In The Art of Distances, Corina Stan identifies an insistent preoccupation with interpersonal distance in a strand of twentieth-century European and Anglophone literature that includes the work of George Orwell, Paul Morand, Elias Canetti, Iris Murdoch, Walter Benjamin, Annie Ernaux, Günter Grass, and Damon Galgut. Specifically, Stan shows that these authors all engage in philosophical meditations, in the realm of literary writing, on the ethical question of how to live with others and how to find an ideal interpersonal distance at historical moments when there are no obviously agreed-upon social norms for ethical behavior. Bringing these authors into dialogue with philosophers such as Michel de Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Helmuth Plessner, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy, Emmanuel Levinas, Peter Sloterdijk, Guillaume le Blanc, and Pierre Zaoui, Stan shows how the question of the right interpersonal distance became a fundamental one for the literary authors under consideration and explores what forms and genres they proposed in order to convey the complexity of this question. Albeit unknowingly, she suggests, they are engaged in fleshing out what Roland Barthes called “a science, or perhaps an art, of distances.”

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Last modified

• 06/08/2022

Creator

• Stan, Corina

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-t24c-kv77

Subject

• Literary criticism

Publisher

• Northwestern University Press

Language

• English

Alternate Identifier

• Paper ISBN 978-0-8101-3685-4
• eBook ISBN 978-0-8101-3687-8
• Cloth ISBN 978-0-8101-3686-1

Keyword

• Zaoui
• Plessner
• George Orwell
• Annie Ernaux
• Walter Benjamin
• Crowds and Power
• modernism
• Nietzsche
• Heidegger
• Elias Canetti
• community
• Jean-Luc Nancy
• modernity
• Levinas
• literary criticism
• ethics
• Roland Barthes
• Freud
• Montaigne
• Damon Galgut
• Iris Murdoch
• alienation
• moral philosophy
• Günter Grass
• The Bell
• Paul Morand
• adorno
• Sloterdijk
• relationships

Date created

• 2018

Related url

•  https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810136854/the-art-of-distances/

Resource type

• Book

Rights statement

• In Copyright

License

• Creative Commons BY-NC-ND Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International