The 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. In 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 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, this book will interest scholars of literature, film, ethics, aesthetics, and anyone drawn to an experimental venture in critical thought In Robert Bresson’s cinematography the linkage of fragmented, heterogeneous images challenges our assumption that we know what things are, or the infinite ways persons, animals, and material objects can be attuned or entangled. In Bresson’s films, an aesthetic principle thus becomes an ethical instrument to carve out an ontology in which the truth of categorical fixities is menaced. The Bond of the Furthest Apart argues that Bresson’s visionary rethinkings run parallel to suppositions about individuality, ontology, and the demystification of human privilege in the philosophical fiction of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Kafka. The bond of the book’s title refers to the counterpoint and antinomy within particular works and beneath the strains of these literary and cinematic works which are kindred in their revelation of things that lure us toward them in the absence of an orienting perspective that would make what is seen precisely recognizable