Reading Václav Havel / / David S. Danaher.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Toronto Press Pilot 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Danaher, David S.,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2018]; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (280 p.)

As a playwright, a dissident, and a politician, Václav Havel was one of the most important intellectual figures of the late twentieth century. Working in an extraordinary range of genres - poetry, plays, public letters, philosophical essays, and political speeches - he left behind a range of texts so diverse that scholars have had difficulty grappling with his oeuvre as a whole.In Reading Václav Havel, David S. Danaher approaches Havel's remarkable body of work holistically, focusing on the language, images, and ideas which appear and reappear in the many genres in which Havel wrote. Carefully reading the original Czech texts alongside their English versions, he exposes what in Havel's thought has been lost in translation. A passionate argument for Havel's continuing relevance, Reading Václav Havel is the first book to capture the fundamental unity of his vast literary legacy.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Approaches to Reading Havel -- 1. The "restlessness of transcendence": Havel's Genres -- 2. Explaining and Understanding : The "Weirdness" of Havel's Plays -- 3. Understanding East and West: The World in Existential Crisis -- 4. "Metaphysical reconstruction": Translating Havel's Keywords -- Conclusion: Havel's Legacy as Appeal -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index