Publisher's Synopsis
Nobel laureate Elias Canetti wrote Auto-da-Fe (Die Blendung) when he and the twentieth century were still quite young. Rooted in the cultural crises of the Weimar period, the novel first received critical acclaim abroad - in England, France, and the United States - where it continues to fascinate readers. The first comprehensive study to place this work in its cultural and philosophical contexts, The End of Modernism situates the novel not only in relation to Canetti's considerable body of social thought, but also within larger debates on Freud and Freudianism, misogyny and modernism's "fragmented subject," racial anti-Semitism and the failure of humanism, contemporary philosophy and philosophical fads, and traditionalist notions of literature and escapist conceptions of history.
