Primo Levi's Ordinary Virtues
From Testimony to Ethics
Robert S. C. Gordon
Price: £64.00 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-815963-6
Publication date: 18 October 2001
328 pages, 216x138 mm
A sample of this book is available in PDF format
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| Reviews |
| - 'This book will soon become one of the most valuable critical texts on Levi, because it encourages readers to go back to Levi's works and re-examine them from new philosophical and critical perspectives.' - Italian Studies
- 'Gordon draws on an impressive philosophical and critical framework ... His scholarly approach also involves the welcome choice of using a language which is clear and precise without being esoteric, learned yet accessible to a wide readership.' - Italian Studies
- 'This scholarly, sensitive, and insightful monograph is an important addition to the body of international Levi criticism.' - Italian Studies
- 'Extraordinary book ... Generous quotations from Levi make the book a pleasure to read ... the chapter on story-telling exemplifies Gordon's approach at its most appealing ... Gordon's book should be read by anyone interested in how a better world might just be possible.' - Jewish Chronicle
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| Description | | - The first in-depth study of Levi's ethical vision, throughout all his work, from his Holocaust writings to his poetry, fiction, and autobiography.
- Enhances Levi's status as a key figure of the twentieth century.
| | Primo Levi was perhaps the most humane and eloquent writer of testimony to emerge from the Nazi Holocaust. But he also went beyond testimony in his work, tackling many of the founding ethical questions of what it is to be human, 'how to live'. Whether in accounts of the concentration camps, essays, science-fiction, autobiography, poetry, or fiction, he always approached his writing with a
questioning, ethically open and alert eye. This book explores the extraordinary depth of Levi the ethical writer across his entire oeuvre for the first time, by way of thirteen so-called 'ordinary virtues', that is the ways and means Levi forges for practically and compassionately engaging with the world. It draws on a wide range of recent thinking about Holocaust literature and the general
relationship between literature and ethics. From the book a new understanding of Levi's importance as both witness and writer emerges, enhancing his status as one of the key literary figures of the twentieth century. |
Readership: Scholars and students of Primo Levi and twentieth-century Italian and Holocaust Literature.
| Contents |
Abreviations
Introduction: Beyond Testimony
I: The Ethical Turn
1.
Looking
2.
Memory
3.
Discretion, or Language and Silence
4.
Uses
II: Wit, or Practical Intelligence
5.
Measure, or a Sense of Limit
6.
Practice, or Trial and Error
7.
Perspective, or Looking Again
8.
Invention, or First Things
III: Community
9.
Common Sense
10.
Friendship
11.
Storytelling
IV: Diversions
12.
Irony, or Wit Revisited
13.
Play
Bibliography
Index
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| Authors, editors,
and contributors |
Robert S. C. Gordon, Fellow, Gonville and Caius College
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