Ecstasy and Terror
From the Greeks to Game of Thrones
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“The role of the critic,” Daniel Mendelsohn writes, “is to mediate intelligently and stylishly between a work and its audience; to educate and edify in an engaging and, preferably, entertaining way.” His latest collection exemplifies the range, depth, and erudition that have made him “required reading for anyone interested in dissecting culture” (The Daily Beast). In Ecstasy and Terror, Mendelsohn once again casts an eye at literature, film, television, and the personal essay, filtering his insights through his training as a scholar of classical antiquity in illuminating and sometimes surprising ways.
Many of these essays look with fresh eyes at our culture’s Greek and Roman models: some find an arresting modernity in canonical works (Bacchae, the Aeneid), while others detect a “Greek DNA” in our responses to national traumas such as the Boston Marathon bombings and the assassination of JFK. There are pieces on contemporary literature, from the “aesthetics of victimhood” in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life to the uncomfortable mixture of art and autobiography in novels by Henry Roth, Ingmar Bergman, and Karl Ove Knausgård. Mendelsohn considers pop culture, too, in essays on the feminism of Game of Thrones and on recent films about artificial intelligence—a subject, he reminds us, that was already of interest to Homer.
This collection also brings together for the first time a number of the award-winning memoirist’s personal essays, including his “critic’s manifesto” and a touching reminiscence of his boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, who inspired him to study the Classics.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Displaying an erudite but accessible prose style, this essay collection is at its best when literary critic Mendelsohn (An Odyssey), who holds a Ph.D. in classics, invokes the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans "as models for thinking about contemporary culture." In the first section, he explores the classical world's modern relevance, looking at the continuing fascination exerted by Sappho, the Aeneid's political significance, and, in the title essay, how the ancient Greeks' concern with providing proper burial even for enemies relates to the controversy over burying Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The middle section is not as consistently strong, though a feminist reading of the Game of Thrones book series and a reconsideration of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited stand out. In the final section, Mendelsohn tells his own story. Of particular note is his essay about grappling with his sexuality in adolescence while carrying on a correspondence with English writer Mary Renault, whose Alexander the Great novels meshed his two great interests of the time, "ancient Greece and other boys." Summing up his philosophy of criticism by asserting, in the final essay, that the best practitioners "educate and edify in an engaging and, preferably, entertaining way," Mendelsohn bears out this contention by his own example throughout this fine volume.
