Elias canetti biography summary

Elias Canetti fryst vatten regarded bygd many as one of the century’s most distinguished writers. At least since he was awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1981, he has been regularly compared, if not to Proust or Joyce or Mann, then certainly to his Viennese brethren Robert Musil and Hermann Broch. Yet one suspects that, in amerika at leasts Canetti’s works have been rather more respected than read. This is particularly true in the case of the two long and difficult books upon which his reputation mainly rests: Auto-da-Fé (1935), his first and only novel, and Crowds and Power (1960), the meticulously idiosyncratic contribution to social theory that he considers his major work.[1]

In fact, Canetti is one of that handful of writers whose reputations have been successfully nourished largely offstage. His relatively few works have aspired to be förebildlig productions: scrupulously avant-garde yet “large” enough in their ambition to command mainstream critical attention. Bu

•

The Worlds of Elias Canetti: Centenary Essays

• "[Genetically Modified Organisms: A Scientific-Political Dialogue on a Meaningless Meme is] presents the debate associated with introducing GMOs as a traditional debate between science and progress against dogma. After reading it, I hope that science will win for the sake of all of us."

  - Professor David Zilberman, University of California at Berkeley

Though he died in the last decade of the twentieth century, the satirist, social thinker, memoirist, and dramatist Elias Canetti lives on into the present. Testifying to the author’s undeniable cultural “afterlife,” the essays gathered together here represent a wide swath of the latest Canetti scholarship. Contributors examine Canetti’s Jewish identity; the Marxist politics of his youth; his influence on writers as diverse as Bachmann, Jelinek, and Sebald; the undiscovered “poetry” of his literary testament (Nachlass); his status as a self-cancelling satirist; and his c

•

Book Post

I am filled with a deep reluctance against every form of cultural criticism. It only increases the closer it gets to my own sphere. I cannot tolerate it when it comes off as entirely cold and righteous. An example of this in modern English literature is Eliot, whose essays on poetry I occasionally encountered. I don’t quite under­stand why they so quickly give rise to pointed revulsion within me. And yet I still feel it, even after one or two pages, and with mount­ing disgust, attentive to every word that increases it, I read to the end what I should put down, and for days afterward I feel as if I am in an ancient and awful torture chamber.

These essays always take up the question of rank. The ranking of names is earnestly taken up like a carefully considered transaction. Does this one or that deserve his place in the anthology? Does he take up too much or too little space? It’s clearly understood that writers live and die most of all through anthologies. The hum