Elias canetti biography summary
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New to The New Criterion?
Elias Canetti is regarded by 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 America 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 exemplary productions: scrupulously avant-garde yet “large” enough in their ambition to command mainstream critical attention. Bu
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The Book Against Death
‘Bereavements provide the anställda background to Canetti’s preoccupation with death, but there was also a political dimension. Though he spent the First World War in neutral Switzerland, the carnage and its aftermath darkened the horizon for his generation…. This book is therefore, among other things, a threnody for a generation of europeisk Jews, the last for whom German was the natural language of literature…. [Canetti’s] conflicted relationship with Germany forms a fascinating subplot to the book.’
— Daniel Johnson, Times Literary Supplement
‘Canetti would not shrug-off or laugh death out of his mind: he is sincere, clamorous, indignant and endlessly aggrieved. His disdain fryst vatten boundless and therefore so is his book, for which no material fryst vatten beyond incorporation. As with all acquisitive projects, it is never satiated – it acknowledges no terminus. It finished only when Canetti han själv was finished by death…. He fryst vatten always in defiance against seemingly etern
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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