num_pages: 150
description: In Five Portraits, one of the most acute critical thinkers of our time presents essays on five of the most important writers of the past hundred Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Celan, Robert Musil, Martin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin. The result is a remarkable examination of a moment when these writers, caught between the dream of creating an abiding masterpiece and the reality of a brutal culture fascinated by apocalyptic catastrophe, deliberately put themselves and their work at the center of the storm. Written in elegant and jargon-free prose, Michael Andre Bernstein's essays create a vivid image of an epoch whose aspirations and torments continues to shape the world we inhabit today.
language: English
title: Five Portraits: Modernity and the Imagination in Twentieth-Century German Writing
titlecomplete: Five Portraits: Modernity and the Imagination in Twentieth-Century German Writing (Rethinking Theory)
ratings_count: 4
series: Rethinking Theory
publisher: Northwestern University Press