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S'està carregant… The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (edició 2011)de Stephen Greenblatt (Autor)
Informació de l'obraThe Swerve: How the World Became Modern de Stephen Greenblatt
   Books Read in 2015 (168) Top Five Books of 2015 (255) » 9 més No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra. Un llibre que fa pensar en els origens de la nostre civilització i en el poder de la paraula per canviar el món. (  ) jonayroda | Nov 1, 2012 | 
 Every page of the book strives to present the Renaissance as an intellectual awakening that triumphs over the oppressive abyss of the Dark Ages. The book pushes the Renaissance as a rebirth of the classical brillance nearly lost during centuries mired in dullness and pain. This invention of modernity relies on a narrative of the good guy defeating the bad guy and thus a glorious transformation. This is dangerous not only because it is inaccurate but more importantly because it subscribes to a progressivist model of history that insists on the onward march of society, a model that allows moderns like us to excuse our crimes and injustices because “at least we’re better than those medievals.” Now unlike most of those thousands of innocent believing readers, I see the deep problems of such an approach, as have the last dozen generations of historians. History does not fit such cookie-cutter narratives. Having studied medieval culture for nearly two decades, I can instantly recognize the oppressive, dark, ignorant Middle Ages that Greenblatt depicts for 262 pages as just… fiction. It’s fiction worse than Dan Brown, because it masquerades as fact.  The distortions in Greenblatt’s narrative may have slipped past the Pulitzer committee, but they won’t slip by someone with even a basic knowledge of church history. St Jerome, to be sure, is no inconsequential figure, but Greenblatt focuses most of his attention on Lactantius and Peter Damian. He is more interested in the latter because he reformed the already selfabasing Benedictine order in the eleventh century, making voluntary self-flagellation “a central ascetic practice of the church” and thus accomplishing the thousand year struggle “to secure the triumph of pain seeking” (107). If this is genuinely how Greenblatt understands the significance and nature of the Benedictine order, one can only wonder why Harvard retains him. Why Stephen Greenblatt is wrong and why it matters. Unlike other non-fiction potboilers, The Swerve claimed for itself, and received, huge moral and cultural authority it simply didn’t earn. Armed with that authority, the book went on to fool unsuspecting readers (like a reviewer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, who called The Swerve “a chapter in how we became what we are”) into believing that Lucretius, who wrote of placidly watching others suffer secure in the knowledge that all phenomena in the universe are merely a wondrous rearrangement of atoms, somehow symbolizes all that is bright and new in the origin of modern life.  Greenblatt's story of the unleashing of the pleasure principle on the European world after the discovery of Lucretius conveys his own passion for discovery, and displays his brilliance as a storyteller. The Swerve is, though, a dazzling retelling of the old humanist myth of the heroic liberation of classical learning from centuries of monastic darkness. The light of Rome fades into gloom, sheep graze in the Forum; then the humanists rebel against the orthodoxies of the church, bring about a great recovery of classical texts and generate a new intellectual dawn. This book makes that story into a great read, but it cannot make it entirely true. In "The Swerve," Stephen Greenblatt, a professor of the humanities at Harvard University and the author of "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare," provides a delightfully engaging, informative and provocative account of Bracciolini's discovery and its implications for the emergence of "modern" culture and philosophy. Pertany a aquestes col·leccions editorials
In this book the author transports readers to the dawn of the Renaissance and chronicles the life of an intrepid book lover who rescued the Roman philosophical text On the Nature of Things from certain oblivion. In this work he has crafted both a work of history and a story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius, a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions. The copying and translation of this ancient book, the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age, fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson. No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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 Google Books — S'està carregant…GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)940.21History and Geography Europe Europe Early Modern 1453-1914 Renaissance period 1453-1517LCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana: (3.89)
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