Bloom's Modern Critical Views - Milan Kundera (2003) (181p) [Inua].pdf

Title: Milan Kundera (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)
Editor: Harold Bloom
Series: Bloom's Modern Critical Views
Hardcover: 172 pages
Publisher: Chelsea House Pub (L) (January 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0791070433
ISBN-13: 978-0791070437

Description:
Critical essays analyze Milan Kundera's psychological themes found frequently throughout his novels, including sexuality, love, and emotions.

Editor’s Note:
My Introduction meditates upon the literary status of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Like the rest of Kundera, it already may be a Period Piece. Robert C. Porter describes Kundera’s early cycle of love stories, after which Pearl Kazin Bell praises Kundera for his transitions from history to autobiography.
For Peter Kussi, Kundera has the distinction of “a dialogue with truth.”
More soberly, the critic John Bayley gives us a balanced estimate, weighing the novelist’s skills against his authentic limitations.
Kundera’s erotic obsessions are admired by Mark Sturdivant, while Roger Kimball finds an affinity between Kundera and the poet, W. H. Auden.
Terry Eagleton, a Marxist cheerleader, grants Kundera “formidable strength,” after which the superb fabulist Italo Calvino expresses some ironic reservations in regard to Kundera’s view of kitsch.
In Ellen Pifer’s judgement, Kundera turns the art of narration against itself in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, while James S. Hans considers the aesthetics of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Laughable Loves is seen by Michael Carroll as a valid instance of cyclic form, after which John O’Brien emphasizes the author’s overt role throughout Kundera’s work.
Tom Wilhelmus finds Nietzsche’s Eternal Return in The Joke, while Vicki Adams concludes this volume by celebrating Kundera’s Post- Modernism.