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University of California Press

The Horizon

A History of Our Infinite Longing

by Didier Maleuvre (Author)
Price: $36.95 / £31.00
Publication Date: Feb 2011
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 392
ISBN: 9780520424661
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 20 b/w photographs

About the Book

What is a horizon? A line where land meets sky? The end of the world or the beginning of perception? In this brilliant, engaging, and stimulating history, Didier Maleuvre journeys to the outer reaches of human experience and explores philosophy, religion, and art to understand our struggle and fascination with limits—of life, knowledge, existence, and death. Maleuvre sweeps us through a vast cultural landscape, enabling us to experience each stopping place as the cusp of a limitless journey, whether he is discussing the works of Picasso, Gothic architecture, Beethoven, or General Relativity. If, as Aristotle said, philosophy begins in wonder, then this remarkable book shows us how wonder—the urge to know beyond the conceivable—is itself the engine of culture.

About the Author

Didier Maleuvre is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Religion of Reality: Inquiry into the Self, Art, and Transcendence and Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part One The Archaic Age

1. Permanence: Egypt, 2500 B.C.E.
2. Astonishment: Mesopotamia, circa 1900 B.C.E.
3. Enterprise: Aegean Sea, circa 725 B.C.E.
4. Tremor: Northern Kingdom of Israel, 500 B.C.E.

Part Two The Philosophical Age

5. Exile: The Desert of Moab, 450 B.C.E.
6. Synthesis: The Hellenic Archipelago, 500 B.C.E.
7. Closure: Athens, circa 400 B.C.E.

Part Three The Theological Age

8. Distance: Nicaea, 325 C.E.
9. Trembling: Hippo, 410
10. Space: The Northern Forest, 1100
11. Perspective: Mount Ventoux, April 1336
12. Ambivalence: Florence, 1503

Part Four The Scientific Age

13. Mortuus sum: Bordeaux, 1574
14. Nothing: Regensburg, May 8, 1654
15. Night: Neuberg, November 10, 1619

Part Five The Subjective Age

16. Formless: Königsberg, 1780
17. Severance: Wetzlar, November 1772
18. Blue Yonder: Tübingen, 1810
19. Eden: Upstate New York, September 22, 1827

Part Six The Mathematical Age

20. Flatness: Murnau, Bavaria, 1908
21. No Exit: Buenos Aires, April 1941
22. Here: Woodstock, NY, August 29, 1952
23. Nowhere: The Moon, July 21, 1969, 3:58 A.M. BST

Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

“Subtle, well-researched, and philosophically generous.”
Choice
“The Horizon is a work of great depth and richness . . . it is deeply untypical of contemporary academic publishing, and all the more welcome for that.”
Metapsychology Online Review
“With this book Maleuvre does not so much intervene in contemporary debates in the humanities as challenges us to reconsider our investment in some of the existential questions that have long motivated humanistic inquiry. Whatever one’s position with respect to the questions Maleuvre raises, the reader is sure to be wonderstruck, provoked, or stirred at some point along the way.”—Paul A. Kottman, author of Tragic Conditions in Shakespeare and A Politics of the Scene

“Maleuvre’s approach is innovative and intriguing. The questions raised in each chapter are absolutely critical to general discussions on the meaning and potentiality of the arts in cultural, political, and social history.”—Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, Religious Art & Cultural History, Georgetown University

"Maleuvre has a poetic touch. He offers new and surprising insights on artists, thinkers, and writers we have either read or heard of often, but now are invited to view from a new perspective. This work challenges readers to new dimensions of creative thought."—Clifford W. Edwards, author of Mystery of The Night Café: Hidden Key to the Spirituality of Vincent Van Gogh

"Written by an academic but not just for other academics, The Horizon is a rollicking romp through four millennia of humanity's ever-continuing attempt to confront—through art, philosophy, literature and science—death, the universe, and everything. Intellectual history on steroids, The Horizon, stalwartly grand in its sweep and studded with steely insights each cultural step of the way, aims to liberate the reader's mind from the confines of the here and now and enables it to be what it was always meant to be: truly human."—Vijay Mascarenhas, Metro State College Denver