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The Demonic: Literature and Experience, by Ewan Fernie
Free PDF The Demonic: Literature and Experience, by Ewan Fernie
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Are we either good or bad, and do we really know the difference? Why do we want what we cannot have, and even to be what we’re not? Can we desire others without wanting to possess them? Can we open to others and not risk possession ourselves? And where, in these cases, do we draw the line?
Ewan Fernie argues that the demonic tradition in literature offers a key to our most agonised and intimate experiences. The Demonic ranges across the breadth of Western culture, engaging with writers as central and various as Luther, Shakespeare, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Melville and Mann.
A powerful foreword by Jonathan Dollimore brings out its implications as an intellectual and stylistic breakthrough into new ways of writing criticism. Fernie unfolds an intense and personal vision, not just of Western modernity, but of identity, morality and sex. As much as it’s concerned with the great works, this is a book about life.
- Sales Rank: #2787367 in Books
- Published on: 2012-12-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.10" h x .80" w x 6.10" l, 1.15 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
Review
"…mind-blowingly insightful… I cannot recommend the book enough!" - Huffington Post
"Fernie offers an uncommonly inviting study that readers can sink their discriminating teeth into with gusto. He presents an irresistible, meticulously prepared, expertly executed, and aesthetic smorgasbord in the form of one savory reading after another of assorted literary texts… Highly recommended." -CHOICE
"This is a profoundly important book. It addresses some of the hardest moral and theological questions we encounter in our struggles to understand literature and life... We need more of this kind of criticism." - Literature and Theology
"Fernie's remarkable book is itself all of these: rich, disturbing and personal - it may, indeed, be more than a little tinged with the demonic. The field of literature dealing with the demonic is vast and varied, and Fernie's wide-ranging exploration does not shrink back from the extent of its material.... The trajectory of Fernie's argument is eclectic in the best possible way where every transition is motivated and matters. The book is overwhelming, though not because of its staggering scope, but because of the originality of its argument and the sheer boldness of Fernie's readings.... Often colloquial, at times very funny indeed.... It is a challenge in the best possible sense, and it is an immensely gratifying read." -Shakespeare Jahrbuch
"The book blasts away at inherent contradictions that traditional theology and social values try to protect unscathed from critical scrutiny. This is what makes this book so vital to our time, probably one of the most important books of literary criticism to come out in recent years.... [T]his is a book that connects the craft of critical thought to the real experience of our lives.... Fernie’s Demonic is a journey we should all take. We will not be the same at the end."--Cahiers Élisabéthains
"Literature and Experience? Ewan Fernie's subtitle will alarm literary scholars who have taken in with their mother's milk the doxa that the study of literature should as far as possible be objective and dispassionate, cordoned off from experience (at least, that of the reader-Historical experience is another matter.) But the bold claim of this book is precisely that professional students of literature should have the pluck to engage with literary texts in an undefended, unapologetically personal, way-should lay themselves open to texts, allowing themselves to be possessed, and disturbed, by their power... the demonic is for Fernie a way of recognizing a constitutive, but profoundly ambivalent, feature of human experience, namely our species' 'potential for creativity over against what merely is'... Macbeth is a central text, though it's hardly alone: one of the most impressive features of the book is the sheer range of authors Fernie manages to recruit to the Devil's party... this is for me one of the most bracing and spirited books of literary criticism of recent years; we need more such attempts to reconnect literature with life." - The Review of English Studies
"Fernie's interpretative scope reminds one of Erich Auerbach or George Steiner. His philosophical scrutiny is at the same time daring and exigent, conscientious and refined. Interpretations of Macbeth and Paradise Lost, along with those that follow of Dostoevsky's Demons and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, stand out as a book within a book. As in a natural vortex, our attention is whirled to the bottom of the problem and, after a memorable experience, released back to the academic decorum of reading literary criticism. An impressive accomplishment! Throughout the book one feels disturbed by literature and responsible to experience. The Demonic seems to have been written with the Kierkegaardian intention to keep 'the wound of negativity' open and with a refusal to derive 'positive, cosy joy from life." - Belgrade Bells
"Provocative and profound – a thrilling and radical account of the allure of the demon in us all." - Salley Vickers, author of Miss Garnet’s Angel
"Ewan Fernie's study of the demonic in canonical literature is an original and exciting work of scholarship. Beautifully written, and continuously engaging, this book surprises the reader at almost every turn with insights into literature that remain in the mind and change how we think of poems and narratives we thought we knew well." - Kevin Hart, Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Virginia, USA
"That the word "evil" contains within itself the word "live" is merely a lexical accident, but that the demonic might yet reveal what it means to truly or finally live is the profound mystery at the heart of Ewan Fernie's book, which, in brilliantly ranging right across the Western literary canon, succeeds in alerting us to the sheer vitality in our cultural inheritance of demonic experience, or what Fernie calls the "life that is opposed to life". And in this life-against-life Fernie finds or senses a way of being-in-the-world that we might not only dare to call truly human but even, perhaps and paradoxically, good or divine." - John Schad, Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Lancaster, UK
"With dazzling range and depth, Ewan Fernie has tackled a subject that we ignore at our peril: the demonic. He not only mines cultural resources―from Luther to Kierkegaard, from Marlowe to Dostoevsky, from Nietzsche to Schreber―to examine the experience of the demonic, but more: with his compelling prose, Fernie manages to create the experience of the demonic for us. This is not a book for the faint of heart. It reveals the relationship of the demonic to contemporary thought on negativity, to the darkness of possession, and to the transcendence of the sacred, showing that 'sainthood is perilously close to damnation'. This book immeasurably enhances our understanding of the problem of evil." - Regina M. Schwartz, Professor of English and Law, Northwestern University, USA
"The Demonic: Literature & Experience is a bold, trailblazing book of formidable intellectual scope and ethical intensity. Through radical reappraisals of masterpieces by Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Dostoevsky and Mann, and through dialogues with thinkers as diverse as Luther, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Freud, it reveals the demonic as a vital force in our daily lives that we disavow to our cost. A passionate, seductive defence of the dark side by a critic committed to making literature matter." - Kiernan Ryan, Professor of English Language & Literature, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
About the Author
Ewan Fernie is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, author of Shame in Shakespeare, and joint General Editor of the Shakespeare Now! series. Redcrosse, his latest, collaborative project, is a new poetic liturgy for St George's Day, which has been performed in major cathedrals and by the RSC, and a book published in 2012.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
A Grand Tour of the Demonic in Literature and Thought
By J. D. Langdon
Ewan Fernie's The Demonic: Literature and Experience takes the reader on an increasingly probing tour through the intricate, subtle, and sometimes nightmarish variations of the demonic as it appears in both thought and literature. Beginning with the nature of the demonic itself (as it may be defined by either a lack or a more "positive" or active kind of negation), Fernie leads us through challenging questions about the necessary interdependence of good and evil, also examining the often close relationship between the demonic and the pure, unleashed creative impulse. As part of the progression of the arguments encompassed within this fascinating examination of the topic, Fernie scrutinizes a number of writers from Shakespeare to Milton to Dostoyevsky and others, in terms of the different ways in which these characters either embrace or embody the demonic.
One of the most impressive aspects of this book may be the careful way in which such a sheer volume of different perspectives on the demonic has been packed into it. While the subject of evil may seem so broad as to defy precise delineation, Fernie carefully subdivides his exploration into precise angles of attack on the subject. Moving from an examination of the all-consuming demonic character of Macbeth, through characters like Angelo, who is driven by a purposeful but evil engine of desire, Fernie's examination of Shakespeare again considers the evil within characters as it arises from different impulses and/or causes. Characterizing Dr. Faustus as "grand, pathetic, and doomed", Fernie notes that he is "Satan humanised" who reaches for what lies within "the restless heart of desire" that "turns out to be an empty dream." Indeed, The Demonic is replete with such richly descriptive prose that brings the immediacy of Fernie's subject directly to his readers.
Other chapters are equally compelling, among them, the portrait of Milton's Satan, at once vital and ruined, scarred, sad and defiant. There are many more sections, examining characters, writers, and thinkers, each in terms of conceptions of the demonic in literature, in philosophy, and in ourselves. Through all of these sections, Fernie simultaneously draws his readers through a series of questions about the relationship of the demonic with possession, with sexuality, with pleasure, and even discusses the potentially promiscuous proximity between the demonic and the sacred.
Part of the book's unique impact lies in the way that Fernie scrutinizes the insubstantial nature of the line between creative transcendence and damnation. Fernie notes that the sacred and the creative may need the underlying polarization of the demonic in order to function properly, or even to exist at all--emphasizing that destruction of the old may be the most essential part of providing a foundation for the new. Unwilling to let either himself or his readers off the hook, Fernie continues to drive his point closer to home, noting that "the demonic also reveals the covetousness at work inside desire, even desire of the best and most sacred kinds." Or, as he continues, "Perhaps most of us are by turns possessing and possessed, and always moving between these two poles of demonic experience."
The Demonic gives us a deep and absorbing look at its subject, not only as the concept appears throughout the works of seminal thinkers and writers, but also as it surfaces again and again within the realms of our own experience. The caveat remains that while Fernie's remarkably clear prose renders the most abstruse concepts and relationships instantly accessible to his readers, his unerring sense of the immediacy of the demonic in our everyday lives underscores a discomfiture that we all sometimes share. This makes The Demonic: Literature and Experience an indispensible source in furthering our understanding of its subject. For literary scholars, philosophers, and for anyone seeking a fascinating read, this is a tremendously valuable and important book.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Shakespeare professor unveils our demonic dimension
By Annie Martirosyan
As the word "experience" in the title of the book expresses, Fernie's The Demonic: Literature and Experience exposes the intimate relation of literature to our lives as a genuine experience. Treating the demonic as a universal part of human nature, the author argues that the evil and the negativity is not opposed to the good and the divinity but is merged with it. The demonic in us accounts for our lives as much as our reason and objectivity.
Fernie argues that we all have a demon living inside us as part of our nature. Through his remarkably deep analysis of literary characters and historical figures we witness the revelation of our inner negativity. As Jonathan Dollimore observes in the Foreword, Fernie does not favour and speak from the viewpoint of any particular religion and this makes his arguments in the book unbiased and comprehensive.
The chapter on Angelo is thought-provoking as the author engages in an analysis of the character on the personal and universal levels. His own identification with Angelo, whilst at first sight strange, stands true for all of us as long as desire and desire to possess the desired are universal human attributes.
As opposed to the wide-held views on Duke Vincentio as a godly prototype in the play, Fernie sees him as a moral charlatan who seeks self-appreciation by deprecating Angelo and others. He is, Fernie asserts, the true violator of a nun as he proposes to Isabella in the end. As repeatedly throughout the book, here too, Fernie is very persuasive.
The two chapters on Dostoevsky - "Dostoevsky's Demons" and "The Master of Petersburg", are a terrific analysis of the maddening depth of Dostoevsky. With one only drawback - I could not get enough of it. Fernie should expand on his Dostoevskian explorations to come up with a complete book of its own!
Fernie is a scholar whose high personal credentials of intellect and insight seize your mind and shuffle it through the pages of his book with persistent astuteness.
I cannot recommend the book enough!
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