http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/3661024

Elias Canetti

In one of the few contemporary studies of Nobel laureate Elias Canetti's life and works available in English, Thomas Falk clearly sets forth the author's contribution to twentieth-century thought and literature. Canetti is not only a creative writer but also a man of letters in the European tradition. The author of just one novel, Auto-da-Fe, and several plays, the erudite Canetti is prized most for his nonfiction writings: three volumes of autobiography, several collections of essays and aphorisms, and above all the exhaustive cross-cultural study of the psychodynamics of crowd behavior, Crowds and Power. Canetti's autobiographies cover the first 30 years of his life: his earliest memories of Ruschuk, Bulgaria, where he was born in 1905; his childhood and adolescence in Manchester, Vienna, Zurich, and Frankfurt; his young adulthood in the politically turbulent Vienna of the 1930s. Falk uses these accounts to examine the biographical context of Canetti's work, assessing the impact on his literary consciousness of the early death of Canetti's father, his complex relationship with his mother, and his friendships with influential Viennese intellectuals. Writing almost exclusively in German, the language favored by his parents for intimate discourse, Canetti was early exposed to - and mastered - several languages. This linguistic sophistication is an important element of his work, informing, in particular, Canetti's theory of the acoustic mask, which holds that each person has a manner of speaking that encompasses not only his or her base language and dialect but numerous modes of expression that reflect both social background and individual psychology. Falk assesses Canetti's use of the acoustic mask in his novel and dramas as a component of characterization and in his nonfiction as a means of better understanding the human condition. The cornerstone of Canetti's work - both imaginative and essayistic - Falk writes, is Crowds and Power, first published in German in 1960 after 25 years of literary research into the myths and cultures primeval to modern. "It could be said," Falk argues, "that all his writings in one way or another treat the topic Canetti examines in this major work": the "total alteration of consciousness" that transpires when individual identity is overtaken by the psychology of the crowd. Falk devotes an entire chapter to this complex study, which draws from the fields of mythology, religion, history, anthropology, biography, and psychology. Sometimes described as a formidably difficult writer, Canetti, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981, has to date not enjoyed the increased popularity that can accompany this distinction. While some may be put off by Canetti's sober consideration of society's ills, Falk contends that the author's intellectual passion and sense of moral responsibility, as well as his gift for storytelling, render his work more than worthwhile. "Anyone interested in studying and in contemplation," Falk concludes, "will find Canetti a stimulating and accessible teacher."

Open All Close All