num_pages: 301
description: 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 cultures Greek and Roman 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 Yanagiharas A Little Life to the uncomfortable mixture of art and autobiography in novels by Henry Roth Ingmar Bergman and Karl Ove Knausgrd. Mendelsohn considers pop culture too in essays on the feminism of Game of Thrones and on recent films about artificial intelligencea 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 memoirists personal essays including his critics manifesto and a touching reminiscence of his boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault who inspired him to study the Classics.
language: English
title: Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones
publisher: New York Review Books