Elias Canetti's counter-image of society : crowds, power, transformation

Johann P. Arnason and David Roberts
Rochester, N.Y. : Camden House, c2004.

ISBN: 1571131604

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Book description
The award of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981 has seemingly assured Elias Canetti's place in literary history. But his significance as a cultural critic has not been adequately recognized. The present study redresses this situation in two ways: by mapping the counter-image of human existence, history, and society that informs Canetti's critique of the modern world and its sciences; and by opening up Canetti's hermetic oeuvre by tracing his cryptic and often concealed dialogue with major figures within the Western tradition such as Hobbes, Durkheim, and Freud and contemporaries such as Adorno, Arendt, and Elias. The authors ask how Canetti's alternative vision of man and society relates to important themes of twentieth-century social and civilizational thought even as it calls into question fundamental assumptions of the social and human sciences. In analyses of Auto da Fé, Crowds and Power, and the aphorisms, the authors elucidate key aspects of Canetti's interrogation of human existence and human history across five thematic complexes: individual and social psychology, totalitarian politics, religion and politics, theories of society, and power and culture. They thus trace the movement of Canetti's thought from an apocalyptic sense of crisis to his search for cultural resources to set against the holocaust of European civilization. [Camden House]

About the author
Johann P. Arnason is a visiting Research Fellow in the School of Languages, Cultures & Linguistics at Monash University. Professor Arnason is editor of the internationally recognised journal of social theory Thesis Eleven and he held a personal chair in Sociology at La Trobe University from 1994 to 2003.

David Roberts is Emeritus Professor of German at Monash University. Professor Roberts is a former director of the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, and co-editor of the social theory journalThesis Eleven.

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