Philosophy of Literature
The initial period of Perniola’s career focuses on the philosophy of the novel and the theory of literature. In his first main work, Il metaromanzo (The Metanovel 1966), which is his doctoral dissertation, Perniola argues that the modern novel from Henry James to Samuel Beckett has a self-referential character. Furthermore he claims that the novel is only about itself. Perniola’s aim was to demonstrate the philosophical dignity of these literary works and try to recover a serious cultural expression. The Italian Nobel Prize for Literature Eugenio Montale praised Perniola for this original critique of novels.
Read more about this topic: Mario Perniola
Famous quotes containing the words philosophy of, philosophy and/or literature:
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“When Philosophy with its abstractions paints grey in grey, the freshness and life of youth has gone, the reconciliation is not a reconciliation in the actual, but in the ideal world.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)