Background
Heller, Erich was born on March 27, 1911 in Komotau, Bohemia. Came to the United States, 1959. Son of Alfred and Else (Hoenig) Heller.
( Heller examines the sense of values embodied in the wor...)
Heller examines the sense of values embodied in the works of key German writers and thinkers from Goethe to Kafka, particularly the consciousness of life's depreciation.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0156261006/?tag=2022091-20
(The guiding theme of these essays is the fate of the imag...)
The guiding theme of these essays is the fate of the imagination and the condition of art in the modern world, where both appear to be enfeebled by scientific hubris, undermined by psychological self-questioning and compromised by political disaster. Erich Heller traces this predicament with subtlety and profundity, from Hegel's and Nietzsche's diagnoses to the various truces and manoeuvres through which remarkable victories have nonetheless been achieved - such as the comic triumphs of Wilhelm Busch. As elsewhere in Professor Heller's work, Thomas Mann's attempt to outwit and redeem his circumstances through art - 'despite' them, as he said himself - occupies a central place. Three of the present essays are devoted to him. Others consider Kleist, Fontane, Hamsun, Karl Kraus and the crucial figures of Hölderlin (who plays such a central role in Heidegger's later philosophical writings) and Rilke. Written with feeling, and the distinctive elegance and wit that have characterized all of Professor Heller's work, the essays here reaffirm the vital interdependence of literature and human values.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521274958/?tag=2022091-20
( In this book, one of the most distinguished scholars of...)
In this book, one of the most distinguished scholars of German culture collects his essays on a figure who has long been one of his chief preoccupations. Erich Heller's lifelong study of modern European literature necessarily returns again and again to Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche prided himself on having broken with all traditional ways of thinking and feeling, and once even claimed that he would someday be recognized for having ushered in a new millennium. While acknowledging Nietzsche's radicalism, Heller also insists on the continuity of the story in which he does indeed occupy a central place. By considering Nietzsche in relation to Goethe, Rilke, Wittgenstein, Yeats, and others, Heller shows the philosopher's ambivalence toward the tradition he inherited as well as his profound effect on the thought and sensibility of those who followed him. It is hardly an exaggeration to say, as Heller does in his first essay, that Nietzsche is to many modern writers and thinkers—including Mann, Musil, Kafka, Freud, Heidegger, Jaspers, Gide, and Sartre—what St. Thomas Aquinas was to Dante: the categorical interpreter of a world, which they contemplate imaginatively and theoretically without ever much upsetting its Nietzschean structure. Thus it is Nietzsche's thought, so pervasively present in the themes of modernity, that gives coherence and unity to Heller's essays. What emerges from them is that, despite his iconoclastic declarations and unorthodox philosophical practices, Nietzsche deals with the human spirit's persistent concerns. His questions remain urgent, and even the answers, in all their contradictoriness, possess the commanding force of his inquiry. An example is the incompatibility of the famous extremes, the teaching of the Übermensch and the Eternal Recurrence of All Things. These cancel each other out and yet grow from the same intellectual and spiritual roots, as is shown lucidly and cogently by one of Heller's most forceful essays, "Nietzsche's Terrors: Time and the Inarticulate." In fathoming the depth of this contradiction, Heller at the same time reveals the importance of Nietzsche for those who seek to understand the wellsprings of the epoch's disquiet, turmoil, and creativity.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226326381/?tag=2022091-20
( Heller examines the sense of values embodied in the wor...)
Heller examines the sense of values embodied in the works of key German writers and thinkers from Goethe to Kafka, particularly the consciousness of life's depreciation.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0370002113/?tag=2022091-20
Heller, Erich was born on March 27, 1911 in Komotau, Bohemia. Came to the United States, 1959. Son of Alfred and Else (Hoenig) Heller.
Doctorate in Law and German, University Prague, Czechoslovakia, 1935. Doctor of Philosophy, Cambridge University, England, 1948. Doctor of Letters (honorary), Emory University, 1965.
Assistant lecturer German, London School Economics, 1943-1945; lecturer German, director studies modern languages, Peterhouse College, Cambridge U., 1945-1948; professor German, U. Wales, 1948-1960; visiting professor, U. Hamburg, 1947; visiting professor, U. Göttingen, 1948; visiting professor, U. Bonn, 1948; visiting professor, Harvard University, 1953-1954; visiting professor, Brandeis U., 1957-1958; professor German, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 1960-1967; Avalon professor humanities emeritus, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 1968-1990. Visiting professor German U. Heidelberg, summer 1963. Carnegie visiting professor humanities Massachusetts Institute Technology, fall 1963.
(The guiding theme of these essays is the fate of the imag...)
(The guiding theme of these essays is the fate of the imag...)
( Heller examines the sense of values embodied in the wor...)
( Heller examines the sense of values embodied in the wor...)
( In this book, one of the most distinguished scholars of...)
( The Description for this book, Franz Kafka, will be for...)
(FROM GERMAN LITERATURE AND CURRENT THEORIES.)
(Book by Heller, Erich)
(Thomas Mann)
Fellow American Academy Arts and Letters. Member Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste, Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, P.E.N. Club (Germany and Austria).