Bond of the Furthest Apart
Essays on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bresson, and Kafka
In the French filmmaker Robert Bresson's cinematography, the linkage of fragmented, dissimilar images challenges our assumption that we know either what things are in themselves or the infinite ways in which they are entangled. The "bond" of Sharon Cameron's title refers to the astonishing connections found both within Bresson's films and across literary works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Kafka, whose visionary rethinkings of experience are akin to Bresson's in their resistance to all forms of abstraction and classification that segregate aspects of reality. Whether exploring Bresson's efforts to reassess the limits of human reason and will, Dostoevsky's subversions of Christian conventions, Tolstoy's incompatible beliefs about death, or Kafka's focus on creatures neither human nor animal, Cameron illuminates how the repeated juxtaposition of disparate, even antithetical, phenomena carves out new approaches to defining the essence of being, one where the very nature of fixed categories is brought into question. An innovative look at a classic French auteur and three giants of European literature, "The Bond of the Furthest Apart" will interest scholars of literature, film, ethics, aesthetics, and anyone drawn to an experimental venture in critical thought.
About the Author
Sharon Cameron is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emerita of English at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of eight books, including, most recently, "Impersonality: Seven Essays", also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Reviews
"'The Bond of the Furthest Apart' is a powerful description of the ethical dimension of aesthetic experience and is in conversation with some of the best work in continental philosophy. It will have a broad appeal across film studies, literary studies, and philosophy".-Brian Price, University of Toronto
"Original to the point of uniqueness, this is a work of literary and film criticism, but its arguments and insights are fundamentally philosophical. Beneath the vast differences, both within the work of the artists Cameron is so closely studying and between the visions of each of the artists, is a kind of nonconformist unity, a resistance to whatever teaches us to look away, to hide among abstractions, not to see what we are seeing".-Michael Wood, Princeton University
