Overview

Commiserating with Devastated Things seeks to understand the place Milan Kundera calls ""the universe of the novel."" Working through Kundera's oeuvre as well as the continental philosophical tradition, Wirth argues that Kundera transforms-not applies-philosophical reflection within literature. Reading between Kundera's work and his self-avowed tradition, from Kafka to Hermann Broch, Wirth asks what it might mean to insist that philosophy does not have a monopoly on wisdom, that the novel has its own modes of wisdom that challenge philosophy's.

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Reviews

Writing with a Zen sense of Czech irony and from a comparative East-West perspective, Wirth situates Kundera's opus at the borders of philosophy and literature. Commiserating with Devastated Things draws Kundera's characters and ideas into dialogue with the intellectual history from Plato to Nietzsche to Musil and Kafka to Deleuze and Dogen. --Martin Matustik, Arizona State University A unique, groundbreaking work that crosses the disciplinary lines between philosophy and literature to advance a highly creative thesis regarding the nature of thinking itself. --Leah Kalmanson, Drake University

Like Kafka but for different reasons, Kundera has been not been fully at home in Prague, and so it is not surprising that this major reflection on existential, political, musical, and novelistic dimensions of Kundera's literature and literary theory migrates beyond Bohemian coasts. Writing with a Zen sense of Czech irony and from a comparative East-West perspective, Wirth situates Kundera's opus at the borders of philosophy and literature. Commiserating with Devastated Things draws Kundera's characters and ideas into dialogue with the intellectual history from Plato to Nietzsche to Musil and Kafka to Deleuze and Dogen. -Martin Matustik, Arizona State University This is a unique, groundbreaking work that crosses the disciplinary lines between philosophy and literature to advance a highly creative thesis regarding the nature of thinking itself. -Leah Kalmanson, Drake University

Author Information

Jason Wirth is Professor of Philosophy and the current Piggott-McCone chair of the Arts and Sciences at Seattle University.

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