomas Aquinas was to Dante: the categorical interpreter of a world, which they contemplate imaginatively and theoretically without ever much upsetting its Nietzschean structure. Thus it is Nietzsche's thought, so pervasively present in the themes of modernity, that gives coherence and unity to Heller's essays. What emerges from them is that, despite his iconoclastic declarations and unorthodox philosophical practices, Nietzsche deals with the human spirit's persistent concerns. His questions remain urgent, and even the answers, in all their contradictoriness, possess the commanding force of his inquiry. An example is the incompatibility of the famous extremes, the teaching of the Übermensch and the Eternal Recurrence of All Things. These cancel each other out and yet grow from the same intellectual and spiritual roots, as is shown lucidly and cogently by one of Heller's most forceful essays, "Nietzsche's Terrors: Time and the Inarticulate." In fathoming the depth of this contradiction, Heller at the same time reveals the importance of Nietzsche for those who seek to understand the wellsprings of the epoch's disquiet, turmoil, and creativity.

The Importance of Nietzsche

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

University of Chicago Press

In this book, one of the most distinguished scholars of German culture collects his essays on a figure who has long been one of his chief preoccupations. Erich Heller's lifelong study of modern European literature necessarily returns again and again to Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche prided himself on having broken with all traditional ways of thinking and feeling, and once even claimed that he would someday be recognized for having ushered in a new millennium. While acknowledging Nietzsche's radicalism, Heller also insists on the continuity of the story in which he does indeed occupy a central place. By considering Nietzsche in relation to Goethe, Rilke, Wittgenstein, Yeats, and others, Heller shows the philosopher's ambivalence toward the tradition he inherited as well as his profound effect on the thought and sensibility of those who followed him. It is hardly an exaggeration to say, as Heller does in his first essay, that Nietzsche is to many modern writers and thinkers—including Mann, Musil, Kafka, Freud, Heidegger, Jaspers, Gide, and Sartre—what St. Thomas Aquinas was to Dante: the categorical interpreter of a world, which they contemplate imaginatively and theoretically without ever much upsetting its Nietzschean structure. Thus it is Nietzsche's thought, so pervasively present in the themes of modernity, that gives coherence and unity to Heller's essays. What emerges from them is that, despite his iconoclastic declarations and unorthodox philosophical practices, Nietzsche deals with the human spirit's persistent concerns. His questions remain urgent, and even the answers, in all their contradictoriness, possess the commanding force of his inquiry. An example is the incompatibility of the famous extremes, the teaching of the Übermensch and the Eternal Recurrence of All Things. These cancel each other out and yet grow from the same intellectual and spiritual roots, as is shown lucidly and cogently by one of Heller's most forceful essays, "Nietzsche's Terrors: Time and the Inarticulate." In fathoming the depth of this contradiction, Heller at the same time reveals the importance of Nietzsche for those who seek to understand the wellsprings of the epoch's disquiet, turmoil, and creativity.

The Importance of Nietzsche (Sino-American-German Documentary)

The disinherited mind: Essays in modern German literature and thought

Bowes & Bowes

The disinherited mind;: Essays in modern German literature and thought

Barnes&Noble

Thomas Mann: The Ironic German

In this book, which was first published in 1958 and reissued in 1981, Professor Heller sees Mann as the late heir of the central tradition of modern German literature and also as one of the most ironic writers within that tradition. He offers a detailed study of the major works of fiction, Buddenbrooks, Tonio Kröher, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers, Doctor Faustus and Felix Krull, as well as a discussion of Mann's most significant political essay, 'Meditations of a Non-Political Man'. Beyond this, Heller's book is a profound commentary on Mann by a mind attuned to (and mouded by) precisely the intellectual and cultural traditions which are so much part of Mann's creative make-up.

MANN, THOMAS

Biographies & Memoirs

Cambridge University Press

The guiding theme of these essays is the fate of the imagination and the condition of art in the modern world, where both appear to be enfeebled by scientific hubris, undermined by psychological self-questioning and compromised by political disaster. Erich Heller traces this predicament with subtlety and profundity, from Hegel's and Nietzsche's diagnoses to the various truces and manoeuvres through which remarkable victories have nonetheless been achieved - such as the comic triumphs of Wilhelm Busch. As elsewhere in Professor Heller's work, Thomas Mann's attempt to outwit and redeem his circumstances through art - 'despite' them, as he said himself - occupies a central place. Three of the present essays are devoted to him. Others consider Kleist, Fontane, Hamsun, Karl Kraus and the crucial figures of Hölderlin (who plays such a central role in Heidegger's later philosophical writings) and Rilke. Written with feeling, and the distinctive elegance and wit that have characterized all of Professor Heller's work, the essays here reaffirm the vital interdependence of literature and human values.

In the Age of Prose: Literary and Philosophical Essays

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