Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach (Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures)
Philip Kitcher's book is a profession of love: for Mann's novella, for Mahler's music, and for the commitment to ideas and reflections on life that a certain current of German culture represented in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One senses that Kitcher has so completely immersed himself in the works of Mann, Mahler's music, their biographies, and to an extent the works by Britten and Visconti, that he speaks from within these works and lives.(Mark M. Anderson, Columbia University)Unusually rich, rewarding, and astounding in its range,Deaths in Veniceasks important philosophical questions -- about art's demands on its practitioners, its connections to the rest of life, and the possibility of endowing our short, evanescent lives with some lasting significance. More than reaching conclusions, these works provide beginnings: examples of new human possibilities that are not to be imitated but transcended -- and that, in large part, is how the book itself proceeds. This is much more than a work on the philosophy of art: it does philosophywithart.(Alexander Nehamas, Princeton University)Deaths in Veniceis a thorough discussion of the possible relation of literature, and art in general, to philosophical thinking. It is this double intensity of perspectives -- a double intensity that is never sacrificed in the one or the other direction -- that makes reading the book a unique experience.(Rudiger Campe, Yale University)Deaths in Veniceis to the twenty-first century what Nietzsche's literary and musical criticism was to the nineteenth: a philosopher's profound, shrewd, learned, sharp-eyed, and humane interpretation of art, which is also a profound interpretation of daily life. Starting from the doomed, lonely passion of Thomas Mann's Aschenbach, Philip Kitcher explores three millennia of thinking and the hidden mysteries of the individual mind as it confronts itself, its neighbors, and the universe.(Edward Mendelson, Columbia University)...[An] outstanding, intellectually agile book, which sheds so much fresh light on Mann's work and on the philosophical questions that it explores.(Ritchie RobertsonTimes Literary Supplement)