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The Real Nietzsche
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17387 |
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BOOK WORLD
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1 / 1990 |
3,856 Words |
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Michael D. Aeschliman
Michael D. Aeschliman teaches English literature at the
University of Virginia. He is the author of The Restitution of
Man. |
THE IMPORTANCE OF NIETZSCHE
Ten Essays
Erich Heller
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989
199 pp., $29.95
Erich Heller has had a long and distinguished career meditating modern German literature and mediating it to the English-speaking world. Born in Bohemia in 1911, he took doctorates at Prague and Cambridge, immigrating to England in that momentous year 1939. In England he taught at Cambridge, the London School of Economics, and the University of Wales, then immigrated in 1960 to the United States, where he has had a distinguished career teaching at Northwestern University.
To the nonacademic, the vocation and status of the literary critic must often seem - even more than that of other academics - faintly ludicrous or supererogatory, the pampered house pet of the groves of academe. Literary critics as self-styled agonistic heroes - lector agonists (heroic readers and interpreters of texts) are particularly vulnerable to this reaction, especially in a time when so many critics move themselves to center stage and displace classic books and writers, practicing what one of our finest literary critics, Christopher Ricks, calls "the envious usurpation" of attention and interest from the writers and books of the literary canon itself. Thus, for instance, while Milton's poetry clearly wishes to celebrate God and truth, his modern commentator often wishes to talk about self and sex. (Perhaps sexuality was, a century ago, the great repressed; but now, as the French philosopher Maurice Clavel has said, the great repressed idea in modern culture is
... (1997 of 23946 Characters)
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