Ecstasy and terror : from the Greeks to Game of thrones

Title:

Author:

Mendelsohn, Daniel Adam, 1960- author.

Added Author:

Levin, Anna, 1961-

Personal Author:

Mendelsohn, Daniel Adam, 1960- author.

ISBN:

9781681374055

Physical Description:

378 pages ; 22 cm

Contents:

Ancients. Girl, Interrupted: How Gay Was Sappho? -- Deep Frieze: What Does the Parthenon Mean? -- Ecstasy and Terror: The Modernity of Euripides' Bacchae -- Unburied: Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the Lessons of Antigone -- JFK, Tragedy, Myth: Classical Paradigms and National Trauma -- Epic Fail?: Reading the Aeneid in the Twenty-First Century -- As Good as Great Poetry Gets: Cavafy Between Poetry and History -- Moderns. The Last Minstrel: Henry Roth's Tormented Life and Work -- Brideshead, Revisited: Getting Waugh Wrong -- Hail, Augustus!: History and Character in John Williams's Fiction -- Weaving New Patterns: The autobiographical novels of Ingmar Bergman -- The End of the Road: Patrick Leigh Fermor's Final Journey -- The Women and the Thrones: George R.R. Martin's Feminist Epic on TV -- The Robots are Winning!: Homer, Ex Machina, and Her -- A Whole Lotta Pain: Hanya Yanagihara and the Aesthetics of Victimhood -- I, Knausgaard: Fact, Fiction, and the Fuhrer -- Personals. The American Boy: An Author, a Young Reader and a Life-Changing Correspondence -- Stopping in Vilna: Stendhal Meets the Holocaust in Eastern Europe -- The Countess and the Schoolboy: Coming of Age in Charlottesville -- A Critic's Manifesto.

Personal Subject:

Mendelsohn, Daniel Adam, 1960-

Subject Term:

Civilization, Ancient, in popular culture.

Civilization, Classical -- Influence.

Civilization, Western -- Classical influences.

Classical literature -- Influence.

Critics -- Biography.

Film critics -- Biography.

Literature, Modern -- Classical influences.

Genre:

Biographies.

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Belmont	Book	801.95 M537	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Ginter Park	Book	801.95 M537	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

"The role of the critic," Daniel Mendelsohn writes, "is to mediate intelligently and stylishly between a work and its audience; to educate and edify in an engaging and, preferably, entertaining way." His latest collection exemplifies the range, depth, and erudition that have made him "required reading for anyone interested in dissecting culture" ( The Daily Beast ). In Ecstasy and Terror , Mendelsohn once again casts an eye at literature, film, television, and the personal essay, filtering his insights through his training as a scholar of classical antiquity in illuminating and sometimes surprising ways.

Many of these essays look with fresh eyes at our culture's Greek and Roman models: some find an arresting modernity in canonical works ( Bacchae , the Aeneid ), while others detect a "Greek DNA" in our responses to national traumas such as the Boston Marathon bombings and the assassination of JFK. There are pieces on contemporary literature, from the "aesthetics of victimhood" in Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life to the uncomfortable mixture of art and autobiography in novels by Henry Roth, Ingmar Bergman, and Karl Ove Knausgård. Mendelsohn considers pop culture, too, in essays on the feminism of Game of Thrones and on recent films about artificial intelligence--a subject, he reminds us, that was already of interest to Homer.

This collection also brings together for the first time a number of the award-winning memoirist's personal essays, including his "critic's manifesto" and a touching reminiscence of his boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, who inspired him to study the Classics.

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

Erudite essays on classical and contemporary culture.The role of a critic, writes Mendelsohn (Humanities/Bard Coll.; An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, 2017, etc.), is "to educate and edify in an engaging and, preferably, entertaining way." The author has used his classical training not for rebarbative academic papers but for "getting readers to love and appreciate the works that I myself loved and appreciated." The pieces in this collection, most of them written for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, demonstrate how brilliantly he has succeeded. Some of them focus on the ancient Greek poets and tragedies he loves, such as Sappho and Antigone. Mendelsohn invokes the classics to offer perspectives on modern-day events, as when he compares the Kennedy family curses to Oresteia and its assumption that there is "a connection between the sins of the fathers and the sufferings of the children and their children afterward." Astute observations populate essays on topics from Brideshead Revisited and Ingmar Bergman films to George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, which he calls a "remarkable feminist epic." Readers might challenge some pointse.g., when Mendelsohn writes that Hanya Yanagihara's novel A Little Life is "about a subject that is too rarely explored in contemporary letters: nonsexual friendship among adult men," one might cite works by Richard Russo, Denis Johnson, Raymond Carver, and many others. However, Mendelsohn's points are always passionately argued. He strikes the perfect balance between learned and playful, as when he wonders what 46th-century archaeologists, sifting through the ruins of 21st-century America, will make of building inscriptions such as Cond Nast and Michael Kors or whether the "presence of mysterious symbolsin particular, an apple with a bite taken out of itwill raise the vexed question of whether the site was sacred or secular."One fascinating essay after another from one of America's best critics. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.