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.
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.
“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
392 pp.6 x 9Illus: 20 b/w photographs
9780520267435$36.95|£31.00Hardcover
Feb 2011