The Worlds of Elias Canetti: Centenary Essays
Editor: William Collins Donahue and Julian Preece
Date Of Publication: Nov 2007
Isbn13: 9781847183521
Isbn: 1-84718-352-2
Though he died in the last decade of the twentieth century, the satirist, social thinker, memoirist, and dramatist Elias Canetti lives on into the present. Testifying to the author’s undeniable cultural “afterlife,” the essays gathered together here represent a wide swath of the latest Canetti scholarship. Contributors examine Canetti’s Jewish identity; the Marxist politics of his youth; his influence on writers as diverse as Bachmann, Jelinek, and Sebald; the undiscovered “poetry” of his literary testament (Nachlass); his status as a self-cancelling satirist; and his complex and sometimes ambivalent citation of Chinese and French cultural icons. In addition, this volume presents a treatment of Canetti as philosopher; as contributor to the great debate on the genesis of violence; as a chronicler of the WWII exile experience; as well as a personal reminiscence by one of the great Canetti scholars of our time, Gerald Stieg. The Worlds of Elias Canetti challenges conventional wisdom about this Nobel laureate and opens up new areas to scholarly investigation.

“The Worlds of Elias Canetti convenes diverse disciplinary perspectives on one of the most enigmatic and ambidextrous authors of the twentieth century. An internationally renowned team of scholars places Canetti’s social thought and literary oeuvre within intriguing new contexts, highlighting as yet underexplored connections within areas such as philosophy, Jewish Studies, cultural anthropology, literary intertextuality, and beyond. Compellingly, this volume introduces us to a Canetti we have not yet known, and one who equally belongs to the twenty-first century. In its scope and originality, The Worlds of Elias Canetti sets a new standard—and not just for Canetti scholarship.”

Jochen Vogt, Professor of German Literature, University of Essen

William Collins Donahue, author of The End of Modernism: Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé, is associate professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature at Duke University, where he serves as Director of Graduate Studies.

Julian Preece, author most recently of The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti: Out of the Shadows of a Husband, is professor of German at the University of Wales Swansea. He has also authored The Life and Works of Guenter Grass: Literature, History, Politics and edited The Cambridge Companion to Kafka.

"The Anthology constitutes a significant enrichment to the body of research on the Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti."

Helga W. Kraft, University of Illinois at Chicago

"The editors have created a collection that displays the shape and balance of the best kind of critical anthology...the essays are of an impressively high standard, and there is an internal coherence and logic to this volume that can sometimes be hard to find in published conference proceedings. The esays address virtually all parts of Canetti's diverse ouvre and represent an excellent snapshot of contemporary scholarship on the author. They succeed in contextualising Canetti's writings in original, often provocative, and persuasive ways, while at times entering into productive dialogue - be the engagement direct or oblique - with one another."

David Darby, University of Western Ontario, MLR, 104.4, 2009

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